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COMMENTARY
December 28, 2011
Holy Innocents
Christmas is a season in 12 parts, or days: Dec. 28 is the feast of the Holy Innocents, and itself among the important occasions in the Christian year. For the Gospel story to which it refers, see Matthew, chapter two.Since many of my readers, including some of my most loyal, are not Christian, I will not insist on the factual veracity of this passage, in which a wrathful Herod, believing himself to have been tricked, is said to have ordered a massacre of all the male children of Bethlehem, beneath two years old, to be sure he was rid of what might be a pretender to his throne. Even among Christians, argument over things like the number of dead is pointless: for the passage refers to a history that is now unrecoverable. And every death is its own universe. The text says what it says, and is the one fixed thing. Moreover, while it is true that the ancient Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, does not mention this massacre in Bethlehem, specifically, he does mention so many other atrocities committed by the same Herod, that this one becomes plausible. Note, one interesting point about the story. On its own terms, the victims of this massacre could not have been Christian children. And yet they are presented as Christian martyrs, in the Church's feast today - the first "buds killed by the frost of persecution." And in a crucial sense they were, martyrs, for even unknowingly, they died for Christ. (Who likewise rewards, beyond our comprehension.) Massacres of the innocents are hardly unknown to secular history. As literature - and as history, however fanciful my reader may believe it to be - the Scriptures of the Jews and of the Christians present so many accounts of events which, although they may be lost in time from our vantage, could also have happened yesterday, and in so many "breaking news" places. In the course of the 20th century, the living witnessed human catastrophes on and beyond the Biblical scale. The same will perhaps one day be said of the 21st century. One might refer to far more than 100 million souls who perished in massacres of the last 100 years, under the murderous tyrannies of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - and a thousand lesser tyrants. The Americans in Iraq, for instance, exhumed the mass graves of perhaps half a million of Saddam Hussein's victims, and the world media hardly noticed. To those who suffer today, from the pain of conscience - a pain enhanced by the sense of responsibility for one's own part in the general moral failure of our human race - there is a most unpleasant recurring realization. It is of millions of "holy innocents" in our own generation, and in our own country. I refer to the hideous, Carthaginian sacrifice of our abortion mills, in which surely even those most radically committed to the so-called "right to choose" can feel no satisfaction. For these, like the children of Bethlehem, may have had no chance to sin; but were nevertheless our sisters and brothers, our fellow human beings, formed to life. And as we now know, through the imaging of the most extraordinary technology, that looks right into the mother's womb, the smallest living fetus is quite capable of the death agony. I mention such things not because I enjoy it. On the contrary, the pain of a troubled conscience is something to be shared; something to be expiated. The poor mother, driven to an abortion, who realizes too late what she has done, needs all the solidarity we can provide from out of our own desperate need for forgiveness. None of us is clean, or can be made clean, by our own efforts alone. Forgiveness, not excuses and vindication, is what the humble seek, and what the arrogant deny. The picture of Herod, attempting deicide, turning upon the innocent children, is - even were his story the purest "literary" fabrication - a figure of terrible substance. We know that such men exist. We have seen what they are capable of doing. We have heard their whining self-justifications. And those who are familiar with the Bible hear, too, the echoes through time: "Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not." Macduff, in Shakespeare's Macbeth: "All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam?" There is no consolation for the loss of a child, or no consolation that can be imagined, by the parent who has been struck such a blow. It takes something, and it must take something, larger than the whole universe to put such a loss "in perspective." Fortunately, there is such a Thing, beyond space and time, that may raise the greatest suffering and deadliest grief, by Resurrection to Feast, everlasting. So I actually believe. Or there is not, and this Earth is our damnation. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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