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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 23, 2001
Unto us a child
This Christmas is different. I have felt it in the air and in the awkward singing of carols; in the phrase "Merry Christmas" which is reviving everywhere; in the way old friends have greeted each other. In the girl I saw stoop and cross herself as a fire truck screamed by. In the man who stopped and turned and gave an old drunk on the sidewalk some money for his food but then -- it was astonishing -- I saw him hug the old guy. Food and money come and go but to be loved and by a stranger! And the man who stopped to notice his neighbour was a short bald fellow in expensive clothes. ("You will get them dirty!" was my involuntary thought.) This man saw Christ in a pathetic drunkard. In an old folks home while waiting to visit an old friend of mine I was talking to a young Jamaican receptionist. "This Christmas is different she said to me. There are so many visitors this year. And people are coming to volunteer man they are coming right in to help!" One person totally unknown to the staff had written out Christmas cards to every single resident of the place. She wrote each one in her own hand: "God loves you and I love you. Merry Christmas!" There was a child shown at a Christmas party the other evening. A wee soft fragile thing just five days old bundled up in his mother's arms the eyes closed the little pursed lips sucking and blowing. And a woman I think a respectable account executive said Look he is like the baby Jesus. (When did you last hear that?) Even in church the last place I'd expect (as an Anglican) small signs of the rebirth of faith. More candles lit more names in the memorials. I swear the churches are a little fuller for there are people in there who don't even know when to stand or kneel. People looking for their bearings in this strange new world and they are coming into church where they have never been. Young people. There are a lot of atheists in the trenches of e-mail but here is another surprise. Not one but several of my most hardened godless friends are rethinking aloud. At the least as one wrote to me the other day I have come to realize I am part of a Christian civilization. I may not believe in God, but I am listening to music by Mozart. I am listening to this piano concerto and do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking, 'This man was a Christian, too'. "Pennies dropping from heaven." So many people stop and think. So many small personal candles to feed a larger growing flame. Another correspondent this one among nature's science majors: "I suddenly got it. God is love." (Eureka! The ultimate equation.) And we here in southern Ontario or wherever we may happen to be so far away from the epicentre the death loam in lower Manhattan where underground the fire only ceased to burn a few days ago. The mystery of death and resurrection of flowers growing in the graveyard soil. For that is what has got us thinking opening our hearts that brush with death that horrible moment of "deaths and entrances". It so defied the course of logic the evil in the moment was so perfectly set. Somehow the polarities reverse and the good comes peeping out like stars at many points. In the words of William Blake: The Grave produc'd these Blossoms sweet In mild repose from Earthly strife; The Blossoms of Eternal Life! An item was making the rounds of the Internet in November it was an explanation of how this could be how God could allow such vicious evil. We had driven God out of our homes out of our schools out of the workplace out of our hearts. And then in the moment of disaster we turn to him by irrepressible instinct: "God how could you let this happen?" We told him to leave and he respecting our free judgement left. Left us to fill our own emptiness left us to do our own shopping left us to make our own sense of a world that without him makes no sense at all. We told him to be gone and he went. So now we ask him to return. "Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened." For in the moment when we look for God we discover he is always there. We came a long way down it is a long way back. But there are beginnings resumptions resurrections; and I think this Christmas is something new. I hope we shall look back on this as our "Recovery Christmas". As the first Christmas in many years to be better than the one before. As the Christmas in which we began to remember what we were about; why we came to be were born -- "in this vale of tears". There is a little chapel called Ad Pastores on the slopes of Shepherd's Fields by Bethlehem. It is a little tent-like structure with modern frescoes inside. Just to the south along the main road is an open field where the midnight mass is served each year on the Eve of Christmas. This is the chapel for the shepherds. There is a plaque dated I think 1954 and it tells the visitor from whence the money came to build this chapel. It filled my heart when I saw it now several years ago. It said this chapel was a gift from the people of Canada . My country. Not from some wealthy patron nor from a mission branch but from all the people of Canada a Christian country. This chapel was built within my own lifetime. It was built at a time when our churches were full when no one was ashamed to be a Christian -- again within my own lifetime. It was built when Christmases were warm with the breath of the Christ child upon us. O Lord I pray you are coming back again. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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