From the Editor's Desk

Resting in the outrageous reality

In our boxes of old photos, the kind of stash that becomes part of any family’s enduring legacy, are pictures showing a few versions of children’s Christmas pageants. They occurred over that period of time when the oldest three were yet young enough to take the child’s view of the tale, complete with age-appropriate ad libs, yet old enough to understand that this was an important enough story to make our lives change for a bit. It caused new things (trees and lights, gifts and songs) to intrude briefly on the everyday.

Our oldest, Rebecca, would gather her two younger brothers and several younger cousins or friends, and the Hawthorn Road Christmas Pageant would go into production with an assortment of props and costumes. There was a short window, a mere two or three years, during which she could cajole the rest into taking their places as Joseph or the odd shepherd or some cattle, always “lowing.” It should be noted that a third younger brother, by timing of birth, missed induction into her little troupe. By the time he came along, she was on the edge of teenagerhood and wouldn’t be caught dead wrapping her head in a bath towel and engaging in something so manifestly churchy on her own time.

Somewhere between the commercial tsunami that accompanies this holiday and the difficult matter of contemplating God entering this world, there is a deeply human sweetness to the story that allows even children to get a toehold on mystery.

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Unfortunately, the sweetness seems to be getting caught up in the culture wars. The bartering of religion for power in the public square of late has so cheapened belief and its language that one hesitates to speak of it for fear of being misunderstood or of getting caught up, this time of year, in the cultural “Christmas” skirmishes. I am amused to see that some advocacy groups are out to “Save Christmas,” as if it needed saving, as if any advocacy group could save it with bumper stickers, as if there aren’t far greater cultural threats to Christmas than objections to taxpayer-supported decorations.

I know deeper cultural issues are in play here and that some see objections to public crèches and such as a giant indicator of the onslaught of secularism and relativism and countless other ills of some post-Christian era.

But I wonder if these battles are false fronts in the war with ourselves over what it means to be Christian in America, over how we reconcile our words and sacred texts with what we do.

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In his essay, Jesuit Fr. Leo O’Donovan writes, “Once more we seek to imagine the unimaginable: that goodness, truth and mercy might pitch a tent among us, dwell in our midst, be the solace and savior of our world. We are preparing to open our hearts to ‘the hint half guessed, the gift half understood’: the birth of eternity in time, a young girl’s womb bearing the fruit of the ages.” (See story) If one seeks, as O’Donovan puts it, the “Holy Mystery at the center of our lives,” if we dare to seek the quiet such a pursuit requires and rest, if just for a moment, in the dazzling, outrageous reality of God with us, then it is impossible to keep at bay the clangor of a haunting dissonance. And that, for me, can be the frightening part, the moment at which one realizes that the childhood sweetness of it has to be left behind, or at least seriously modified in the adult encounter with that moment of mystery.

Does the dissonance come from those who don’t like seeing our symbols on public property? Or does the feeling of unease derive more from an awkward awareness that for all of our public clamoring about how religious and righteous we are, the cloak of our Gospel doesn’t fit the outlines of our undertakings?

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More than a quarter-century ago another Jesuit, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, gave a sermon in Central Baptist Church in Wayne, Pa., on the “cultural catastrophe” we faced in our time. “The initiative of God,” he said, “is to summon us to the works of justice.” The summons “can be a comforting thought or, immediately, a rather disturbing one, for if God moves in us first without any initiative on our part, then the summons is immediately clear and abrupt.” And such a summons, he said, “flies in the face of the American supposition that we are the movers of the earth, that we are called to be and to become No. 1.”

The cultural catastrophe that he saw proceeding in our lifetime is characterized, he said, by the fact “that there is very little truth in our sanctuaries, in our homes, in our places of work about who we are in America; that most of us are being pushed gently and irrevocably downstream, into silent taxpaying ... silent citizenship ... into complicity with war and violence.” Prophets have been known to spoil a party now and then, and Berrigan is practiced in upending comfortable assumptions.

There’s no reason, though, to spoil the party or cancel the children’s pageant. It is perhaps enough to know -- in this fourth year of war, when terror and torture are regularly on our lips, when unspeakable billions are poured into maintaining a military operation the proportions of which are unknown in human history -- that the grace of our “savior and solace,” the Mystery at the center of our lives, is received, lived out, in real time.

Children grow and the sweetness of the mystery ferments into a truth infinitely complex if simultaneously, unmistakably clear: We are called to embrace as integral to our faith and lives the absurdity of our God joining humanity as a helpless child in desperate circumstances to give hope to the poor and ultimately confronting power not with power but with his own death.

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, December 22, 2006