Christmas 2021
After months of a smoke laden city towards the end of 2019, horrifying bushfires over the start of 2020, only to be followed by an historic pandemic with the dramatic national lockdown commencing in March of last year, people were ready to dance on the grave of 2020. No one was imagining the trauma of a more sustained lockdown in 2021, just as no one would imagine that its outcome would be such a concerning surge of new Covid cases as we face a new year. We are in the grip of a pandemic of a virus that will not yet yield to our control. The great moments of history do not unfold on our timing. We have been catapulted into an historic change of era, the dimensions of which are still barely discernible. Most moments in history we look back upon. We are heirs to their resolution. To live through historical times, however, is to live without resolution. It is to stare in the face of uncertainty. Sustained uncertainty takes its toll: it makes us tired. After two and a half years of calamity, the world is tired. We are tired. We are not dancing. We will be tiptoeing ever so cautiously into a new year.
We wish the uncertainty behind us; we wish the pandemic were over. We want to be over the fear of loved ones being vulnerable to a cruel illness. We want to breathe in the fresh air of freedom from regulations which prevent us from the spontaneity which gives life its energy and interest. We want to be rejuvenated; we want our world to be reborn.
We come to this Christmas with hearts tired and dispirited. We will celebrate. Our talk, however, will be of the pandemic and its implications, of those we know whose plans have had to change because of recent developments, of the muted lead-up to Christmas day, of the smallness of crowds both in the malls and in the churches, of the concern about how yet another year living with virus might be.
And yet, in the midst of it all, Christmas invites us to stop. We hear the story– that story that never tires of its telling. What part of the story do we not know? And yet, we tell it again, and again. Something in the story is important to us. Something in the story reassures us. Something in the story brings us home to ourselves.
It is the laughter of a baby.
A baby’s laughter. The laughter of a baby is one of the world’s most miraculous moments. It disarms us. It melts away our rigid defensiveness. It opens our countenance and transforms the lines of anxiety so that our worry dissolves into a reciprocal smile. For a moment, the world is innocent; the world is good; the world is full of promise. The laughter of a baby possesses an unparalleled power. It says to us, you in all your worry and concern, you in all your defensiveness and pretence, are good. You have an unmistakable beauty that can never be taken away. This is the gift that the laughter of a baby is to us.
Each Christmas, we are reminded that God has come to us not in apocalyptic, cataclysmic events but as a baby. And if God comes to us as a baby, then it is to effect in us what every baby does. The laughter of a baby reduces us; it makes us forget about ourselves for a moment. It is the simplest of experiences; it is the most complex. Simple in its freedom; complex in its capacity. If this be our experience of every baby, how more so is it our experience of the Divine Baby upon whom we gaze this night/day?
We need that laughter of the Divine Baby more than ever. It is the laughter to remind us of what is most important. It is the laughter that steadies us through the challenges in front of us, that brings us back to what is central, that opens us out to one another, that reassures us that there is a future, even if it be a very different one from what we had planned.
With humility, let us approach the Divine Child. Let us be present; let us be surprised. Hear his laughter. Let us be reassured. Let us be restored. Let us find the confidence to journey on into an unknown future. Then, too, perhaps we will find ourselves smiling. And may this smile be that which is most contagious in our world today.
