Christmas 2024 – David Ranson

It is often remarked that it is children who make Christmas. Often, they are at the centre of our thoughts and practices when we come to celebrate Christmas – whether it be our own children, or grandchildren, nieces or nephews. Christmas is an enchanting time for children – they are full of expectation and excitement. Their sense of wonder at the decorations, the music, the family customs, Santa Claus, and our gift-giving are all infectious. We lead them to the crib, and we bend down to their level and see the scene through their eyes. The characters of Mary and Joseph, the baby Jesus, the shepherds, the wise men and even the sheep, the donkeys and the camels take on fresh perspective for us – an experience highlighted even more when we watch children act out the Nativity Play. If Christmas has a magic, it is, perhaps, because we become spellbound by the delight, the pure wonder, and sense of play in children that comes so much to the fore in the celebration.

For a transitory moment our children teach us to let go of the frenzy and anxiety of our life, all the pressures and the expectations that can at times seem to overwhelm us, and we become captivated by innocence. At Christmas, our children re-capture for us a moment of innocence, a moment of pure light, a moment of simple stillness. In their wonder, our concern gives way; in their excitement, our pressure is relieved; in their play, our compulsiveness is disarmed. Our children retrieve our own child, the child within us, the child that has become over laid with so much adult expectation, but which has never really disappeared altogether and lives somewhere in the recesses of our being. For a few brief moments we see the world again as children. We see the world with innocence

Christmas restores for us the glimpse of innocence in a world wearied by its loss. Each day seems to greet us with innocence shattered. We live with its loss in our own relationships and families as we struggle with the challenge and invitation of love, and we resign to its expulsion in our world of business. We are dismayed by the sheer brutality of the current conflicts. In a media saturated culture, we fear our children having to carry the weight of adulthood prematurely.

The world is not innocent. Yet every Christmas our children lead us back to the stable of innocence. No, innocence is not in the inns of the economy, politics and culture. Often enough it may not even in the inn of our own family. We must go outside these to find what we are looking for. We must go to the neglected parts of ourselves, the parts of us that our children keep alive in us, the mangers of wonder, of play, of simple presence and delight in life just as it is in all of its enchanting simplicity. This is the gift of children to us, and happy are we, as adults who have long lost our innocence, who can receive this gift of inestimable value. Christmas is given to us simply to stop, to wonder, to play, to be present.

If our children gift us in this way, then can we not see that this is how God gifts us? For we celebrate this night that God has become a child, pure innocence. God has become a child in a world shattered of its innocence to disarm our pretension, to confound our cynicism, to soften our defensiveness, to still our neediness, to lead us out of the city of our ambitions, to glimpse once again both the memory of our past and the promise of our future. We are not innocent, but at every Christmas innocence is given to us to seek out, to bow down before, to cradle. Our pretension, our cynicism, our defensiveness, our ambition, our neediness – all that which denies us of our innocence – gives way and we are given back our humanity. A child does this for us. And the child’s name is Jesus.

As Pope Francis once preached, “When we look at a newborn baby, we are led to smile at it, and if a smile blossoms on its small face, then we feel a simple, naive emotion. The child responds to our gaze, but their smile is much more “powerful,” because it is new, pure, like spring water, and in us adults it awakens an intimate nostalgia for childhood.”[1] Our interaction with a smiling baby restores us to the truth of ourselves, to our own loveableness and the loveableness of life itself. But in the baby of the Nativity, it is God who smiles at us. As Pope Francis puts it so simply yet so eloquently, “Jesus is the smile of God.”

And this smile fills us with hope. For hope is freedom. Where we have hope, there is an open horizon. We can move, even without knowing the certainty of our destination. Hope gives us the capacity to keep making decisions of trust and for love; it enables us to surrender the despair of self-enclosure and to reach out in commitment to the relationships of our life in and by which we are given our identity and our dignity. For the person who has hope, there is possibility. For the one who lives in despair, the present itself is experienced with finality, as the barrier to the past becoming something more.

At the heart of the story of Christmas lies a fundamental human hope. Through all its twists and turns – from its outset in Nazareth where the life of a young girl stirs with new beginnings, through to the birth of new life full of possibility and concluding with a visit of strangers from the East who wonder at the meaning of all that has taken place – runs the thread of hope. It is the hope that “God is with us.” In all its various stages, the story reverberates with this unspoken, but nonetheless remarkable, refrain, “God-is with-us”:

God is with us in the questions which disturb us, as with Mary;
God is with us as we go about making ends meet, providing and protecting our family;
God is with us as we find ourselves in social and political currents we do not fully understand;
God is with us as we delight at new life and fresh beginnings;
God is with us as we nurture and encourage one another;

And if “God is with us” then there is always the possibility of something more. For God is an infinite horizon of invitation. And we are not alone; there is something larger than ourselves, something more than our own clumsy endeavours and inadequate attempts in life. We are not alone before a cold force of destiny that is arbitrary in its manifestation. And thus, dead ends can become new beginnings, hopelessness can be transformed by promise, death may be overcome by a stronger force of life.

Yes, the proclamation at the heart of the story of Christmas that “God is with us” gives us hope. It gives us a future. It gives us back our innocence.

[1] See Pope Francis’ Christmas Greetings to Vatican Employees and their Families, 21 December 2019. See https://zenit.org/articles/pope-offers-christmas-greetings-to-vatican-employees-and-families/