Edges Magazine Issue 24: A Christmas Meditation

EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 24

January 2001

A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION

Father John Michael Hanvey is member
of the T.H.O.M.A.S. community

At the beginning of autumn this year the Welsh priest and poet R.S.Thomas died aged 87.

For me he had been a lifeline to the Divine in some rather difficult times. To know that another priest could wrestle with faith and with prayer and with God, and with his own humanity was a profound experience . I even went to listen to him read some of his poetry at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, and then met him briefly afterwards, just to say “thanks”.

Such phrases like God as the ‘Bleak North,’ or God as such a ‘fast God,’ often not there when we get there, but well ahead of us, and God as ‘movement behind the curtain,’ glimpsed at through arid prayer, sum up his rugged spirituality and cold comfort theology.

In his poem, ‘The Combat,’ he says this to God: ‘

You have no name .
We have wrestled with you all day,
and now night approaches,
the darkness from which we emerged
seeking and anonymous you withdraw,
leaving us nursing our bruises, our desolations...’.

Even at Christmas when we celebrate God’s extravagant love for us, there is always in the equation, the reality and the almost futile desolation that awaits this child. Artists have tried to capture this in paintings of the nativity . Sometimes the Christ-child is holding a cross or someone is pointing towards one . There is one very powerful painting of Mary holding the infant Christ in her arms, but the baby looks dead, a foretaste of the Pieta, where Mary holds the dead Christ after the crucifixion.

We too walk with this Divine child experiencing the bruises and the desolations. But each time we encounter our own pain and poverty , and the pain of others, and enter into this freely, Christ is born again. At this moment we who have been made in the image and likeness of God, and have kept the image, but lost the likeness, begin the process of redeeming the likeness as well.

To be there for others, the old, the young, the addicted, the lonely, the little ones of this world and maybe to see our own poverty as a gift rather than a curse , is to celebrate the whole point of God becoming man in Christ on that first Christmas night. Here Christ emptied himself of all that was His by right as Son of God, to become like us in all things except sin.

There is a stunning work of art on show at the Royal Academy by Maurizio Cattelan. It shows Pope John Paul II struck to the ground by a meteor . As he tries to get up from under the weight of the meteor , using his staff, with the image of the crucified Christ at the top , his face reflects the agony and forsakeness of Christ on the cross. This is by no means a disrespectful work of art, but rather a metaphor for the 3rd Millennium where individuals and whole societies struggle to discover the possibility of faith within a world where God often feels absent.

I saw the Pope recently at a Papal Mass in Rome . He was frail, shaking both in body and voice , but with a faith built on rock. I saw this faith in the faces of many in that 300,000 crowd, young and old, trying to get a glimpse of this icon of hope .

Of course all of us, even popes and poets will have to return again and again to our own particular poverty of mind, body , faith, always looking for meaning towards that tree where the weather will always be , ‘...Nailing the appalled body that had asked to be born.’ - R.S.Thomas.