On Christmas Eve some years ago in Italy when the ‘Red Brigade’ was blowing up and bombing public places, a young railway police officer went to work as usual. In the middle of the morning of Christmas Eve he was involved in dealing with the injured and the dead after the terrorist bombing on the rail line between Rome and Bologna Later that day another bomb went off on Rome railway station and again he was involved in digging out the injured and the dead from the carnage – men and women, children clutching teddy bears and toys, all the presents they had brought with them for the celebration of Christmas with their families and friends. That night the young Italian policeman went home and took his own life. Before he died he left a note for his parents and brothers. In it he wrote, I can no longer go on living my life with all the futility and emptiness and pain. But I beg you to go on living yours, because somewhere in the middle of it all there must be something beautiful. In our Drop-in here at T.H.O.M.A.S. where many of the young people who come to us have nothing really to call their own, I often hear from them how they hate Christmas and all the hype that goes with it, with the emphasis on family get-togethers, not always successful may I add. In fact there is more recorded domestic violence over the Christmas period than at any other time of year. I guess we all expect too much from this one particular day and try to cram a yearsworth of what we think family ought to be, into a few hours. I think most of the young people who come to us in the lead up to Christmas with all the emphasis on spending lots of money, also feel out of it and many of them do ‘get out of it’ on alcohol and drugs. They might not be involved like the young railway police officer in digging out the dead at Christmas, but there is of course in many of their lives an internal death that has already taken place, where there is deep loneliness and often despair. We all die many times, in many different ways before we finally breathe our last. And sometimes these deaths are good for us; often it’s difficult to distinguish between birth and death in our lives. But having said all of this, I am not disheartened at this time of year. Ever since I can remember I’ve loved everything about Christmas. It’s like being given yet another chance to celebrate the greatest event that ever happened in human history, or ever could happen. Christmas has inspired the greatest musicians in the world to write the most profound and beautiful music around this one event that has changed our history for ever. ‘He was incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.’ In every Catholic Church and Chapel, city, town and village, this event will be celebrated on Christmas Eve. From the magnificence of the Pope’s Mass in Rome to the same Mass celebrated in the poverty of a war-torn village in Africa, or in a prison on Christmas morning, or in the ward of a hospital with victims of AIDS and wasting away with their illness; or in the day room of the elderly confused in a nursing home – this Christ’s Mass is for everyone without exception. It’s about God’s extravagant love for us, it’s about him actually liking us. We are very fortunate to have so many beautiful Christmas cards that speak of this incredible intervention in human history when God became man. But of course the story does not end here. There is nothing sentimental about this Christ. This child is destined to be rejected and brutally murdered on the cross and this appalled body that had asked to be born ends up again in the arms of the mother, who on Christmas Eve aged probably fourteen, gave milk to our bread. Only this week I heard yet again from one of the young people who come to us, how the loneliness of things is often so unbearable, the splice of his life from four to eighteen in children’s homes, where he said ‘people are not allowed to love you.’ All of us I feel need to find new ways of breaking through into lives and minds fractured by life, where we can show something of the extravagant love of God which is Christmas, and Good Friday and Easter Sunday and is and always will be for everyone, but most of all for the people of no importance, where often there is no room for them in our rather individualistic and self-centred world. This applies not just to the young, but to so many others, often confined to the familiar circle of chairs in a nursing home, with fewer and fewer visitors and only distant memories of what life used to be like. May all that is the possibility of Christmas somehow be made flesh in us this festive season, where somewhere in all of this there is always the possibility of discovering something beautiful. |
