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When Existence Himself Lay in a Manger

Christmas carols are the creed of Christendom. They were born, we are told, in Assisi with the first crib celebrating the coming of Christ to the world. The Poor Man of Assisi and his own surged around the crèche where was laid the Child. These songs attested to that burst of popular piety that swept Europe sometime in the dawn of the high Middle Ages.

Did not that great heart that was G. K. Chesterton affirm that when we come to Bethlehem the man becomes the child and the child the man? God made Man: woman giving birth to her own Creator: Creator not disguised as creature but being one: a howling, babbling baby reaching for his mother’s milk.

We go to Bethlehem in many ways, but all of them send us to the same Infant. Kris Kringle and Santa Claus; St. Nicholas and the Three Kings; Epiphany and gold, incense, and myrrh. And never let us forget the old man who says in the England of Dickens:

Christmas is coming
The geese are getting fat
Please to put a penny
In the old man’s hat.
If you haven’t got a penny,
A ha’ penny will do
If you haven’t got a ha’ penny
Then God bless you.

Little more need be said about Christian charity. This little rhyme does it all. It sums up the poor man’s Christmas when the poor man’s God was born in a manger because there was no room for him at the inn. “And he came into the world and the world knew him not.”

I shall never forget what a very good friend once said to me about these issues: Catholic truths are literally true, whereas other religions tend to fade away into metaphor. Christmas means what it is. The Lord God literally became man. This truth is again encountered in the Holy Eucharist, where meaning is literally being. The bread and wine are what they mean, Christ himself.

The typical mind formed by the modern sensibility has been tricked into doubting that religion has anything to do with reality, with things as they are. Religion, for these folks, concerns our reactions to reality, and in these reactions there consists whatever meaning or intelligibility the religious dimension of life might have. A typical modern man is either reluctant to grant or refuses to grant any weight to existence understood in its most basic sense as fact, as something that happened.

Did the Incarnation happen? The Catholic affirmation of the Nativity is based on a fact, not on a theory; on a premise, not on a poem. The Son of God became man. Precisely here we encounter the simultaneously classical and the modern objection to Christianity.

The paganism of the Mediterranean world of the first centuries after the birth of Christ was full of mystery religions in which pale divinities died and rose like the phoenix. They were as ethereal and unreal as the myths in which they lived their shadowy lives. Every corner of the heavily populated empire was peopled by household gods, charming little creatures who ruled in the vegetable garden beyond the walls of the house and who guarded the marriage bed and the skillets in the scullery.

That world was choked with gods, although by then hardly anybody believed in them anymore. But the public power of the empire preserved them all. They were necessary for the commonweal of a society that otherwise would sink into the darkness of atheism. Men required some meaning for their lives if only as a hedge against despair.

Few men who governed Rome in their chaste white togas were altogether atheists. Most were so highly skeptical that they admitted every Eastern deity into the pantheon. “What can we really know? After all, these preternatural beings might exist. Even if they do not, a belief in them shores up good manners, supports the law, guarantees contracts, and keeps the peace.”

What pagan classicism could not grant was the Christian claim that there is one God and that his Son was quite literally born in an almost unknown town in Palestine. The radical severity of the Faith undid everything hitherto taken to be englobed by what they understood to be religion. The divine entered time in the womb of a Virgin, and from that day forward the world was stripped of divinity, political existence was cut down to size, and emperors and kings, powers and potentates, were called to bend the knee before Bethlehem.

This was too much for them. The persecutions commenced. The blood of martyrs flowed in the Colosseum. The crosses multiplied along the roadside as Christian victims by the score attested to their faith in Christ. Classical antiquity bent religion to its own ends and would have done the same with the nascent Christianity had the new Faith been but one star in a galaxy of beliefs that attested to the tolerance of the pagan spirit.

Yet the Church did not bend. The Incarnation happened, and everything else in God’s creation takes on meaning and significance in the light of the singular event in which Eternity took unto itself time.

Pagan religion, with its seasonable rites and its civic pieties, meant much to pagan man, but it was not true, and at the bottom of his soul pagan man knew it. Even Cicero whispered that there were probably no gods at all, but we must never say so out loud.

The business ought to be put in its most stark outlines. If God became man, was incarnated in the womb of a virgin, then everything man did, has done, and will do, is totally changed. Everything moves forth from and returns to this shattering event.

To say that man by nature is religious is to say that by nature he is pagan. He feasts on a surplus that must be consumed. He sacrifices solemnly in duly appointed places hallowed by tradition. He thus tacitly admits his dependence on powers and forces sensed by him to buoy him up in being. He blesses his young and guards his dead in well-kept cemeteries. He sets up statues to his heroes, and he sings songs remembering their deeds.

The Catholic Church has known this and embraced all of it. Thus many of its enemies have called it pagan. But if this natural religiosity be equated formally with religion, then we would have to admit in all candor that Catholic Christianity is no religion at all. Based as it is not on what man does naturally as a religious being, but on what God did freely for man, the Faith proclaims the good news that Christ the Savior is born.

The splendor of Christmas known to children shatters all categories and refutes the wisdom of this world. Were we to pause when we recite the creed at Mass in order to ponder the awesome and indeed awful affirmation that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” I am afraid we would never get on with the sacrifice. The Church wisely insists that its most solemn liturgical prayer be done swiftly and without personal ruminations by celebrant on the altar or faithful in the pew. The mystery is too terrible to be halted. Were it so halted, frozen as in a vision, we might be struck dead. We certainly would be struck dumb.

If we scrutinize the vast panorama of the great religions that have covered the Earth and changed man in their image, we note that only Christianity claims to be based on a single event, a single fact: the Incarnation of the Son of God. The Incarnation is affirmed within an orthodoxy in which one truth leads to another, and all of them are understood within a complexity of doctrine: the Father sent his Son to save the world.

But who is the Father?

Moses asked God to tell his name because Moses had to preach in that name to the children of Israel. We can presume that God might well have said: “I am your Father; I am the holy one; I am the Lord and thy Master, King above every earthly king.” Had God answered Moses in these terms, all of us who attend to these truths would have been satisfied. God is all of these affirmations made of him, but he is more.

He chose to speak otherwise to Moses: “I Am Who Am.” When asked who he is, we have it—no levity is intended—from the horse’s mouth. God stated, before a burning bush that hid him, that his name is Is.

Likewise, Our Lord did not say, “I have the truth.” He said, “I am the truth” (and the way, and the life). This separates Christ from all myths and mystifications. He stands before all history as the God-Man who says, “Accept me or reject me.”

God is. Christ is, first as the eternal Son of the Father, himself God in all his glory, and then as Jesus in a manger, true man born of the Virgin. We affirm all these truths in the creed. To take these propositions literally is to undo everything that previously was in the order of nature. The world is turned upside down, transfigured, altogether itself yet so much more.

The God who names himself I Am is the same God who is in the manger on Christmas. The Catholic Faith begins and ends with a God who in every sense is Creator of the world that is, making each and every thing be at this very moment in time.

The Holy Eucharist we receive at Mass is quite literally our Lord, body and soul, humanity and divinity, eternal Word of God and the Child of the Nativity. Our entire Faith is woven into a tapestry of affirmations all bearing on being. A youthful carpenter’s apprentice, as Chesterton called him, declared that “Before Abraham was, I Am,” thus taking to himself the solemn name of God, and those who heard him knew what he meant and would have stoned him to death had it then been possible.

Later they murdered him on a cross, and it is in the theology of the Crucifixion that the full import of what I am suggesting comes home to us in its most awesome dimensions. Theologians tell us that when he hung there those three hours, in which mankind was redeemed, he summed up all existence—both human and cosmic—in which all time came together in a supreme moment of salvation and the tears of history, from its first beginning to its final end in judgment, were wiped away by the incarnate Author of all that is.

But this is Christmas. Do not lock yourself in a room and ponder all these truths. Go out into the streets and sing with the herald angel, “Glory to the newborn King.” Remember the poor man with his hat in hand. He figures the poor Child. Both will come to you on Christmas Day. Never forget: if you haven’t got a half penny, then God bless you.

 

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