Christmas2008

Christmas Survey
Artists and journalists, writers and scientists... We presented the Christmas poster to a group of people from different walks of life, as you do with your friends, and asked them to come to grips with a question: What does this fact mean to you? Some felt overwhelmed and a few others declined. 
But many agreed to see it through, and here are their responses

edited by Paola Bergamini, Giuseppe Frangi, Mario Gargantini, Paolo Perego, Mario Prignano and Fabrizio Rossi

By now, you’re familiar with the Christmas poster. Some of you have already hung yours up at home, in your entry or kitchen, or wherever it can be seen as you pass, so you can let yourself be struck as often as possible by the impact of the faces and words. Some of you have put it up in your office, to spark reflection in your colleagues as well as yourself. Those who hadn’t seen it before will have found it on the cover of Traces. It’s not just a way of celebrating Christmas. It serves to tell everyone, without mediation, about the root of our experience. This root is there, in that “fact” (“He has shown Himself”) and in that “phenomenon of a different humanity”–Christ and the Church. So, giving the poster to friends and acquaintances, as many do, is a way of saying who you are and what you’ve encountered, proclaiming the infinite value of Christmas.
Well, we’ve done the same thing, proposing those lines of Benedict XVI and Fr. Giussani to people in different walks of life: artists, entrepreneurs, journalists, and politicians. We asked them one simple question: What does this fact mean to you? What does “the Christian claim” communicate to you, the assertion that that fact–that Child–“corresponds to the exigencies of the heart more than any thought of ours”? It was a personal provocation, avoiding the abstract chatter or opinions about Christmas “making us good” or complaints that “it’s not like it used to be.”
There were some who declined to share their meditations for various legitimate reasons, those who swerved a bit to reflect on “sociological” aspects. But many accepted and actively engaged the question personally. Here are their responses, full of their humanity, and thus, of ours. A rich humanity also informs the insights of Antonio Socci–author of the just-published Inquiry on Jesus (Rizzoli)–demonstrating one thing, and one thing alone: “that fact” fulfills the human heart, setting us free, making us fully human. 

Claudio Magris
Writer
A small hut, or a cave, in the immense night of the world. That hut is greater than the black infinite spaces, even if it barely fits a newborn, a man and a woman, a cow, and a donkey, because here, the entire world enters. Not just shepherds, but all women and men, even those who lived before or would live after, because with that birth, “the dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open,” as it says in Spe Salvi. It is the rebirth–the true birth–of all of humanity, of that time, of ages before, and ages to come, because that child did not come to establish another religion (superfluous at that, given there already were and are too many), but to change life.
For this reason, when I was a child, I used to put everything I could into the crèche: stuffed animals, broken toy soldiers, photographs, illustrations of people, landscapes, animals, plants, or things that’d struck me, as if that hut were the true ark for universal refuge and redemption. In that hut or cave there are a child, a mother, and a father, not an unbearable little family jealously imprisoned in its egotistical particularity; no false and sugary little goody-two-shoes holy card of the family. The mother conceived that newborn scandalously, outside the self-righteous moralism of marriage; the father accepted the child with the courage and love of one who knows that every creature is a child of God and thus our child. The cow and the donkey who warm the child with their breath protect him in that moment perhaps no less than his parents, and remind us of the obscure animal cousins who live alongside us, who are not exempt from the divine plan and its love.
That child was born, and Mary no longer suffered the pains of labor. But creation, as St. Paul would say later, still continues to groan with labor pains, that rebirth of all life promised and not yet realized. In the great night there is a choir that announces the glory of God in the highest and peace on earth to men of good will. We know little of that glory; we know that peace still hasn’t arrived, that to date its proclamation has been belied, that pain, horrors, injustice, and abominations continued even during and after that night. But, as it’s written, that which tarries, will come. For now, we only have the crying and the first unconscious smiles of that newborn, more precious and more real than that song. Angels can make mistakes, above all on the times. It’s more difficult to err about that child, who hasn’t said, and couldn’t say, anything yet, but who simply exists.

Giampaolo Pansa
Journalist and Writer
Fr. Giussani’s sentence goes straight to the heart, not just to the intelligence. I identify with it very much; it is my way of being. I was baptized and confirmed; I went to Mass, and even served as altar boy in the Cathedral of Casale. But I don’t remember how I thought of God in those moments. I remember being shaken by the illustrations in the religion book, with naked bodies burning in hell. Then I disappeared into the limbo of agnosticism. Now, in the evening when we go to bed, my wife and I pray to our parents, and Baby Jesus; we talk about God, but not an old man with a beard God. No, a Child God, good and tender. I think of God with that semblance because He seems more willing to forgive my foolishness, my sins. I’ve always thought that there would be nothingness after death, but now I’m not so sure. I’d prefer that there be the famous last judgment. Pansa? Where should we send him? Hell, purgatory, or heaven? Christmas is God who comes to earth, but who remains perennially a baby, who is good. And to be born in those conditions! A refugee, in a tent… I remember the intense care my sister and I devoted to preparing the crèche. Papà brought in two planks that became a big table. I was always struck by the empty hut, at the thought that a child born there would suffer the cold. My sister would say, “What do you mean? There are the cow and the donkey, and then Saint Joseph; you think he’d leave the child shivering?” Well, I’m still with that child there in that hut. The Pope talks about reason and reasonability. Hmmm. Maybe I’m not a “reasonable” man. I work a lot with the heart, with my need. I don’t know whether this parabola will lead me to be a believer, but if I should rediscover God, I believe I would be guided by that child, that God of Christmas, that God of the birth. And I would be pushed by my need for Him. I sense it forcefully, above all in the evening after a hard day’s work. I need Him. I wouldn’t have thought so ten years ago, but today I wonder if everything ends with death. What’s after? Is there some place I can go? To do what, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t want it to be a bad place, even if I don’t know that I’d merit heaven.

Michael O’Brien
Writer
Intellectual pride blinds us. I see it in my work as a writer and painter; before settling at my desk or taking a brush in hand, I always ask God to illuminate me, and it’s as if I were working on my knees. Herein lies the power of the Pope’s call to “the humility of reason”–reason isn’t an autonomous power. Every time we try to isolate it from morality or the heart, we deform it. Reason has to bow before what it encounters. With this humility, it becomes what it was created for: a tool at the service of the whole truth of man.
Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation. In that moment, all of creation was transformed, not by a thought, but by a fact: God became man and changed our heart, mind, soul, and body. We have to bring men this living Truth, not a dead letter. As Fr. Giussani says, the first impact is with a “different humanity.” I’ve seen it in many extraordinary Christians, those they call “great”–a beggar, a mother, a poet in love with Christ. People who have suffered a lot and have discovered a mysterious reality: the companionship of Christ with them on the cross. The world is not saved by collective projects, but by these people. One by one.

Duccio Macchetto
Astrophysicist at the Space
Telescope Science
Institute of Baltimore, MD
This year has been characterized by pessimism. We find ourselves before a dark, sad panorama that frightens many because it casts doubt on the foundations of affluence we have taken for granted.
And instead, Christmas comes, rebirth, hope, optimism, salvation. This Christmas surely will be different from those in recent years, because we’ll return to giving importance to the true meaning of this event. We’ll forget the gifts a bit and return to thinking about what this date means: the annual celebration of the birth of Christ, His Incarnation as a child, the beginning of His journey on this earth, a journey that leads to our eternal salvation.

Toni Capuozzo
Vice-Editor of the Italian
 television station TG5
Maybe it’s the economic crisis, or maybe it’s my advanced age, but this year Christmas makes me think much more. I’m returning to the simplicity and intimacy with which I experienced it as a child. It’s striking to hear the Pope these days talking about humility. He’s a great gift, a precious travel companion. We all need it, because often we’re in a Tower of Babel, controlled by a pride that convinces us we can govern life and death. Above all, I need it in my work as a journalist. Those who are humble are curious, and learn from what happens; they don’t think they already know everything, and often prefer to remain quiet. Instead, I meet many who think they can save the world themselves. You can organize protests, rant and rave to oppose the war in the Congo (rightly so), but not notice the old lady living all alone next door. We lack a bond with the world around us.
Before the problems and the arrogance of man today, Giussani doesn’t limit Christ to a tradition, but speaks of Him with daily surprise. Like faith: it’s not something acquired forever, but something we must come to grips with daily. This gives me a lot of hope and a lot of uncertainty. It’s a revolutionary fact–whether you have faith or not (I don’t, even though I’ve never defined myself as atheist), you can glimpse in it a guide in the present and in the future.