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christmas

He Was Born for me
A community celebrates with hot cocoa. The “profound joy” of not being “isolated.” Everyday life “becomes an adventure.” Christmas as seen by three people of different faiths, who here compare themselves to the Christmas poster–with the awareness that only Christ can generate unity.

Texts collected by Fabrizio Rossi

John
MILBANK
Theologian and Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at Nottingham University. Anglican.
God became a baby. The infinitely great became the last, the smallest. It’s a fact that moves me to tears: God has spoken to us, to make us understand who He is. He revealed Himself in the absolute vulnerability and innocence of a child, communicating to us His most intimate image: a human face. With His birth in a grotto, Christ wanted to save every circumstance. Paradoxically, only if we encounter the divine do we truly discover humanity. Christ is the true incarnation of reason, and so faith can enter into all aspects of existence, as emphasized by our Anglican movement, “Radical Orthodoxy.”
But men and women wanted to cast out faith from everyday life. Then Cardinal Ratzinger wondered, “Does faith still have any chance?” Many perceive it as something extraneous–they’re too proud to believe in the birth of that child. They can’t accept that the true nature of God is humility. Like the “wise” spoken of in the Bible, they don’t understand the question at all. For me, however, faith manages to open a breach precisely because of that “inextinguishable aspiration, full of nostalgia, for an infinite”–nobody lives without affirming something beyond the material. The rejection of Christ means the undoing of humanism. We have the results before our eyes: a society against life, in favor of euthanasia…
In this secularized culture, we Christians realize that what unites us is deeper than the differences of confession: not a set of rules and values, but Christ Himself, in His concrete humanity. Fr. Giussani hits the bull’s-eye: “How could we ever accept ourselves and others in the name of a discourse? …Unless Christ is a presence now–now!–I cannot love myself now and I cannot love you now.” Thus, we Anglicans and Catholics can’t accept each other if we stop at the formal questions–for unity, committees, and documents aren’t enough. The move of each individual is needed. I was recently in Montreal, and in the Catholic cathedral a priest told me that all who are baptized and accept the eucharistic presence of Christ might receive communion from him that day. Which I then did. My joy was at experiencing full eucharistic unity as an Anglican with Catholics. I would not have been moved to joy by an abstract ecumenical statement, but a deep joy surged through me because I felt I wasn’t isolated. Before the level of institution, we have to walk as individuals, certain of what Fr. Giussani says: above everything, there’s the presence of Christ. He is the one who brings us together.

JUAN MANUEL
de Prada
Spanish opinion maker and author of essays and novels.Catholic.
I will spend Christmas in Zamora, my Castilian hometown.  Each year, after the Christmas Eve celebration, the pastor offers all the faithful in attendance hot cocoa and churros, our typical fritters, as if to say, “We can’t remain like strangers now; let’s celebrate together. God was born for us, not just for me.” The encounter with a community, in a world where families are drifting and each person conceives of himself as isolated, is a most striking and fascinating event. This is Christmas: God burst into history, to be present in our lives. It’s a simple fact that even a child can recognize. It’s a truth that our epoch tries to contaminate, by emptying this celebration of its meaning. We eat, we drink, we party till the wee hours of the morning… but if Christ isn’t at the center of it, our celebration becomes a pantomime where we try to replace the communion among people with an artificial and frantic amusement. It’s a sort of tragic farce. Chesterton understood this quite well: “Take away the supernatural and what you are left with is the unnatural.” It is all a production meant to conceal the fatigue, the indifference, and the cynicism that Father Giussani talked about. Our society searches for happiness as if it were morphine–you take it and you achieve a sense of well-being. But man is not just a chain of molecules; man is made for complete happiness. Once man has cut God out of his existence, he is an amputee, like one missing an arm. We feel there is something missing, so we try to anesthetize ourselves with the most disparate pleasures. Thank God, though, the pain does not go away; it is the only way through which contemporary man can avoid falling into the falsity of a God-less celebration. This cynicism prevents me from loving those I meet. Fr. Giussani asks,  “How can we accept ourselves and others in the name of a discourse?” Embracing the concrete person who suffers requires a great effort; it is much easier to love those who are far away, maybe precisely in the name of humanitarianism…This disembodied love is the opposite of Christmas. Where can we start anew? We can start from the “inextinguishable aspiration, full of nostalgia, for an infinite” that Ratzinger talks about. If one who has rejected God is honest, one can’t but feel amputated. As far as I am concerned, the best way to give witness to what Christmas is is to reawaken that nostalgia in those I meet, saying, “What you thought lost, is here.” It is present and generates unity among Christians.  This is what the contemporary man desires: to touch with his own hands this incarnate faith, by bumping into a community that celebrates the birth of our Lord–maybe with hot cocoa and churros.

Tat’jana Kasatkina
Russian scholar, Director of the Department of Theory of Literature at the Russian Science Academy. Orthodox.
God comes to life in a totally helpless child. He is an abandoned child, because there is no place for him in the inn. He is born in a manger, in the womb of the earth; the earth itself becomes the Mother of God, and this birth is a cosmic event. This is how Christ transforms everything: the poorest fact of life acquires greatness and dignity.  As Antonij the Metropolitan of Surož once said, Christmas bears witness to the fact that God takes on Himself all our faults; He made us free, but He does not leave on our shoulders the consequences of this wounded freedom. He alone can answer to the “inextinguishable aspiration, full of nostalgia” of man. Ratzinger talks about it with great clarity: “…does faith still have any chance at all?” I am certain it does, because only this event that involves reason can make the world deep enough for us. One of Dostoevsky’s characters already asked this question: “Can an educated man, a contemporary European believe, really believe in the divinity of the son of God, Jesus Christ?” Not just a contemporary man, but an educated contemporary man, one who feeds on the “half-science” Dostoevsky talks about, that offers a ready-made answer to man’s eternal issues. This answer seems to resolve everything, but in reality it almost instantaneously falls apart, thus becoming a source of desperation. Christ is our depth, and it is His face that shines in the eyes of those who look at us with love. Father Giussani says it well, “Unless Christ is a presence now–now!–I cannot love myself now and I cannot love you now.” We would be left with only our finite image to love–what boredom… On the contrary, if He is present, we are all irreducible; in fact, getting to know the other means getting to know God. This way, everyday life becomes an adventure. It is Him that we meet in other men. We have to learn to recognize Him, like the Dostoevsky short story The Little Orphan suggests. The story takes place in a frosty cellar, where, on the morning of Christmas Eve, a child wakes up. Dostoevsky shows us a sort of desolate nativity scene, as if to say: we have to see that Child in each one of the children who are born in the underground dwellings of this world; and that Mother in all the suffering mothers. There are many nativity scenes on earth, where we Christians should bring Christmas. I love this hymn of the Orthodox Liturgy: “Thy birth, O Christ our God, has made the light of knowledge shine upon the world; in it the worshipers of the stars were taught from a star to adore you...” (troparion hymn of the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ). This is the meaning of Christmas: what used to be an idol, a surrogate of the true God, is now the way to Him, like the stars for the Magi. The whole world, in every smallest particle, mirrors the face of Christ. For this reason, we will never be abandoned…