Christmas: Mass at Dawn

Readings: Isaiah 62:11-12; Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2:15-20

At least for some of us,
Christmas disappoints. 
We hope to receive a gift that we will love
but did not know we even wanted.
We hope ourselves to give gifts 
that will delight the ones we love the most.
We hope to sing songs that will lift our hearts
above the sorrows that shadow every life
not just for a moment, but forever.
We hope to prepare a meal that will fill
not just our bellies with food
but our hearts with joy.
But as the morning passes
and turns into day and then into evening,
we might find our shining hopes turn bitter, 
like the aftertaste of too many sweets. 
Sylvia Plath, in The Bell Jar,
her memoir-disguised-as-a-novel,
wrote, “I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, 
the way I always do the day after Christmas, 
as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles 
and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents 
and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey 
and the carols at the piano promised 
never came to pass.”
Christmas disappoints 
as hopes grown great in anticipation
are gradually deflated with the passing of the day.

Were the shepherds disappointed in Christmas?
After the angelic array and the celestial songs
and the proclamation of good tidings of great joy
and the promise of peace to God’s people,
were they disappointed when they found
a quite ordinary looking infant
and his ordinary and no doubt exhausted parents
who probably were not at that moment
terribly excited to receive guests,
especially not a bunch of scruffy shepherds.
Did they look at the humble surroundings
in which their supposed savior was found
and wonder how this could possibly be
the fulfillment of their hopes—
hopes that had grown in anticipation
not just for hours or days or weeks
but through centuries in which 
their people had longed 
for a kingdom of God?
Did the shepherds leave there deflated,
their hopes disappointed 
by the ordinariness of it all,
regretting that they had ever 
hoped in the first place?

But Luke tells us that 
“the shepherds returned,
glorifying and praising God 
for all they had heard and seen.” 
Perhaps the shepherds were graced 
with sight to see beyond the ordinary.
Perhaps they could see already here,
in this tiny infant in the manger,
the light that had come into the world,
the light that enlightens all people,
the light that the darkness could not overcome.
The seventeenth-century poet Richard Crashaw,
imagined the shepherds speaking to the child:

We saw thee in thy balmy nest,

       Young dawn of our eternal day!

We saw thine eyes break from their east

       And chase the trembling shades away.

We saw thee, and we bless’d the sight,

We saw thee by thine own sweet light.

Christmas is not simply 
our feeble human endeavor
to find a bit of hope 
amid the dark days of winter’s gloom;
it is not simply our desperate attempt 
at convincing ourselves
that people are not so bad after all,
that we are not so bad after all.
It is not simply pine boughs and candles 
and presents and birch-log fires 
and the Christmas turkey and carols.
If that were all it was,
then, yes, we should be disappointed.
But if we can see the newborn Jesus 
by his own sweet light,
the light that he sheds abroad in our hearts
to chase the trembling shades away,
then Christmas will not disappoint.

Sylvia Plath, after recounting 
her disappointment in Christmas,
adds wistfully, 
“At Christmas I almost wished
I was a Catholic.”
It is as if she recognizes
that the only way 
that Christmas will not disappoint
is if we find in it the mystery of faith 
that we proclaim each week:
that God from God and light from light
has come down from heaven
and taken flesh
for us and for our salvation.
Christmas will not disappoint
only if we can see in it
what the shepherds saw:
the young dawn of our eternal day.
Christmas will not disappoint
only if Christ gives to us, here and now,
the unanticipated gift of eternal life;
if he fills our hearts with angelic song
that is endlessly delightful,
if he spreads for us the feast of his love
that is our foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

Christmas does not disappoint 
because it is the great act of God in Christ,
making himself what we are
so that we might be what he is—
beloved children of God,
and heirs in hope of eternal life,
“not because of any 
righteous deeds we had done
but because of his mercy.”
So let us pray 
on this Christmas morning
that God, who is merciful,
might show us Christ 
in his own sweet light,
chasing all shades 
of disappointment
from our hearts,
and revealing 
his mercy in us all.

 

Christmas: Mass at Dawn (Shepherds' Mass)

Readings: Isaiah 62:11-12; Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2:15-20

VIDEO

The Christmas story that we know and love

involves Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus,
and a journey to Bethlehem and no room at the inn, 
and a stable and a manger and a donkey and an ox,
along with angels and shepherds, 
and three good kings and one very bad one.
Assembled from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke
with a bit of the prophet Isaiah thrown in,
this is the story depicted in our nativity pageants 
and in the manger scenes in our homes.

But for the first Mass of Christmas day,
much of that story seems missing.
Our Gospel reading from Luke 
does give us shepherds,
but not the exciting part with the angels 
who exhilarate and terrify them,
announcing the birth of the world’s savior
and peace and good will to all people,
but rather the part where they arrive 
once the excitement is over
and see what to all appearances 
is an ordinary newborn child.
We have Mary and Joseph and the child, 
but we hear not of the search for shelter
or of the birth itself,
but of a moment of repose
when “Mary kept all these things,
reflecting on them in her heart.”

We may feel that we, like the shepherds, 
are arriving in the early light of day
once all the excitement of the night is over.
But in fact we, like Mary, 
have arrived at a moment
of contemplative stillness 
amid momentous events.
And in that stillness we hear 
the true mystery of Christmas.
St. Paul, without mentioning
any of the elements of the Christmas story,
speaks to us of what we celebrate this day:
“the kindness and generous love 
of God our savior appeared, 
not because of any righteous deeds 
we had done
but because of his mercy.”

This is the great mystery we celebrate
each year at this time.
Not the stable, not the manger,
not the donkey, ox, or angels,
not Mary nor Joseph, 
not even little baby Jesus—
but the kindness and generous love
of the one who comes to save us,
not because we are good,
but because God is good.
This is the mystery made flesh
in the infant born in a manger,
watched over by donkey and ox.
This is the true marvel for which 
the shepherds glorify and praise God.
This is what Mary cherishes in her heart.

St. Bede, in a commentary on Luke’s Gospel,
imagines Mary’s reflection on this mystery:
“As I contemplate his greatness, 
which knows no limits, 
I joyfully surrender my whole life, 
my senses, 
my judgment, 
for my spirit rejoices 
in the eternal Godhead 
of that Jesus, 
that Savior, 
whom I have conceived 
in this world of time.”
Cherishing all these things in her heart,
Mary holds within herself still
the mystery to which she has just given birth:
the God whose greatness knows no limits
born within the limitations of time and place
out of love for us 
and for our salvation.
Mary surrenders to that mystery,
so that the joy of Christ conceived in her
might be hers for eternity.

We too are called 
to cherish in our hearts
this mystery that teeters 
on the edge of the incomprehensible:
this divine love that 
no goodness found in us calls forth,
but which explodes into our world 
in a shocking, disorienting, thrilling act 
of sheer mercy given to us 
who deserve no mercy.
The 17th-century mystical author 
known as Angelus Silesius wrote,
“If Christ is born 
a thousand times in Bethlehem 
but not in you,
you remain still forever lost.”
This is the work Christmas calls us to
in this morning of contemplative repose; 
it calls us to the work of Mary:
the work of surrendering ourselves to God 
whose mercy we can never merit,
of cherishing the memory of that mercy, 
so that its mystery might seep into our souls,
of letting that mystery be born in us anew
so that we might become vessels
bearing mercy to our world,
so that God in his mercy
might have mercy on us all.