NOTE: All reflections throughout the Advent and Christmas season will be available on our homepage and then archived on our Advent-Christmas 2024 webpage.
The reflection below is from Doris Donnelly from the 1988 Advent reflection booklet, The Birthing of Justice: Reflections for Advent 1988.
by Doris Donnelly
Isaiah 9:1-16 | Titus 2:11-14 | Luke 2:10-11
The climax of Advent is the birth of Christ. So, on Christmas, we remember the historical event when, responding to government regulations, Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem where they gave birth in an emergency shelter because of a low-cost housing shortage. And while the carols do not mention tetanus or strep or the risk of death for both mother and baby, surely fear and anxiety accompanied the birth of Jesus, as they do the birth of infants all over the world even today.
But we celebrate the fruit of our “yes” on Christmas, too. Every member of the Christian assembly has heard that, as surely as Mary experienced childbearing, so we experience Christ-bearing. Christ forms in us mystically as he formed in Mary physically. Our hands become Christ’s hands, our feet become Christ’s feet, our actions become linked with the acts of Christ.
Or they do not.
The birth of Jesus made an immeasurable difference in the lives of Mary and Joseph – there is nothing like a baby to turn lives upside down. The birth of Jesus will make a difference in our lives – a radical interruption in the style of life to which we have become accustomed. God comes, as God always does, in the most unthreatening but most compelling ways and then leaves us free to accept or reject his presence.
Yet Christmas reminds us that it is not enough to bring God into our hearts. When God comes, God never comes alone. Jesus asks to take in his strange friends, his dispossessed and uprooted children, his unpopular causes and projects.
Christmas reminds us that the powerful, who profit from preserving the status quo, were not open to the in-breaking of God’s power, to curing the injustice and heartbreak of this world. But some shepherds caught on. And a few wise men. And we must.
Christmas calls us to think as small as a seed. To fantasize a world of peace and justice and believe that it can be. To say yes so that God’s life can grow in us. To nurture the community born with Jesus, a community of hope and joy in a world full of despair.
Christmas calls us to remember that Jesus’s birth this Christmas no longer depends on Mary. It depends on us.
FOR REFLECTION:
- Has the birth of Jesus turned your life upside down? What change has it called you to?
- “Jesus’s birth … depends on us.” What situation today needs Christ’s hands, Christ’s feet?
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Doris Donnelly, your reflection rings a number of bells, your words reverberate as concepts learned over many years and made part of my daily faith-inspired life. I don’t respond to the Nativity as an individual but as part of the corporate Body of Christ. And as part of a culture fed with literature both sacred and profane. Thanks for adding that Christ brings other beings, human and non-human, with him. James Joyce wrote provocatively in *Ulysses* that “Here comes everybody.” I’m not the first to make a Christian interpretation of that expression. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Meister Eckhart inspires me to want also to give birth to the Son of God in my time and culture. Thanks again for your Christmas gift.
I hope the Church can think about the canonization of Dorothy Day in 2025. That could truly be a transforming experience.