If we except the consumerist diversion of the party, Christmas is a precious gift to the human adventure: celebration of childhood, dazzling in front of the fragile, confusing life, bearer of new beginnings and dreams that bring life. And who still listens, if only inadvertently, to her gospel voice which brought her into the world, can also detect traces of a scouring memory, capable of purifying and to revive existence whether it is stuck in the superfluous, puffed up with chimeras, overwhelmed with helplessness, anguish or suffering, or even subjected to powers as destructive as they are bewitching. Certainly, it has undoubtedly become for a large number – diverted from the religious as from an oppressive matrix or from a useless old age – inaudible, if not insignificant. What could tell us actual or vital from such stories from another age, we say to ourselves? Perhaps the unexpected …
It would not be nothing in a society which, after having made a blind cult to Progress and having observed the devastation it has produced, is tempted to turn to another idol: Fatality. She no longer promises anything, but orders to act as if nothing had happened, business as usual or barely, with a touch of green – otherwise the coming collapse would be immediate. Like those who, cynical, carefree or doped by their wealth and their power, feast in the middle of ruins, and admire the Earth from the top of space, like strangers, a glass of champagne in the hand, in him raising a toast: “After us the flood”.
Hope for the desperate
Christmas, Children’s Day, really? While our governments sell off the future of our children by procrastinating, out of cowardice or conformism, on the measures to be taken, instead of acting with courage, here and now. Yes, if we listen to the story that was first told in Palestine – not as believers, but simply as beings of desire who draw on myths, poetry and the flip side of things, reasons for living and for to hope. We would then realize that the Christmas star has never been extinguished, but still shines in the dark nights of the world, like a joyous madness, setting in motion, as in year 1, the invisible ones of society, as were the shepherds then and still are the poor and the angels. An unalterable stream of joy springs from suffering, war, abandonment, reproach and aversion, against all hope, like the power of fragility.
The cries of Rachel mourning the death of their children (Matthew 2, 18) are never far from the feast; to the gold, the frankincense, the myrrh offered by the Magi to the child-God echoes the cross of the condemned. Christmas is one step away from the Passion. The crib, from the gallows. Same Good News to the crushed and defiled of the world. The one whom the powerful had believed to muzzle for eternity, but who unwittingly forced the door to hell to say that there is indeed life before death, could only be born on the roads, as one without -logis or a refugee, to the songs of a cloud of angels, like a flayed choir, offending the delicate ears of well-born and well-meaning people, but intriguing the scum, suddenly awakened to his desire to live , withered by the harshness and violence of time. It is the stubborn hope of the dawn, lifting the prostrate, supporting their limping march and their relentless fight, giving the cries of the poor and of the Earth the weight of infinite justice.
Christmas, against all odds, remembers the impossible arising from the implacable reality, dislodging its hinges, oozing meaning into the apparent absurd, distressing the Herods of all times at the idea that history escapes them. , that their triumphal procession, crushing the loosers on its way, come stumble upon the incredible, contesting their diktat which grants them the feast and the multitude the crumbs. A firm no to humiliation, a resounding yes to a dignified life. What may be different, says God.
Christmas is birth which braves decay and overthrows the petrified, it is the child who strips the emperor by his subversive innocence. It is the fragility of life that reveals the essential, without worrying about the laughter of the haves and the sated, who prefer to crawl in front of the realism of the State – this “good conscience of the bastards”, said Bernanos – and close their eyes in the face of the urgency of time. This is because they know very well that a world delivered from the profit which ravages the earth, from the power which crushes, from the comfort which puts to sleep, from the hatred of the living, is a world which is violently hostile to them, whose birth makes shudder because it announces the end of what their existence was built on. Yes, Christmas is the feast of childhood: promise and judgment, depending on whether one is on the side of life or on the side of death. He is like a fire smoldering under ashes, a spark is enough to ignite him. “And how I would like it to burn already” (Luke, 12:49), said the one who was born that night. Merry Christmas.