In a dilapidated shelter, a child lies in a manger as his only berth. He is surrounded by his mother and father, and shepherds who came running in the middle of the night after a celestial rumor alerted them to an unexpected birth. This is the beginning of an annual festivity of which many people in Quebec have lost the religious thread: a God-Love incarnated in our suffering and desiring humanity.
It is one of the rare remaining traces of a religious imprint in Quebec society, although some, dissatisfied with this scent, would like to remember nothing of it, preferring to cling to the pagan festival of the winter solstice. , for which Noël replaced IVe century, forgetting, or pretending to forget, that this celebration was also religious. We will perhaps get there collectively, but at the same time erasing the invigorating breath of a thousand-year-old story of hope, which has continued to be incredibly relevant. Perhaps even more than ever in our era of technical-financial-military force, unparalleled in history, coupled with the predicted ecological catastrophe of planetary scale.
We still need to be able, to read our life as well as to talk about love, to welcome words still shrouded in silence, such as “God”, which evoke the native darkness of the world, the abyssal human enigma, the elusive part of meaning, the unnameable that animates all words.
Christmas is a story that is both upsetting and ridiculous – upsetting in its ridiculous nature. The eternal and the infinite slip incognito through time, thanks to the birth of a child, whose only witnesses are the homeless and the ragged – the shepherds: these irredeemably impure people, despised by the pious Jews of that time . No wonder, a cynic would say, that, two thousand years later, nothing has changed: the nest of pain and despair in which this story was born, in Palestine, under Roman occupation, is still all too familiar to us.
This child could have been born in the ruins of Ukraine, Gaza or Sudan, or even in a slum in our cities, without changing the scenery. It could even be that God continues to be born there without the world knowing, without anything apparently changing. Christmas doesn’t mean anything else. Everywhere the same cries, the same tears, the same hunger and the same thirst for justice and peace, the same infinite, insane, desperate hope that evil will have an end.
We don’t celebrate Christmas despite the bombs or the persistent misfortune. There would be a mistake. No, suffering, misery are part of the landscape, like an invisible thread connects the first Christmas to the cross on which this newborn child who has become an adult will hang one day of Jewish Passover, some thirty years later.
It is true that Christmas is the celebration of childhood, as we absent-mindedly tend to say, thinking of little Jesus in the crib, of the presents at the foot of the colorful tree, of the deep laughter of a loving dad hidden under Santa’s beard and, of course, to the laughter of amazed children. But this is still too little. He speaks of the childhood of the being from whom we most often flee, busy as we are with the daily routine or when we bow to the dictatorship of the present and its implacable diktat: what is cannot be otherwise. — in the name of the realism of the satiated.
Nothing apparently changes. Like this incarnate God, diapered, nestled in a manger. Like the fire that smolders under the peat. Like a loving hand placed on a bruised body, perhaps in agony. Strong love is like death, the lover of Song of Songs. Power of fragility, Christmas has the power to bring a trickle of breath into a throat clogged with despair, to clear the flat and dull horizon of fatality – yes, the world can be otherwise. And stick to that promise of dawn.
Like stubborn hope, Christmas rings in wounded hearts and on ravaged lands. Joy in pain. Enchantment in fragility. The cry and the breath of life mixed together, the infinite in the tiny, the raw desire in a ball of fire which creates an insatiable hunger and thirst for justice and peace.
But its primary work is to be a breakthrough of infinity – a word that frightens some; which is to be thrown into the dustbin of history for others, with the jokes of yesteryear. Only writers and poets, like Yvon Rivard and Hélène Dorion, among others, persist in making it familiar and an object of attention. Is it not at the sources of being and its aspirations, because desire? Now, without these breakthroughs of infinity, human existence which feeds on light, like plants, said Simone Weil, can only shrivel and wither, even if sated, and mutilate itself, “while offering the appearance of fullness and wealth” (Patocka).
Christmas does not change the world, except the way we look at it and the way we grow in it, by turning away from adulterated desires and obscene superfluities and by orienting ourselves towards the essential, which comes from nothings, which can be multiplied over time. infinity.