By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY
Once again the season of Christmas is almost upon us, as we journey through the weeks of Advent in expectation of commemorating the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day. This should obviously be a cause of great joy for us, and in fact this very point was emphasized by the Angel who appeared to the shepherds on that wonderful night two thousand years ago.
St. Luke, in chapter 2 of his Gospel, recounts how our Lady and St. Joseph had traveled to Bethlehem at Caesar’s command, and how Jesus was born in a poor cave, the only accommodation that was available because there was no room at the inn.
But despite the poverty and obscurity of the birth of Christ, it was impossible for the Angelic hosts to be silent about it, and St. Luke goes on to tell us that an angel of the Lord appeared to some shepherds who were keeping watch over their flock that night.
“As the glory of the Lord shone around them, they were filled with fear. But the angel reassured them saying, ‘Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord’.”
He then went on to tell them that as a sign of this they would find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger, before the sky was filled with a great multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace among men with whom He is pleased!”
The Angel, then, put great stress on the element of joy in the birth of Christ, indeed a great joy, and this is something that ought to characterize our celebration of the whole festival of Christmastide. Another characteristic of Christmas which should be present in our hearts is a profound admiration and love for the Blessed Virgin, who is described in the Litany of Loreto as the “Cause of our joy.”
This is important, because without Mary’s assent to the request made through the Angel Gabriel, then there would have been no joy at Christmas, and no redemption for mankind.
And that joy should be the characteristic note of how we approach and appreciate Christmas is evident from the fact that in the Joyful Mysteries of the rosary we have a whole series of prayers during which we can meditate on and pray over the events most intimately connected with the birth of Christ.
But to a greater or lesser extent, we seem to have lost the ability to be joyful. We are certainly capable of enjoying the good things of the world, of enjoying pleasurable sensations, but that is not the same thing as being joyful. We can also experience moments of happiness, but these can be fleeting — and if we try to grasp such happiness, we often find that it slips through our fingers.
Quite often, indeed, happiness comes as an unexpected byproduct of something we have experienced, precisely when we are not trying to manufacture such a feeling or cling to it.
In fact, St. Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest theologian in the history of the Church, taught that perfect happiness is not possible on this Earth, although we can aspire to an imperfect form of happiness.
But joy is really something beyond all that, since while pleasure relates to the body, and happiness is more associated with our feelings and the mind, joy relates to our hearts and the spiritual life.
In this world though, of course, joy is seldom unmixed with some sort of suffering, and we can see that in the latter two Joyful Mysteries, the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple, and His being found by Mary and Joseph in the same Temple as a young man. While the first three Joyful Mysteries are all very much focused on the joy of the Nativity and the events leading up to it, the last two mysteries foreshadow the sufferings the God-Man would have to endure.
Thus when the baby Jesus was taken to the Temple, the aged Simeon told His Mother about the sword of sorrow that would later pierce her soul, while in the incident of the finding of Jesus in the Temple, the three days loss, the anguish this caused Mary and Joseph likewise foreshadowed the sufferings of the Blessed Virgin at the time of the crucifixion.
We even have this mysterious statement from St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church” (Col. 1:24).
Here we have the idea that sufferings, even deep sufferings, can be a source of joy for the person who is truly united with Christ.
St. Paul in fact referred to joyfulness as being one of the fruits of the Spirit in his Letter to the Galatians, along with love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23).
Jesus referred to how we can receive and maintain this joy in our hearts. In the opening verses of chapter 15 of St. John’s Gospel, He describes Himself as the True Vine, and emphasizes the necessity of His followers abiding in Him, saying: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.”
And if we do this, we are assured that His joy will be in us, and our own joy complete. But this abiding in Him does involve being prepared to carry our cross with Him.
A Wondrously Beautiful Infant
Someone who did this preeminently was St. Francis of Assisi, the saint responsible for popularizing the Christmas crib or crèche. In the year 1223, he desired to celebrate Christmas in the town of Greccio with particular devotion. To this end, near the town square he prepared a life-size Nativity scene including a manger with hay, and an ox and a donkey. While the townspeople looked on, the saint stood before the manger and wept tears of joy and devotion.
Then a certain Master John of Greccio, who formerly had been a soldier, but was now a friend of St. Francis, saw that the manger held a wondrously beautiful infant, and that the saint embraced him lovingly. Thus St. Francis was privileged to behold and even embrace the Christ Child — but this would not have happened without the life of penitential suffering he had endured, and which culminated in him receiving the stigmata of Christ.
The above vision of Master John is credible because of miracles involving the hay of the manger, which was preserved by the townspeople, and which was responsible for miraculous cures of cattle disease and various pestilences.
If suffering, then, is an inescapable part of Christian life, during Christmastide itself we can, for a time at least, concentrate on the purely joyful aspects of Christ’s birth and of life itself, and marvel that the God who created the universe and everything in it, should have so humbled Himself as to become man, in order to die for us out of pure love.
And if the seraphic St. Francis was judged worthy to behold the infant Jesus for a few moments, we must remember that our Lady was His Mother, the God-bearer, who lived in the closest intimacy with him for thirty years. From this alone we can get some faint idea of how exalted in holiness and sanctity she was. She is at the heart of Christmas and inseparable from her Son, Jesus.
A Blessed and JOYFUL Christmas to one and all!
(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian Apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also written two time-travel/adventure books for young people, and the third in the series is due to be published next year — details can be seen at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk.)
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