By JOHN YOUNG
God can seem very remote. By studying the world He created we can prove His existence and gain some knowledge of His nature. A person with a gift for philosophy and good teachers can gain wonderful insight, by the use of reason, into the Architect of the universe.
But most people are not philosophers, and even those who are will not experience, through their use of reason alone, the intimacy with God for which the soul naturally yearns.
Even God as known through divine Revelation can seem abstract, although in fact He is most real. Take the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity: three Persons each distinct from the others, yet each is the same God. Or the Beatific Vision: This Vision is the most intimate and concrete knowledge, yet in our earthly state we find it hard to visualize it, and may feel it as something remote and almost unreal.
So the most real things can appear unreal and distant. This happens because all our knowledge comes through the five senses of touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell: And these are about material things. The intellect works only in conjunction with images in the imagination: There is no pure intuition of spiritual realities.
That’s the way we are made. But some Christians leading a holy life have been misled regarding the place of the senses and the emotions in relation to sanctity. They have tried to suppress their senses and imagination when praying, striving for union with God through their spiritual faculties alone.
St. Teresa of Avila discusses this attitude, and speaks of books on spirituality which “advise us earnestly to put aside all corporeal imagination and to approach the contemplation of the Divinity. For they say that anything else, even Christ’s humanity, will hinder or impede those who have arrived so far [to an advanced stage of the spiritual life] from attaining to the most perfect contemplation” (St. Teresa: The Life, chapter XXII).
St. Teresa followed that advice for a time, but came to see that it was mistaken. She came to see the great need to meditate on Jesus’ Humanity, and thus draw closer to Him. She says: “We are not angels and we have bodies . . . as a rule our thoughts must have something to lean upon….”
“We look at Him [Christ] as a Man; we think of His moments of weakness and times of trial, and He becomes our Companion. Once we have made a habit of thinking of Him in this way, it becomes very easy to find Him at our side….”
God, knowing us fully, provided for the human need to approach Him through tangible things. He provided for it in an astonishing way: He became man. And therefore we see God eating and drinking, talking to His friends, obeying His Mother and St. Joseph, teaching through down-to-earth parables, suffering hunger, and finally dying on a cross for our salvation.
Christianity is full of paradoxes, beginning with the paradox of God as a tiny baby. The Creator of the universe was born in a stable. His mother was a virgin. Jewish shepherds and wise men from among the Gentiles were invited, while no invitation was issued to the leaders of the Chosen People.
The imagery of the stable has shaped the Christian worldview. It has shown concretely how close God is to the human race, how intimately bound up with the everyday things of life. It has shown that holiness can be found in poverty. It has helped to overcome the snobbish prejudice that people with money or power are superior to those who lack these.
In G.K. Chesterton’s wonderful book The Everlasting Man there is a chapter titled The God in the Cave. Chesterton here contrasts two ideas that must be regarded as remote from each other: “. . . the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars.” The Baby in the manger was the sustainer of the stars.
He points out a difference between a child brought up as a Christian and one brought up as a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist. “The difference is that every Catholic child has learned from pictures, and even every Protestant child from stories, this incredible combination of contrasted ideas as one of the very first impressions on his mind.”
Chesterton claims that any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas will always have an association in his mind of those contrasting ideas: the Baby and the unknown strength that sustains the stars.
Today we find determined attempts by atheists to ban Christmas displays from public places. Why are they so desperate to do this? Part of the explanation surely lies in the vision of reality shown so concretely by the story of the first Christmas night. That vision is a refutation of unbelief.
Even people in modern secular society are moved toward the supernatural by the stable in Bethlehem. And the militant atheists know this, at least subconsciously. So they do their best to abolish that image.
We should try hard to penetrate the sublime realities that “no eye has seen and no ear has heard” (cf. 1 Cor. 2:9). But we do it best through contemplating the Divine Baby in the manger.
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