Christmas 2009
Dearest Sisters and Friends,
Happy Christmas to you all!
As the beautiful autumn season comes to an end here in Japan and the participants of the Council of the Institute have left for home, we are looking forward to the birth of Jesus among us once again.
Our pilgrim journey continues from the Council of the Institute, where we deepened our conviction that our call as Infant Jesus sisters is particularly relevant in the world today and where we renewed our firm commitment to journey and to search with others. Our sharing from different provinces showed us very clearly that God is also calling people to live the Gospel alongside us, inspired by the spirituality that has been handed down to us from Nicolas Barré and the first sisters in the Institute. Christmas is a time of new life and hope; let us renew our response to God’s personal call to each of us to follow Jesus, “the Way, the Truth and the Life” (Jn 14:5).
Christmas speaks to us of childlike wonder, innocence, joy, love, forgiveness, family, community and generosity. When we are attuned to these simple values we see clearly what is special in ordinary everyday life. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, in his poem Advent, called it ‘the newness that was in every stale thing when we looked at it as children’.
A new dawn begins with this child’s appearance, the dawn of endless day and endless light. At Christmas we are reminded that this light comes into the darkest corners, that this God-child is born in destitution, in a cave outside the city. This child is the Son of God and the Son of Mary. This is our Saviour. This birth brings together a mixture of glory and misery, transcendence and familiarity. God draws ever closer to us – sometimes so close it is not comfortable.
On Christmas day the only response is joy. “A light will shine on us this day: the Lord is born for us.” (ps. 97). This birth is for all nations, for heaven and earth, for justice and glory. God comes to live with us and for us, to die with us and for us, to rise with us and for us.
The Council of the Institute also reminded us that our experience of God-with-us enables us to reflect on all our crises as experiences of faith, n ot in order to avoid the pain and suffering of the crisis but in order to find God’s Word to us in every difficult circumstance of our lives.
Christmas does not rid the world of evil. There will still be sickness, senseless hurt, broken dreams, and cold lonely seasons when love is far away. Christmas does not promise heaven on earth; it promises God's presence in our lives on earth. Sometimes we need a crisis to open our eyes to opportunities. The current financial crisis may be a call to bring us back to the essentials of our lives, to leave behind what may be leading us far away from God and far away from love.
The birth of Jesus sends us inwards to ourselves. We reflect on our own hearts and see if they are true. We look at our lives in the light of this child, and he is either the standard by which we fail or the source from which we rise: he is our being judged or our being forgiven. We either abide in him or stand in opposition to him. They are the only two choices. The Word of God cuts cleanly through all the darkness in our lives.
The birth of Jesus also sends us outwards to others and to the realities of our world. This child is the light to the nations, the glory of God revealed to all peoples; the light comes to bathe us in glory or to expose us to the truth. That truth includes the ever-growing multitude of poor men and women without work and without shelter, infants and children injured and violated, adolescents enlisted in the wars of adults, young people whose lives are destroyed by drugs.
The situation of migrants and displaced people in all our countries continues to call us to action, as we recognised at the Council of the Institute. How do we view the foreigner in our midst? How do we view someone of the same nationality as ourselves who has a different history? The birth of Jesus begins with a harrowing journey for Joseph and his very pregnant wife, Mary, from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to David’s town of Bethlehem in Judea “to be registered” (Lk.2:3). While they are there, along with thousands of others who had also travelled long distances, in the midst of the chaos and confusion of the crowds, “she gave birth to her first born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn” (Lk 2:7). This is a child of a despised, poor, conquered nation, an expendable people. God is present in this child in places of exclusion, in caves and among all those who can recognise him as their own.
Christmas challenges us to reform our lives and become women and men of justice. It also delights us. In the words of Karl Rahner, it is God giving us permission to be happy. We see light in darkness in the face of a newborn baby whose innocence can still stun us into wonder and soften, for a while, the edges of our cynicism.
God is born as a helpless baby whose vulnerability confronts our false strength, whose transparency confronts our deception, whose generosity confronts our selfishness, whose innocence confronts our worldliness. This baby calls forth what is best in us.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). The light of faith enables us to recognize in the new-born child the eternal and immortal God. Christmas renews not just our faith and hope, but also our innocence. The crib invites us to soften our hearts and calls us to follow Jesus throughout His life. His way will lead us to “act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with our God” (Mic. 6:8).
May our celebration of Christmas this year bring us back to the crib, with our hearts open, so that the space inside us may become a haven of peace from which a vision of new life may emerge.
Masako and Marie Agnès join me in
wishing you all the joys and blessings of this Christmas season,
Marie