Our society is often caught in the act of repetition: Read newspapers, watch television, surf the Internet. It stutters. An invisible wheel brings back everyday the same wars, the same woes; and those who survive are the same! The events turn in a loop, making us tired and skeptical. How to break a cycle of violence that always hits the weakest? How to reverse the trends of unemployment or crime? Halt cancer or AIDS? The failures of humanity, which is often struggling its own inconsistencies because it refuses to confront and deal with real problems, lead to resignation, fatalism, and, ultimately, to a creeping despair. We doubt that an improvement may be possible. Tomorrow may only look like today. As the dusk comes before the nightfall, or like the end of summer foretells the winter, the mechanical sequence of things can not give way to anything novel or unexpected.
Economists and demographers are not at rest: the future is peered through and contained in the jaws of all kinds of forecasts or projections. We predict next week’s weather, price rises, the dollar rates, our your life expectancy… predictions seize sports tabloids just like the opinion polls skew the politicians. And even if calculations proved uncertain or unlikely, we will not hesitate to consult a guru a soothsayer or tarot cards to secure or protect ourselves from the dreaded random. The legitimate concern of the future favors conformism of thought or action. “Is there anything new under the sun?” (Book of Ecclesiastes).
And yet, here is an absolute novelty which breaks into the monotony of the days. Something that man has never imagined, or reasoned. Something totally baffling: Christmas. God in a baby. This who exceeds man is manifested in what is hardly anything. A God who babbles, smiles and cries, and sucks the breast of His mother Mary. We need centuries to stop rubbing the eyes and grasp the reality of such a myth or fairy tale. This descent of God in our humanity, in its most fragile and most perplexing form, reveals the price He paid to overturn our history, like the land after plowing.
Christmas invites us not only to contemplate the child of Bethlehem, but also to consider the world through the eyes of this child. A look of innocence, freshness, hope, free of any compromise. Too serious or too satiated at the spectacle of the world, our adult eyes cultivate skepticism, fatalism or derision. To marvel our disillusioned hearts, we do not hesitate to resort to tricks of the technology or to seek artistic mediation, trying to stimulate the sleeping dream within us. The small child is so close to home that he discovers the novelty and beauty in the most mundane things: a smile that we give, the song of a bird or a passing cloud. Learning to discern the marvelous little things in life, such is the lesson of Christmas. A lesson of life but also a spiritual message. God came down in the ordinary life and in the fragility of an infant to reveal His face. The Almighty has been a toddler, making us rediscover the wonder of childhood.
Childhood is precious in the eyes of the Christian. Jesus calls those who violate it “scandalous.” But it can not be reduced to just a phase of life. The spirit of childhood is not transient. It persists in the adult we have become. Our effort is to find it again, to dazzle ourselves. Our simple way to become content with so little. Our ability to dream and hope in the heart of the night. Often, the elderly “falls back,” in spite of himself, into the childhood that he had left. it catches him just before the end as if to teach that God##s world that awaits him is that of eternal childhood. “When I appear before God, it is the child that I was which will be before me” (Georges Bernanos).
We resist, with all the force of our reason and our complacency, finding the childhood. When he must leave the hooks in a world of competition and hard work, when the other becomes a rival, the ingenuity of the child, his unconcern, or his vulnerability, appear as defects. we take the child with so little seriousness that we tend to mock him. We play the child when we refuse maturation, act childishly to avoid growing because we are afraid to take charge and face the constraints; we simply content with assistance, resort to relationships, which may be short and warm, and we constantly seek protection and safety.
But this is not the spirit of childhood that the gospel offers. The child of the Father, who remained Jesus until Calvary, undertook all the requirements, the struggles and the contradictions of his humanity and yet remained exposed, available and committed to serving others. In his adult life, he cultivated an endless attachment to the Father, the virtue of wonder, compassion, delicacy in the face of evil of which he has no idea, a simplicity that even confused his family, and an enthusiasm that attracted the crowds.
Because of Christmas, God can bring forth the “new” from the “old” that we are. He comes to “resurrect” and awaken the child we were, which, to Him, we have never ceased to be. At the manger, Christmas makes us the gift of the spirit of childhood. What a priceless gift! In our society, where everything is bought and everything is sold, this free and gracious gift converts our heart which is worn out by the habitual. It frees us from the routine and mundane. It heals the bruised childhood, whether we were victims or accomplices. “If you do not become like children, you will never enter the Kingdom of God,” Jesus says. God##s world is that of childhood. Christmas points us to it.
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Dominique Rey is bishop of Fréjus-Toulon. Le Figaro