Cycles and repetitions have their meaning. Each winter is distinct, each day unique, each sunset reveals its own charm. Each cycle finds us in a different moment of our lives. The cycles and rituals remind us of the values and beliefs that sustain our existence and guide us in our journey through it.
Christmas, again? Another cycle.
What does it want to remind us this time?
What values is it inviting us to reassume?
And how is it finding me at this moment in my life?
In what local and global circumstances are we preparing to celebrate this Christmas?
It’s one thing to participate absent-mindedly in the routine of this annual celebration — with lights, music and gifts — and another to remember, as the Latin origin of the word re-cordis suggests, to pass through the heart again of what Christmas means. To allow the memory of that event to nourish our heart, our wishes, our motivations … the things that propel us to live fully.
Christmas has been edited, fragmented and commercialized to sell us a passing happiness, fleeting. We have heard the story so many times that we often fail to be amazed; we don’t allow ourselves to be touched by its profound and existential implications, which continue to transform our vision of the world and of life.
We could say — in astrophysical language — that Christmas opened another window to the universe to us, a new dimension of the mystery, of the infinite, of the transcendental … of God himself.
This Christmas — speaking from what I’m feeling — finds us anxious or despondent, unsettled by the uncertainty about the future, the economy, borders, wars, our own personal wounds. It finds us polarized, at times irritable, sensitive, unsatisfied.
But Christmas also finds us capable of tenderness, witnesses of heroic gestures of solidarity, of a growing consciousness to care for our earth, of the healing of past cultural wounds, of the promotion of justice, of the respect for diversity, and of the cultivation of hope. It finds us more conscious of our lights and shadows, as humanity and as individuals.
Liturgical rituals precisely “remind” us that the baby, whose birth we celebrate, was light: “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world” (John 1:9). And it also reminds us that that light was not always welcomed, that many preferred to remain in the darkness. Each Christmas invites us once more to recognize that tension between light and darkness, between what liberates us and what enslaves us, between good and evil.
Perhaps this season will be an opportunity to look inward, in prayer and in silence, to awaken and recreate our choices, our decisions, our commitments.
Christmas also invites us to immerse ourselves in the mystery of the Transcendent, that millennium search of humanity to comprehend what exceeds our reason. And that mystery — inconceivably — became flesh, like us, and pitched his tent among us.
This changed everything.
We were no longer the same.
That is what humbly becomes present in a manger: a reality and a symbol that invite us to see ourselves like beings where the sacred dwell. And that is why, precisely why, we call ourselves brothers and sisters.
Ricardo Márquez can be reached at marquez_muskus@yahoo.com.
