from Christ is the Christian who does not know how to love. A string of cruel words from a Christian can destroy another Christian.
Over and over again people write to me to explain why they left a church in bitterness and hurt, because of the mer-cilessness of Christians who made them feel unwelcome, or even told them to go away.
I'm convinced that it takes immense courage to remain in a church where one is surrounded by hostile voices; and yet we must remain in our churches and we must answer hostil-ity with meekness, with gentleness, or simply not answer it at all!
Reverend Rick Warren writes with shining eloquence of this in The Purpose Driven Life, this need to love. But many a venerable Catholic theologian has written of the same imper-ative. The message of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, of Karl Rahner, of Walter Kasper, of St. Augustine, of St. Paul is - to love. The message of St. Francis of Assisi was love.
We have the famous prayer of St. Francis which spells it out beautifully and poetically:
Lord, make me an instrument of
Your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow Love.
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may Not so much seek to be consoled, As to console;
To be understood, as to understand; To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we
receive -
It is in pardoning that we are
pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are
born to eternal life.
We kid ourselves if we think this is "feel-good Christianity." This is Christianity! If it isn't Christianity, then what can Christianity possibly be? It's the toughest way to live that there is.
Again I see in the Christmas tableaux of the Holy Family the perfect iconography of this love. I see the love of God in the presence of the Christ Child; but I also see in the Virgin Mother, the embodiment of the truth that the conception of the Child Jesus did not involve violence or a proprietary claim on the part of any human being. The Virginity of Mary is not a rejection of sexuality; it is a rejection of violence, a rejection of ownership, a rejection of the social system of the first century in which even a Jewish woman became to some extent the chattel of her husband. The Virgin Mary is a woman who belongs to no man, and only to God.
And we, whether we are male or female, like Mary, belong only to God.
Joseph is the perfect guardian and the perfect witness. He is the man who assumes the responsibilities of fatherhood.
But these are seen in their deepest essence, divorced from any claim established by conjugal dominance. They are freely given, these gifts of fatherhood, and therefore they illuminate all fatherhood for all of us - men or women - as they become a parental ideal.
In the Christmas picture of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, the family transcends the age-old cycle of fertility and death.
Each figure is there voluntarily, and therefore symbolically, and allegorically. Each figure speaks of the pure relationship to the Father in Heaven. This is the Family of Love.
No wonder the hymns celebrate this so fiercely through the centuries. "God rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay. Remember, Christ Our Savior was born on Christmas day."
Yet the Christ Child will die. He will grow up to die, and to rise again.
From the moment we come to Christ we start negotiating with all this. And to move out of that negotiation and back to the heart of Christ is the hardest thing, I think, for a Christian to do.
Did St. Francis of Assisi know this when he put the babe in the Christmas Creche at Greccio? Was he not one of the greatest of the Christmas Christians? Did he not give us the Christmas Creche?
And yet Francis received the shocking and dreadful wounds of the Stigmata. Francis knelt in awe of The Atonement. But Francis was a Christmas Christian first and foremost, perhaps as he reached out his arms to all God's creatures, and all God's creation, and to Christ Himself.
My path leads me deeper and deeper into these mysteries.
The powerful inversion of God, the Creator, become human in the body of a babe enthralls me. The complexity of simply loving leaves me stunned.
This path to Christ, this attempt to grasp the multiple meanings of His life and death on earth, had led