The Archbishops of Armagh’s joint Christmas Message

22 December 2021 • Persistent link: iarccum.org/?p=4120

Just before Christmas 1937, Monsignor Ronald Knox wrote a letter to the English Catholic periodical, The Tablet. Knox was the son of a Church of England bishop and had converted to Catholicism shortly after taking a brilliant First at the University of Oxford. He later became the first Catholic Chaplain to Oxford since the Reformation.

The letter arose from a remark that a friend of Knoxs had made, that shewasnt going to have her house turned upside down just because it was Christmas”. Thinking afterwards about what she had said, Knox wrote in his letter, “What is Christmas from start to finish but things being turned upside down?”

Even the days, continually darkening in the runup Christmas, turn with the solstice and light begins to win again. Just when trees should be at their barest, lustrous evergreen branches are brought indoors and enhanced with lights and glitter. And just at a time (especially in the ancient world) when darkness was a cover for thieves in the night coming to burgle homes, in our modern recasting of the story, a genial old boy squeezes himself down the chimney and leaves gifts.

Everything started to turn upside down from that first Christmas. Those who were least got the best placesthe ox and the ass beside the manger and Kings asking directions from shepherds. Perhaps, the greatest revolution of all: the Virgin conceives and gives birth to a child. The wonder of all thistopsyturvydomis summed up in the words of the beautiful ancient hymn, sometimes sung at Midnight on Christmas Eve, ‘O magnum mysterium!’

O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the newborn Lord,
lying in a manger!
Blessed is the virgin whose womb
was worthy to bear
the Lord, Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!

There is to a degree a natural instinct in us to try to turn the world back on its feet again, because Gods coming into his own creation knocks us badly off balance. So we tie ourselves ever more tightly into the world ofgetting and spendingand have communion in consumption. But we cant shake off the feeling that there is a fragility about our indulgence; that somewhere there is a frail seam that will give way; a nagging feeling that there will come a day when there wont be more tomorrow.

At this time of the year, perhaps, it is the very lavishness of Christmas that gives us a heightened consciousness of (and a bad conscience about) thelittle onesmentioned so often in the Gospels: the homeless, the poor, the rejected, and all those who long to see the world turned upside down again, whenthe earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters fill the sea”.

At present there are many people who have had not just the two worst Christmases ever, but two of the worst years everthose whose bodies have been overwhelmed or whose minds have been scrambled by Covid19; those whove had bereavements during the pandemic, whose plans have been cancelled, families separated, visits curtailed, operations postponed, businesses and livelihoods upturned.

If the Spirit is saying anything to the Churches this Christmas, might it not be to think about how we, as individuals but also as a society, can enter prayerfully and hopefully into that great mystery of theWord made flesh”, and hold on to more of the upside down world embodied in the Gospel narratives? Happy Christmas and may God bless you and your families.