“We run the risk of concealing Christmas behind bourgeois customs and sentimentality, behind all those traditions that make this holiday dear and precious to us,” wrote Father Alfred Delp, S.J., from his cell in a Nazi concentration camp. “Yet perhaps the deep meaning is still hiding behind all those things. What this celebration is about is the founding of a final order for the world, a new center of meaning for all existence. We are not celebrating some children’s holiday, but rather the fact that God has spoken His ultimate Word to the world. Christ is the ultimate Word of God to the world.”
Father Delp, chained and awaiting the world’s retribution for heralding the Gospel in a totalitarian spiritual wilderness, naturally understood the humble confession of John the Baptist – “I am not H e” – to be the key to what he describes as “the Advent of the heart.” The confession that we, like John, are not God is the first step toward being human, who we really are. This is what we need to be reminded of, what we need to hear, the Advent for which we are waiting.
Denying any myth of secular salvation always exacts a high price. Daring to defect from the mad Christmas rush into a refuge of peace and quiet is a heresy from which few jaded consciences can forgive themselves these days, pressed as we are by the guilt of lost connections and the self-sentenced lists by which, followed, we hope to repair them. Our best efforts have not produced the peace we long for. We fall far from our goals for a Christmas that can never come from us. Christmas, instead, must come TO us.
The wilderness of John and Father Delp are indeed familiar in our chaotic and confusing Black Fridays or Cyber Mondays, where emptiness and desolation are no less pervasive, merely louder and more labyrinthine. It is difficult to heed the cry in our souls – let alone the poor around us – when the wilderness itself has grown so everywhere. What Father Delp saw in the Baptist was, above all, one who did not inflate his own importance but personified “service and annunciation” in pointing the way to the true Messiah.
Central to our call to service is worship. Unless we adore the Christ who saves us personally, we are not serving the God revealed in all creation. Action alone, not even good and giving social work, can be authentic and humanizing unless it is caught up in prayer and thanksgiving for the gift of the crucified Savior. Candles, carols and cookies, though more inviting perhaps than the shopping treks, are merely memories in search of a star that seeks its resting place in Bethlehem. Separating our Christmas preparations from the practice of worship and daily prayer, therefore, is something of a contradiction, like a tragic pregnancy preparing for a stillborn birth.
From his imprisonment, Father Delp recognized the poor and damaged state of the broken, disillusioned humanity around him, but he did not despair of it in his own suffering. Instead, he saw his confinement and poverty as a call for purification and focus on the God who comes to hearts thirsting for the fresh air of His promised grace.
The Advent we are waiting for is here in our midst. It is the seed of faith planted in our hearts at baptism. For it to grow and fulfill its promise however, it needs to be nurtured and listened to, for it is really a Person that deserves to be acknowledged and worshipped for who He really is. If we, like Mary, we would choose to accept the promise of bearing Christ to the world, then He will also be born in each of us as the God who comes. Over just another holiday, a new Holy Day will dawn.
