Sense and Nonsense: On Fellowship, the “Baby Jesus,” and the Incarnation

Last Christmas I celebrated midnight Mass at the lovely Poor Clares’ Convent in Aptos (California) with an old friend from the University of Santa Clara, Father Edward Warren, S. J. This convent is in the parish to which my brother Jerry and his dear family belong, so we usually attend Christmas Mass either at Resurrection Parish across California Highway One or at the Poor Clares’, though we normally have Sunday Mass when I am about at nearby Villa Maria del Mar Chapel of the Holy Names’ Sisters. This old wooden chapel above the cliffs at Santa Cruz, where you can often hear the waves crashing below during Mass, is a favorite of the family:

The Sister Sacristan had carefully instructed us about the entrance ceremony for the Midnight Mass. The sisters in choir would be singing carols, always a touching moment, while we would proceed from the back of the chapel. Father Warren was the principal celebrant. On the way into the sanctuary before the crowded congregation, we were to stop briefly to incense the Christmas crib, with its manger, animals, shepherds and angels singing on high. I was to carry on a cushion a “Baby Jesus” doll in the procession to place it in the crib just before the incensing. The scene, I realized, was fraught with unaccustomed danger, as I knew my brother and nephews would be carefully watching how Uncle Jim, a liturgical clubfoot, would handle this delicate role.

Sure enough, when we got into the sanctuary, with the lights appropriately low, the firs, greenery, and poinsettias all about, I panicked, as I had not noticed ahead of time just where the crib might be. As lead man, I could not figure out where I was supposed to put the “Baby Jesus”. Everything was alike to me, so I saw on my left something that looked like perhaps an advanced design crib and walked over to it. But this turned out to be the lentern or sanctuary lamp stand. I was frozen.

Meanwhile, Father Warren, with the incense, and the alter boys had turned right, while Uncle Jim was wandering around the sanctuary lamp stand looking for a place to put the “Baby Jesus” doll down. When someone hissed, I finally looked around to see Father Warren calmly over at the crib, waiting for me to get my bearings. I began to giggle at this preposterous Christmas scene in which Uncle Jim could not even find the crib, let alone the inn or the manger. Needless to say, my brother and nephews were merciless when it was all finally over, though the dear nuns, who must have been collapsing in their secluded choir, and my nieces and sister-in-law were charmingly delicate about the whole scene. My nephews have offered to buy me a leash this Christmas, when I will again appear at the Poor Clares’ Convent Chapel. I am sure, theologically, the real Baby Jesus understands.

On December 31, 1963, just a few months before she died, Flannery O’Connor wrote that her lupus had put her into bed causing her to miss Christmas Mass. But she did hear of the participation of her pet burro at the local Milledgeville, Georgia, religious Christmas pageants:

Ernest — that is Equinox’s pa — did the honors for the burros this Christmas and went both to the Christian manger and the Methodist pageant. He did very well in the Christian manger — in which there were also a cow, a pig, a Shetland pony and some sheep and he did all right at the Methodist dress rehearsal but when the big moment came and the church full of Methodists, he wouldn’t put a foot inside the door. Doesn’t care for “fellowship” I suppose. (The Habit of Being, p. 555.)

Burros in Georgia who don’t care for “fellowship,” clergy in Aptos who can’t find the crib — of such is Christmas. Somehow there is a profound connection, often illustrated by the Christmas mysteries, between solemnity and humor. Indeed, I suspect, the connection is ultimately metaphysical and more.

In an earlier letter (June 19, 1957), Flannery O’Connor had been asked about the origin of some of her most “grotesque” and unusual characters. She responded that her “standard of judgment” could only arise within Christianity, “because it concerns specifically Christ and the Incarnation, the fact that there has been a unique intervention in history. It’s not a matter in these stories of Do Unto Others. That can be found in any ethical culture series. It is the fact of the Word made flesh.”

What this suggests this Christmas is that the particular mode of revelation — God becoming a child — is precisely “grotesque,” as Flannery O’Connor put it, because it is the least likely mode of redemption the human mind, as such, could image. There is a kind of “death-wish” in humanity, as the Russian scientist Igor Shafarevich put it, which cannot accept the goodness of what we are and what God is, of God’s way of doing things. This too is why the “political messianisms” that charge so much of our public life today, even in religion itself, are at pains to stress the “Do Unto Others” as the primary mode of redemption. For them, the Incarnation is a scandal, as it must be to all self- redeeming religions. Uncle Jim wandering confusedly about a sanctuary looking for a crib, or the burro Ernest, “Equinox’s pa,” refusing to have “fellowship” with the Methodists on Christmas eve, is far closer to the particular reality of our being than learned dissertations and violent movements for the salvation of all mankind from sundry “exploitations.”

The Second Reading for the Dawn Mass at Christmas this year is from St. Paul’s Epistle to Titus: “But when the kindness and love of God our savior for mankind were revealed, it was not because he was concerned with any righteous actions we might have done ourselves; it was for no reason except his own compassion that he saved us.” Compared to this salvation, the only one there is, all else will seem odd or strange, particularly those we dream up by ourselves. But immersed in the mysteries of our incarnation, of the Word made flesh, we discover both the solemnity and the humor, because we are indeed freed from the burden of saving ourselves. Something greater has already been given to us, and we can hardly name it. In being given more than we could have hoped, we find our hopes paltry before the destiny to which we are actually called. And this is our joy, liturgical clubfeet though we be. The Incarnation is not what we would have expected, but it is what we got. Rejoice and be glad.

Author

  • Fr. James V. Schall

    The Rev. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books and countless articles for magazines and newspapers.

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