Last night, as I was walking on the Green in my home city, I stopped by the crèche – nestled on the rough equivalent of half a parking space ceded by the city, installed (and funded) by my hometown multinational men’s Catholic Fraternal Organization. The effect was tasteful, if a bit rococo.

Continuing to circle the Green, noting the homeless huddled in the bus shelters, I had cause to wonder: how would a Nativity scene look today, here in this city? Needless to say, no stables or mangers are to be found here. Still, one can imagine it: “stable” modernizes somewhere north of “dumpster” and south of “garage,” maybe like “boxcar” or “shipping container.” And “manger” – for all the sublimity of the sheepfold called to feed on the Bread of Life – in modern practical terms is definitely and unmistakably “cardboard box.”

Of course, it could have been worse. Fifteen minutes away, in front of a five- or six-bedroom brick colonial in an affluent suburb – trust me, I know the place, though it’s not unique – behold… what? A crèche?—no, not exactly a crèche, no praesepio the Poor Man of Assisi would have known, but a monstrosity in glowing, planet-killing plastic, simpering saints and sages heavily rouged and stiffly arrayed, and in their midst il Bambinone, rotund and rubicund, bloated and beneficent, looking a lot likelier to grow up and rise to the heavens on a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer than on a cloud of glory. Or a cross.

Meanwhile, in Bethlehem, the Christ Child born two thousand-odd years ago lay tightly wrapped (in “swaddling clothes” – or maybe “the thickest, warmest sweatshirt his mother has”), in a cold stone cave (no cute wooden lean-tos in desert lands). This year?—he lies in the rubble. On all sides, men wage war… and the innocent suffer most.

Sometimes, it gets to be too much. Sometimes I look around and I’m ashamed to be human. I see the effects of sin, my own and the sins of others. I see the death and living hell visited upon children, the feeble elderly, the poor. I know my own sins all too well. Sometimes I feel like a blight on the face of the earth.

But I’m not. And neither are you. Because God has made us in His own image and likeness, and nothing we do can so deface the Divine image as to render it unholy, a worthless thing. No, the Father is more Father than that; no betrayal of yours or mine can touch His existential core. If we deny him, he will also deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself. And God proved his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. So Merry Christmas! Sleigh bells and caroling! Tinsel and holly! Sackcloth and ashes! God is born, born a child, born to die for our sins. Venite adoremus.

So let’s stop and ask ourselves, seriously: Why are we here?

We’re here for the Cross.

The Cross. Seriously, the Cross, here of all places by our local tasteful if slightly rococo manger, here in the bleak midwinter? Before the spring has come, before the rains wash the ground and the blood starts flowing again? Can’t the Cross wait a bit, till the trees grow strong enough to bear the load and flowers yield their petals to cast upon the bier? Why must the Cross come now, all out of season, deep in the days of darkness, now that the light has all but left the sky?

But the Cross can’t wait — for the Cross is the Tree of Life. And life does not consist in palliative measures, shifting the weight to ease the pressure on this body of broken bones. And life does not consist in dying and dealing death in equal measure, as the rockets fly and aerial bombardment pounds the tunnels and the streets and the hospitals and schools and churches. And life does not consist in such fierce rapacious voracious grasping as drags all finite goods into its death-grip, like the miser borne down by his money-belt to the depths of the sea. And life does not even consist in such transports of transcendence as grace may afford the artist, the child or the saint – these last are a foretaste of heaven, and must be respected as such. No, this life consists in suffering – but do not fear it; to turn away from suffering is a choice for death.

Listen! How can you not hear it? Creation is groaning, the whole of being insofar as it lives at all, lives in constant longing for a Redeemer, for the coming of a Beloved who will make all things new. Only the dead, the dead among the dead who have died the second death, and the dead matter of a clockwork cosmos – only the dead do not long. And so we suffer, and we cry out to the heavens: “Have mercy on us!” And God who is Mercy itself lets the light of His face shine upon us, and its glory burns us with the fire of a thousand suns.

Seek His Face – the Face that shines up from the manger, the Face that shines down from the Cross, shines down far more brightly than ever shone the star that marked His coming. It shines. Shine, Lord Jesus. Gloria in excelsis Deo.

Gloria in excelsis Deo. You can almost hear it. The angels sing. Shepherds watch their flocks by night; a star shines down from above. And Jesus? Perhaps He sleeps.

In the world around us, in the circumstances which fill us with frustration or with dread, in the heart, God knows, of our enemy or of our friend – in our own hearts, our own little storm-tossed boats, adrift on the sea of life… sleeping. He may be sleeping. As the old hymn tune runs, Then peal the bells more loud and deep/God is not dead, nor does He sleep…

Indeed, not dead. Oh no, not dead at all, not where the waters would have engulfed us, the torrent gone over us. For if anywhere God is dead, it is where He has died of boredom. Nietzsche said it: It is the scoff­ers in the streets – and the pious in the churches, for our part – who have killed God, blanketed him in a suffocating fog of indifferent insouciant insensibility. It is not adversity, nor even hatred, that kills God in our life, but complacency and prosperity – fat, dead, jaded, soul-killing prosperity. On the brink of triumph, Nietzsche rails in frustration: God is struck low, not by demigods poised to replace him, but by leeches, parasites, blind self-satisfied worms, blind and ever to remain blind to their accidental deicide. If they could but look on him whom they have pierced, they would revive Him, and their hearts would be filled with joy. But they can’t. For what has killed God but the flattening, the draining of mystery and beauty and value from life, the safe aseptic soulless dehuman­iz­ing pale dove gray synthetic utili­tarian office cubicle cum condominium cum housing complex cum corporate campus cum shopping mall of contemporary life? No storm of destruction, no terror of the foe, no curse of the infidel, no rejection, no persecution, no denial, no fist-shake of hatred can kill God; no, all that – verzeihen Sie mir, Herr Professor – will only make Him stronger. What kills God in us is our own life-in-death; what kills God in us is not persecution and not hatred, but boredom. Thus God has died of boredom in our world – not His boredom, of course, but our own.

But no, God is not dead… for the Spirit moves where He will: You withhold your breath and they die, and return to the dust from which they came, you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth. No, the God we worship is One in three persons, and the dynamism and intersaturation of that Triune Love is ever primed to set the whole creation afire with burning life, with a life so burning that a soul sodden with sleep too deep for death may catch ablaze.

But does God sleep? I know this; God did sleep. This is Emmanuel, God-with-us, and with us He assumed our rhythms. The Lord in His human nature did not sit awake all night, every night. And so He slept; and so He dreamt. What did He dream? What does a God in the flesh dream?

Did He dream of days to come, in buildings humble and simple, spacious and gorgeous, ugly and utilitarian, hidden in secrecy, where men and women, some in garb like His own, but most in other garments, humble, splendid, ugly, strange, men and women and children much like you and much like me, with hearts full of wonder or heads full of idle talk, with mouths filled with praise or Cheerios or chewing gum, would gather to kneel before him, to worship at His altars or to fulfill a Mass obligation or a social obligation or to pass the time, to see or to be seen, to love him, to ignore him, to outrage and blaspheme him, to look right through him and see him not, to bow down before him in body or in spirit, to receive him in their hands and on their tongues and in their hearts. What did He think, what did He feel, as He dreamt of the days of age upon age?

This is our life here now. This is our treasure, whether we know to treasure it or not – this is Emmanuel, God-with-us, small and pale and fragile in His accidents, unassuming, almost as if wishing to pass unnoticed. And silent – silent as the depths of sleep.

Beloved, beloved Jesus! What are we to make of your silence, your eyes upon us, your gaze? Do you see us now, you who see all? Did you dream of us here before you, as you slept on the straw at Bethlehem or beneath the stars of Galilee? Who was absent from your mind and from your heart – you who have taken us all as your beloved ones and died for each, as if for each alone?

It is said of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, that her delight is to be with the children of men. And thus you have made us your delight, yes and more – for you have taken on our nature. God-with-us indeed, with us not only in company but in solidarity, God with us, God in us, God like us and us like God – for your incarnation is the bridge we cross to our divinization.

Perhaps He sleeps – like the newborn child of a homeless girl, asleep in a cardboard box in a boxcar or a shipping container, a sweatshirt tucked about him to keep away the cold. And perhaps He sleeps in a somnolent soul who waits to be awakened, when the midnight cry rings out or the trumpets sound. And perhaps He sleeps in the dark night of a soul that yearns for him and suffers longing and abandonment too intense to hear His gentle breath as He slumbers. And perhaps He sleeps in you, and perhaps He sleeps in me.

Beloved, beloved Jesus! Dear, gentle, tiny little God! I make such noise, such outcry, I cry in the wilderness like the Baptist, but unlike him, I can only dimly guess what I am preparing the way for, and I am fortunate if my cries are enough to get me to repent, much less anyone else. Dear Jesus, let me be quiet for once; let me hear you. Let me trust you. Let me cease my clamoring and watch you sleep.

Silent night! Holy night! All is calm, all is bright. Round yon virgin mother and child! Holy infant, so tender and mild, sleep in heavenly peace! Sleep in heavenly peace!

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Image by G.C. from Pixabay