GOD BECOMES MAN
Gaughan, Norbert F.
I GOD BECOMES MAN NORBERT F. GAUGHAN A Christmas meditation In his excellent and devotional The Birth o] the Messiah: A Commentary on The lnIancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke, the...
...A decree of the state, up to now not known for bringing about God's ways, establishes a census which allows the prophecy of Bethlehem's greatness over all Judaea to be fulfilled...
...there are Egypt, Nazareth, Jerusalem ahead...
...an empty stable is seen filled with the presence of God...
...Joseph Haydn will set to music, "A maid, a servant...
...But this tale transcends the Christian dimension...
...Along with their king, their lives are barren and empty...
...The search is unique, and personal, the quest for God, my heart's desire...
...that what is seen by men through the eyes of God is the true reality...
...So if we cannot keep our promises, how then can we expect others to keep theirs...
...For this, he will not get what he wants, knowledge of the location of the child...
...II NORBERT F. GAUGHAN i$ Auxiliary Bishop of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, and contributes a column to diocesan newspapers...
...When the Fathers of the church contemplated the mystery of the Incarnation and Nativity, they saw it as a harmony between heaven and earth...
...These "men of God" have read the Scriptures welt:~ "He will be born in Judaea...
...All are expected to come to him...
...Even more, we are confronted with the paradox that God's promise can, by his will, only be fulfilled when men keep theirs...
...Joseph and Mary have to leave their homes to satisfy the demands of the imperial census...
...In his wrath, the tyrant strikes out and brings death to others: the mothers and children of Bethlehem...
...Because, child of Joachim and Anna, she had been raised on God's word and had inwardly said, "So be it" to him so many times...
...So keepers of God's word will miss the Word made flesh...
...But together we glorify and praise God...
...Shepherds of Bethlehem will discover by another kind of shepherd, who will be the Shepherd foretold by Ezekiel...
...The quest is ever unique, the response always personal...
...Philosophers, kings, diplomats, remember what Chesterton spoke to you...
...they have the knowledge, but do not know what to do with it...
...she speaks of mean and proportion, high and low, separation and unity, awed above all "that a Divine Person should be a thing...
...it is the only way Emmanuel, God-with-us, can come to be...
...We are not to make our oaths, vows, or promises rashly, easily, in a careless manner...
...If men did not want the peace he brought, he still offered us his peace, reminding us, however, it is not that peace which the world gives...
...No, Christmas is not just the promise made on God's part, it is also the promise given by a maiden which makes it possible for God's Word to be fulfilled...
...Another philosopher spoke of love and strife, the combining of things and their breaking apart...
...It is important to note that once we have found him, we cannot remain static...
...We make the 160-degree turn implied by the New Testament word "metanoia," that conversion which literally means being turned around in an opposite direction...
...as you have spoken, so be it...
...He remains yet the child destined for the rise and fall of many...
...Still, it is true that the telling of the birth of Christ has become part of mankind's collective consciousnesswprobably because the story appeals to continual and secret longings of the human heart...
...it had all happened as they had been told...
...Tiny, insignificant Bethlehem is raised higher than mighty Jerusalem...
...Kings offer homage to a mere child...
...This is the mood, indeed the faith of our day...
...But what a way to do it: the strong God becomes the weakest of the weak...
...We still do...
...All the promises we make to God begin to be when we keep our promises made to men...
...The first Joseph dreamed dreams that brought him and his people into Egypt and eventual bondage...
...But Christmas focuses our gaze upon the maiden: calm, serene, faithful...
...If we cannot attain the highest heights of God, we can strive for the height of God when He stoops down and reaches out to us...
...we have learned to our dismay not only "la donna ~ mobile...
...The second Joseph, betrothed to Mary, is sent dreams which will bring the New Israel back, in a flight into Egypt (not away from it...
...Herod's scribes and prophets are much the same...
...These harmonies convince the Fathers of the church that what men see is not really so...
...As Gabriel Marcel reminds us, God is our fidelity...
...Nor is it the fulfillment of the promise made by God, the "First Gospel," or "Proto-Evangelium" of Genesis 3:15...
...This has inspired, above all, our Christmas music...
...It had been announced by the angelic choir: Glory in heaven, peace on earth for men...
...It is this facet of Christmas: God turning the tables on men, as it were, that has inspired the countless stories associated with Christmas...
...Straight away, there must be no delay, no putting off...
...A feast of reconciliation, Christmas announced that in a world of stress and a life of tension, there is for each one of us the possibility of peace...
...Wise men must be instructed in dreams, and are led by nature's star...
...A lad of twelve with his wisdom Commonweal: 813 confounds the learning of those trained in the ways of God...
...Paul says, "When the term was completed, God sent his own Son...
...Christmas music, all harmonious, celebrates Christ, our Harmony...
...It's true: when we are not willing to make our personal search for God, we sometimes end up hurting others, punishing them for our failures...
...Experience has taught us too well of fickle man...
...But truth is, the keeping began before the promise was made...
...But because we are changed by the meeting, it is a different road...
...They are willing to sell their knowledge of God to the power of the State, for favor, for advancement...
...In this lies the great appeal of the Christmas story, as hymns and songs attest, when they ponder the truth that God waited upon the maiden's "yes...
...It never ceases and of late we have Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors, and Britten's "'A Ceremony of Carols," which sets to music these words: "This stable is a Prince's Court, This crib His chair of State...
...We continue the journey once we have found him...
...Here is the secret of God's promise at Christmas...
...Those who will not make the journey, for whatever reason, may not find their heart's desire...
...In its legends, it saw in the Magi symbols of the differences that exist between men, which were reconciled into one as they sought out God's Son...
...From our own failures to keep our word, we know how weak, how impossible it is for each to be firm, constant, and keep the bond...
...Truly the Christ child is mediator in another sense...
...Occasionally, to reach the soul's delight, you do not have to journey far...
...He, the middle ground as it were, becomes the center, to raise up our lowliness...
...That divine turning of the tables, hinted at in Greek fables, became part of all our subsequent fairy tales...
...Freud, and discover that by his help we can overcome the things that went wrong or were lacking in our infant years...
...Miserable shepherds, the last usually, if at all, to receive the favors and blessings of men, are the first to hear the good news of God's greatest gift and to avail themselves Jf that blessing incarnate...
...He will not change his life, nor direction...
...Nations, peoples, presidents, leaders, statesmen, why then, even ordinary men and women: none of these should be held to the keeping of a promise...
...There is deep mystery here...
...Ah, the world...
...Those who intend or will to stay in one place, to let God find them, run the risk of missing him, or not discovering him...
...The word was one fabric woven of the limited and unlimited...
...We know well our vagrant moods, our ups and downs...
...But men can still learn from him...
...Worst of aft, they may mistake something else for God...
...The shepherds " . . . returned glorifying and praising God for what they had heard and seen...
...On another journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem, they lose him...
...The Magi, even if they did come from the Orient, needed orientation from on high...
...In a rudimentary survey conducted in one secular college class on "What feast or holiday do you like best?," the students, from varied religious, cultural, racial backgrounds, unanimously chose Christmas...
...I1...
...The birth of one child brings about the death of other children...
...She was not awkward in her knowledge of God's word...
...It begins in the mystery of the Godhead, when in the fullness of time, as St...
...They see the sign carried into the temple in his mother's arms, and they have to go but a little further on...
...Daughter of Israel, she has had before her eyes the certainty that the God of Israel was faithful...
...We chuckle sentimentally to discover that one of them is depicted as black...
...chance meetings with other children who will turn out to be an Apostle, or even Judas Iscariot...
...If they cooperate with the king, surely he will reward them and be their security...
...For the Magi, it was a case of "Being warned in a. dream not to go back to Herod, they returned home another way...
...They cannot begin because all their researches have not prepared them really to receive God's invitation...
...Mary is a mere slip of a girl who makes her word come true, and by this makes the Word, the Son of God, our ever-living Word, dwell in our midst...
...We are not trapped in our past...
...Yet all this is possible because the journey was first initiated by God...
...As the book of Wisdom says (and the Fathers of the church applied this to Christ's coming to us), "All things were lying in peace and silence and night in her swift course was half spent, when Thy almighty Word leapt from Thy royal throne in heaven . . . . " Vatican II was right to call believers, the church, "a pilgrim people...
...the real princess (never found among the proud and haughty...
...Where are you, Dr...
...Unfortunately the title has been thrown about so carelessly that it almost is meaningless...
...Gospel readers continue to reckon these contradictions...
...They will not budge except to do the king's bidding...
...But we must permit ourselves to be taught, to learn from others how to re-orient ourselves...
...The shepherds give up their customary haunts...
...But they will not attempt the personal quest...
...The search is crucial (there is a "crux," a cross, many crossroads in it...
...Her husband, Zacharias, whose task it is to proclaim God's praises as a priest, will give greater witness to God by his silence...
...When we hear this now, in an age of promises made mostly to be broken, deliberately or without design, we still want to believe in promises made and kept...
...When I join you we will be willows whose roots move walls...
...Wrong or frustrated quests may teach us how to straighten out the paths of our lives...
...Christ is God's harmony with, and harmonizing of, man...
...Each of us makes the same journey: "Come, we must go straight to Bethlehem...
...This is not just the case of the promise made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob...
...Then they may end up as desolate as Herod was in his prisonpalace, when the Magi did not return...
...Consult the Gospel stories...
...The pre,Socratic philosophers told us of this...
...So there are tales of wonder attendam as the Holy Family makes its way to and from Egypt: trees t~at give shelter...
...Christmas is harmony, the reconciliation o] opposites...
...Herod helps them, gives them the right answer, but for the wrong reason, "So that I myself may go and pay him homage...
...Mary will keep that promise, all the way to the cross and beyond...
...Old monarchs come tumbling down as the humble are made kings...
...They know where to go...
...At that turning point of their lives, they must consult others, to learn how to make it right again...
...They will have to be west walls refining the raisin gold of morning every morning...
...It is God's initiative that bridges the infinite distance between us...
...There are other infancy narratives, in the apocryphal gospels...
...So many humans must make a journey...
...Harmony came from the balancing of the scales, "equilibrium...
...They will not presume to be weight-beating walls holding up a roof of lead against unlikely heavens...
...The Fathers rhapsod~d about the topsy-turviness of God's dealings with men...
...They will have to be walls that listen sweetly and can keep a secret...
...He can only dwell in our midst when with all our hearts, we strive to keep the promises made, in his name, to others...
...An unborn child, later to be the Baptist, already proclaims the presence of the Messiah by leaping in his mother's womb, foreshowing what he will do later: "Look, there he is, the Lamb of God...
...An old man and an old woman are young in spirit when they find a child they never knew, but knew about...
...Mary confesses herself to be, but God calls her a mother, and a queen...
...But do that, and oh, you will grow, stand more erect...
...Before it can come to be, we must try to keep our promCommonweal: 811 ises...
...Together we ask, "Where is the child who is born to be king of the Jews...
...It is too much with us...
...So much of our human experience seems to be caught up in contraries, and even contradictories...
...or rather, they will allow him to enslave them because of their complacency and apathy...
...God's topsy-turviness is enunciated in Mary's Magnificat, which proclaims that the poor are now rich, and the proud impoverished...
...Know that all your Waldens are but pale shadows of a Bethlehem, where the discovery of the child and love of him alone can change the directions and hearts of men...
...They will find him only when they retrace their steps...
...But each asks the question for himself...
...God comes to us, so that we can begin our search for him...
...Plots and counterplots of kings are foiled by the simplicity of a young girl, attuned to the ways of God...
...The Greeks gave us the word "harmony," to sit, nlfy the joining...
...To describe this they spoke of tension, or the conflict of opposites, resulting, as Heraclitus said, in a "Iogos," an element of arrangement common to all things...
...A girl (young and awkward according to the world's judgments) makes a promise: "Here am I. I am the Lord's servant...
...I GOD BECOMES MAN NORBERT F. GAUGHAN A Christmas meditation In his excellent and devotional The Birth o] the Messiah: A Commentary on The lnIancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke, the distinguished biblical scholar Father Raymond Brown says, "The first two chapters of Matthew and Luke are just as profoundly Christian and as dramatically persuasive as the last two chapters, the story of the Passion and Resurrection...
...Marc-Antoine Charpentier will compose a canticle that sings, "The Eternal One is born, the Endless One is caught and concealed in our appearance...
...By keeping her promise , the Virgin nourishes the Word, who only then appears to men...
...The dark of night is pierced by angelic light...
...The Gospels are stories of contraries reconciled, and opposites made one by the stupendous act of God, who crossed the infinite boundaries between him and man...
...Again, the Sibylline Oracle, "The king will recline his limbs in the lap of the queen of the world...
...They noted the conflict between the temporal and eternal, the changeless and changing, the permanem and the passing, the transcendent and immanent...
...The center of the Gospel account is a promise made to a young girl...
...Joseph and Mary must leave Bethlehem...
...The king of creation is watched over by creature animals, who are wiser than Herod...
...Herod is not at all prepared to leave his palace...
...Men of Scripture, they had forgotten the Psalmist, "The Lord is my Rock, my Buckler, my Shield...
...A Virgin will give birth to a chBd...
...flowers and roses that bloom in the snow...
...As Caryll Houselander has said, the story of the birth of Christ has become part of "the collective consciousness of mankind, invested with light and loveliness...
...but we so conveniently forget that when the times come to live out the implication...
...God's Word must grow in the maiden before he can come to all men...
...By this, the brothers and sisters of a new Moses will be freed forever from the bondage of sin...
...You shall conceive and bear a s o n . . . He will be g r e a t . . . The holy child to be born will be called 'Son of God...
...But she concludes that only thus could there he the unheard of friendship between God and man in Christ...
...23 December 1977:814...
...A full hostelry is suddenly revealed to be really empty of GOd and his love...
...It has happened as we have been told., Now we must give collective witness of that for others...
...You must bow your head, stoop a little, before you can enter that low-ceilinged stable-cave...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 EDMUND PENNANT TALKING TO WALLS Talking to walls when you are gone I will be selective...
...He, the Faithful One, makes us become faithful...
...I. Christmas is a story of a promise made and a promise kept...
...These lead to the heart's desire found in the quest, which begins another, different journey...
...Come to the stable, Dr...
...Mary, Joseph, shepherds, Magi, Simeon, Anna all will make different 23 December 1977:812 journeys...
...One despot more vicious than the other will enslave them...
...Such stories are still cherished for they flow from this unbelievable fact of God's reconciliation with us, making our reconciliation with self possible...
...The Sibylline Oracle will exclaim, "The Holy Virgin, distinguished by her beauty and honor, will feed the king of heaven, in his younger years, with her milk...
...The wise men who "traveled under a solitary star," to quote Houselander's lovely phrase, journey to the wrong place, Herod's palace...
...My ways are not your ways," indeed...
...These are not to be despised, for, as Father Raymond Brown has it, they seek only to throw a reverse mirror on Christ: what we saw of him in the public life, he already was in his childhood...
...Matthew who gives Christ's genealogy, tells us the Spotless Lamb of Israel descended from, among others, Rahab, the harlot and Ruth, not a Jew...
...God's Son did not come slowly, hesitmitly...
...From it, in time, came "concord," and lastly, the "happy combination of many diverse things into one...
...as a people, we journey together...
...Simone WeB, in her First Notebook, is absorbed with this equilibrium...
...Mary had begun the keeping of the word long before the angel asked for her "yes...
...For at least we can move toward a Child, in our loves and our deeds...
...Already he is doomed...
...the wise animals (who recognize the mystery, more than that allegedly rational animal, man...
...Jesus is God's promise (pro-missus)--the "missus pro nobis'--the One Sent For Us...
...This woman was not young in God's ways...
...Sometimes we must go back to discover where our own quest went awry...
...Why else was she able to say, "I am the Lord's servant...
...Come, we must go straight to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened...
...They travel to and from Egypt to save the child...
...But a people is constituted of persons...
...What follows is a meditation on some of these longings...
...We are pilgrims...
...He wants others to make the journey for him...
...the quest, the searching which alone leads to the "happy-ever-after"I The Christmas stories suggest best this harmony, reconciliation, peace...
...Are our promise~ but weak desires, pious hopes, temporizing evasions based on our assumption that surely reasonable persons (as we all are) cannot expect others to live up to their words...
...God, the provider of all, is provided for by a simple maiden...
...Anna, the prophetess and Simeon, have long been waiting for the sign that will mark their travers end...
...Skinner...
...At Christmas we are met with this mystery of promises kept...
...Paul says, being God meant nothing to him, he assumed the nature of a slave...
...An elder cousin, Elizabeth, must and willingiy does give deference to a young maid...
...Conflict destroyed the old to create anew...
...A barren woman, Elizabeth, gives birth to an infant...
...you will be able to roach out beyond the stars...
...It is heartening to know in the storms of our lives and the tempest of our times, we can find equilibrium in him...
...Or worse, mistake it...
...For it, Christ is a sign of comradiction, not of harmony...
...Men, women, young and old, of all colors and races, learn what the early church knew...
...In Tales ]tom Eternity, Rosemary Hanghton develops such themes: the youngest son (who wins out over the elders...
...And on it goes...
...IL Christmas is the story o~ ]ourneys made...
...This may have been because of emotional connections with the family's keeping of the feast, with only good remembrances filtered through the screen of memory...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 26
