New Year's Eve

Fast away the old year passes,
Fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!
Hail the new, ye lads and lasses!
Fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!

The annual ritual of changing the calendar inspires some serious reflection for many, such as I myself engaged in here yesterday. But it also has its lighter side.  I am too old - and, increasingly, too socially isolated - to party on New Year's Eve. I am enough of a traditionalist, however, at least to stay up until midnight - long enough at least to call my family (who live three time zones earlier) to wish them a  "Happy New Year" before I slouch off to bed.

My first memory of New Year's Eve dates back to the early 1950s, when much of my extended family gathered at what was in effect the old homestead in Italian Harlem - my aunt's apartment on 124th Street and 2nd Avenue. I remember our regular visits there and walks around the neighborhood to the Triborough Bridge. But all I remember of New Year's Eve there was the midnight noisemakers and streamers. Soon enough, my aunt moved uptown as had the rest of the family already, and our celebrations were held in her - or another relative's - East Bronx apartment. Apart from the late hour and the uniquely midnight-related hijinks, those parties were not much different from the many extended family gatherings that took place all year long. But, for a child, the fact that it was late at night made it special, even exciting.

Midnight itself was, of course, completely ritualized. Guy Lombardo was on the TV, and his Royal Canadians sang their familiar staples, like Boo Hoo and Enjoy Yourself, It's later Than You Think. As midnight approached, the TV took us to Times Square, where a large crowd (comparatively small by today's standards) awaited the midnight ball drop (atop what was then still the NY Times Building).  The entire event revolved around that ball of lights. The extravagant entertainments we nowadays associate with that event  were way off in the future. The ball was the show. And one year, I well remember, the ball got stuck on the way down and never quite made it to the bottom of the pole. But the new year's number lit up anyway. 

Once the ball came down and the new year lit up, we all jumped from our seats, made noise with our noisemakers, shouted "happy new year," and kissed each other. The more traditionally inclined might also venture out into the apartment building's hallway banging pots and pans. (Another venerable Italian custom - throwing dishes out the window - had by then become ancient history, clearly a casualty of assimilation.)

All that was, of course, accompanied by Guy Lombardo and his band playing Auld Lang Syne, the Scottish origins of which I was hardly aware of. I only knew it as Guy Lombardo's new year's eve song! Then we all sat down to eat. This was the only time we kids stayed up so late and so the only time we ate at such an absurd hour, one consequence of which was that none of us could then receive Communion at Mass later that morning. (Although most adults received Communion only occasionally, my generation was socialized to receive every Sunday and holy day. On January 1, we faithfully attended the 9:00 a.m. Children's Mass under the watchful supervision of the Sisters as usual, but so universal was the custom of staying up late and eating after midnight that hardly anyone received Communion on New Year's Day.)

As the years passed, New Year's Eve gatherings grew smaller, lonelier, and less exciting. There were occasional exceptions, of course.  At Princeton, I and my housemates did host a gloriously successful party for a number of our fellow grad students to usher in 1976.  Several years later, in the novitiate, it seemed almost everyone else had someplace else to go, so one of my classmates and I prepared snacks and celebrated together with the assistant novice master.

For the Great Jubilee, the Archbishop of Toronto asked each parish to celebrate a Midnight Mass. I led a pre-midnight "vigil" service that ended with me standing in the nativity scene proclaiming the Prologue to John's Gospel, as the midnight hour sounded, whereupon the first Mass of the year 2000 began. 

During my decade as a parish priest in New York, I was frequently a guest at a very pleasant gathering at a parishioner's apartment on Central Park West, from whose balcony, we could watch the midnight fireworks in the sky and the midnight runners starting their ridiculous race in the park below. Living as I did within walking distance from Times Square, I also saw how that traditional event grew and grew, even as our post-9/11 security state mentality has deformed it and all such public gatherings beyond recognition.

Nowadays, I am more likely alone on New Year's Eve. Yes, I still stay up to see the ball, but then I quickly phone my family and then call it a night. I am now old enough to feel free to dispense myself from the obligation to have fun on New Year's Eve. Instead, it has become an occasion for quiet gratitude - that I have made it to another year and that the world has made it to another year - and to hope that both I and the world will make it to the next New Year's Eve not too much worse for wear.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Fast away the old year passes,
Fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!
Hail the new, ye lads and lasses!
Fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!

Technically, of course, 2020 will be the last year of the second decade of the 21st century. Even so, a common convention makes it the beginning of the new decade of the "20s," while the year that is now ending likewise marks the end of the decade of the "teens." Even Queen Elizabeth II, in her Christmas Broadcast the other day, followed that current convention. So I might as well too!

For me personally, this sort of works anyway, since 2010 was a decisive turning point for me, when I transitioned from seemingly somewhat permanent vicariousness to a pastorship. All three of my postings as a priest have been amazingly wonderful experiences, and each place and its people will always have a special place in my heart. But I have especially cherished these almost 10 years as a parish pastor - the people I have served and worked with, the experiences we have shared together, and the extra opportunities I have had to be more deeply involved in the larger life of the Church in this region. In effect, I have been challenged to live what priesthood is for and what ministry is about. And so I am grateful to those who have made this unique and blessed opportunity possible for me. On the other hand, with what the British call becoming "redundant" staring me in the face in the new decade, I may experience much more satisfaction in looking backward rather than forward!

The reverse may be true for the wider world, however. If this has been on balance a good decade for me personally, it has been dramatically less so for the wider world, which may have no alternative but to look ahead to the future with some guarded hope.  

Decades are an artificial kind of chronology, of course. For the world, I suppose this troubled "decade" actually began in 2008 with the financial crisis, which, on the one hand, exposed (as if there should ever have been any doubt) the moral defects of capitalism, and, on the other hand, began a prolonged period of heightened economic and social distress which has adversely impacted many Americans, many of whom have felt "left behind" as a result - a widespread experience that has had catastrophic political consequences. (The ongoing Democratic primary process will reveal whether the Democrats have come to understand the Trump is a consequence, not a cause, of our present predicament, and that returning to the status quo ante 2016 is not what most Americans appear to want - especially those already "left behind" well before 2016.)

That same year that gave us the financial crisis also saw the election of "Hope and Change" President Barack Obama, whose administration ended up producing much less change than it promised and inspiring a lot less hope than hype. Obama's single greatest accomplishment was, of course, the Affordable Care Act, which barely passed after a year of Democratic dithering that frittered away the opportunity to pass it before Senator Kennedy's death led to the Democrats' loss of his seat. Universal Health Care had been a Democratic aspiration for decades. The Affordable Care Act did not fulfill that aspiration, but it did bring the country a lot closer, for which the Obama Administration rightly deserves credit, even praise. The most successful part of the law, however, in terms of significant expansions of coverage, was probably the Medicaid expansion. So the moral of the story is that what the rest of Obamacare resisted - a single payer ("Medicare for all") model is ultimately the best way to go. Yet, given so many Americans' fetishistic devotion to private (employer-provided) health insurance, that option didn't have any serious chance of being enacted in 2010, even if Obama had had the courage to propose it. 

Obama's biggest problem, of course, came from the opposition party's fanatical opposition to him personally. At the time, I (like so many others) interpreted his election as  a gigantic leap away from our nation's lingering legacy of racism. Rather than that, however, the election of a non-white president proved to be an event of such traumatic dimensions for enough voters as to trigger an intense reaction, which in retrospect probably should have been predicted instead of appearing as something of a surprise. 

So, instead of heralding a gigantic leap away from our racist past, the Obama years exposed our lingering racist present. All that was needed to stir the toxic brew to  destructive intensity was a political charlatan to exploit it for his own advancement, which, of course, happened soon enough.

In addition to traditional American racism's revived visibility and virulence, other similar evils  - American nativism, religious bigotry, and anti-semitism have been on the rise. The latter has a history and constituencies all its own and is very visibly on the rise throughout the world on both the political right and the political left.

All this has occurred alongside another terribly destructive phenomenon - the virtual universalization of the internet, the ubiquity of smartphones, and the general calamity commonly called "social media," all of which has isolated individuals from traditional social connections, has fragmented our society into niches with separate realities with little or nothing shared or common, has vastly increased the long-standing American gullibility for conspiracy theories of all sorts, and has fostered foreign interference in American politics on an unprecedented scale. It has also enabled bigots to find like-minded haters and widely propagate their malicious messages without ever even having to stir from their homes

Meanwhile, the role played by traditional social institutions that used to occupy the cultural space between the isolated individual and the leviathan state (thus making the individual less isolated and the state less leviathan) has radically diminished. Churches, in particular, once so central in American society, have lost much of their significance - in part due to world-historical secularizing tendencies, but in large part due to Churches' own internal difficulties and to their problematic efforts at regaining political power.

The decade has also highlighted the differences between the two opposing sides in our political and cultural divide. The Right produced the Tea Party. It also engaged in political action to acquire and keep control of the levers of political power. The Left produced the Occupy movement and some impressive political marches and demonstrations - in other words lots of expressive, symbolic politics, but fewer votes that could actually change anything. For all that Russia and Comey may have contributed to Trump's election in 2016, it was the failure to get out the vote in certain places (and votes cast for frivolous third-party candidates) that helped decide the actual outcome. 

Generational differences and conflicts are hardly new, but they too may have been exacerbated in this decade by the unprecedented phenomenon of my "Baby Boomer" generation's longevity and consequent reluctance to move aside. The fact that the incumbent president and his three most prominent potential rivals are all septuagenarians is really rather remarkable (and should be remarked upon more). I am not an "ageist," and I do not advocate for compulsory retirement or any other age-related discrimination. Still, there is only so much one can accomplish in one's life, and learning to quit ought itself to be an important component of wholesome aging. And while I don't completely agree with the columnist who recently suggested that my Baby Boomer generation is leaving the world so much worse off than we found it, there is some sadly serious substance to that claim. Certainly there are many things that are much better today than 50, 60, or 70 years ago. But there are also many more things that are worse. In particular, regarding what may turn out to be the most decisive issue of our era, what we have done to damage the environment and our failure to arrest climate change, my "baby Boomer" generation is most definitely leaving a world which is much worse than world we inherited.

That is true in other areas as well. What we Baby Boomers can do to correct the world we have helped create is obviously limited. At least we can bear witness to the fact that there was once a time when we shared a common culture, when the institutions that mediated the space between the individual and the state (families, churches, schools, labor unions, civic organizations, etc.) were all a lot stronger, when income inequality was less, and when we (unlike the next generation) could realistically expect to live better off then our parents' generation. It may be difficult for those who are inheriting the world we are leaving behind even to imagine the world we had inherited; and, given contemporary ideological deformations in the understanding of fundamental human realities, what we have lost may be too hard for too many to appreciate adequately. But, if bearing such witness is all Baby Boomers can still do, we ought at least to be doing it.

As the last year of the second decade of the 21st century and the first year of the "20s," the year 2020 will inevitably be perceived as a liminal year, but it will be especially so because it will be an American Presidential Election year. As a consequence of the decade that is ending, one can confidently predict that the election will have at least one, rather sad, result. It will leave about half the country pleased but still very angry, and the other half just very angry! What a commentary on the decade that is ending - and on us who have lived it!

The Holy Family

The feast of the Holy family is a modern invention – much like the 19th and 20th century nuclear family it may seem to some to romanticize.

Families come in all kinds and shapes and sizes, and the forms family takes have evolved over time, and have evolved especially dramatically just in our own lifetimes. That said, everyone begins life, biologically at least, as a member of a family. And family life in some form has almost universally been the basic unit of social organization, and for most people the focus of their day-to-day lives. Even those of us without families of our own treasure our extended family connections and family-like connections.

One of the striking things about God’s relationship with the human race, as revealed in both the Old and the New Testaments, is how it is largely a series of family stories - beginning with the creation of a family, from whom the whole human race is descended. After several generations, during which things seem to go from bad to worse, God singles out one particular family to be his agent for renewing his promise to the entire human race. The rest of the Old Testament follows the story of God’s promises to Abraham’s and Sarah’s descendants, culminating in the New Testament in the homeless, refugee immigrant family, known to us today as “the Holy Family.”

We’re all familiar with countless artistic portrayals of the Holy Family. It’s safe to say there are more portraits of the Holy Family than of any ordinary family. And, of course, we have them here on display in the familiar Christmas scene. Such nativity scenes invite us to appreciate the circumstances of Christ’s birth, to consider the concrete reality of God becoming one of us, a human being like ourselves. “The nativity scene.”  Pope Francis has reminded us, “is like a living gospel rising up from the pages of sacred Scripture.”

Indeed! But, of course, nativity scenes are also somewhat artificial. The figures appear frozen in time. All the participants who came and went at different times in the actual story all appear together and seem stuck in one moment. And, of course, we have so sentimentalized the story that, even though we are staring at a less than optimal setting in which to give birth under obviously sub-standard conditions, we hardly think at all about that aspect of the story.

And yet, if we but read the Christmas story as told by Matthew and Luke – certainly if we do so without passing it though the filters of holiday sentimentality, if we read it as it was originally written to be read – then what do we find? A young unmarried girl is inexplicably pregnant. Her fiancé marries her anyway, based on a dream he had. She gives birth far from home, in a cave, with some animals for company and some strangers for visitors. In the ancient world – indeed for much of human history in most of the world – childbirth was a dangerous, life-threatening experience. Assuming mother and child both made it safely through that, there were further threats in the form of diseases that carried away both rich and poor. And, of course, most people were poor, and so everyone in a typical family – adults and children – lived close to the margin, often hungry or in danger of becoming so. 

And if you were poor – then as now - you were almost certainly also politically powerless, and that could pose problems too – as it definitely does for the Holy Family in today’s Gospel reading, which reminds us how, born in poverty far from home, Jesus’ very life was soon threatened by political violence and his family forced to seek asylum as political refugees. It should not challenge our imagination to picture the Holy family’s situation. Our contemporary world is full of political refugees. We think of the especially tragic situations in the Middle East and parts of Africa and all the people whom those conflicts have displaced, perhaps permanently. Meanwhile, right here in our own country, we also have immigrants who came here to escape political persecution or oppression. That’s what Jesus, Mary, and Joseph had to do, immigrating to Israel’s ancient enemy Egypt, to escape King Herod the Great’s “killing fields.” But, unlike our government, Egypt welcomed them. Nor did it forcibly separate the parents from their child, as our supposedly Christian country has done.

Many families – then as now – experienced similar problems. The Incarnation wasn’t some sentimental novel.  When for us and for our salvation he came down from heaven (as we say so routinely in the Creed), it was for real. God became one of us, part of our world, a member of a family, a family struggling to make ends meet from crisis to crisis.

I remember a friend of mine, talking to me about the challenges of being a parent, saying that he thought the fact that the human race has survived at all is itself a tribute to how families have struggled, stuck together, and pulled through.

Of course, the Holy Family had some special help – Joseph’s dreams, for example. But, if the Incarnation means that in the Holy Family God himself has experienced and identified himself with our lifelong stresses and insecurities, then the corollary also follows from that – that God is present with us too, to sustain us in our stresses and insecurities. And even without any special dreams, we do have God’s word directing us to stick together and support one another – in good times and bad. We have God’s word directing us to put on, as Paul says, heartfelt compassion, kindness humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another.

Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville TN, December 29, 2019.

Little Women (The Movie)

In October 2008, a group of us took a tour of certain sites in the Boston area associated with the early, pre-conversion life of Paulist Fathers' founder Isaac Hecker.  One such site was Fruitlands, a utopian transcendentalist community founded by Bronson Alcott and Charles lane, where Hecker, hoping for a more ascetic life than what he had experienced for several months at the transcendentalist community at Brook Farm, was very briefly a somewhat dissatisfied resident in 1844. While there, he met Bronson Alcott's young daughter Louisa May Alcott (photo), who later published an account of Fruitlands' somewhat less than successful story in Transcendental Wild Oats (1873). Louisa May Alcott, of course, grew up to write the perhaps also somewhat semi-autobiographical novel Little Women (1868-1869) about the four March sisters, that has since become an enduring American classic. It has seen seven film adaptations, as well as several made-for-TV versions. I first saw it in the 1933 movie version, which I saw on  our original black-and-white TV sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. 

Now, this much loved literary classic has been made into yet another movie, released appropriately on Christmas Day. The book famously begins with the lament that Christmas won't be Christmas without presents - a vacuum this book has well filled for 150 years. Now this beautiful and uplifting film may do the same for a new generation of audiences. 

Directed by Greta Gerwig, it stars Brooklyn's Saoirse Ronan as Jo, Harry Potter's Emma Watson as Meg, Florence Pugh as Amy, Eliza Scanlen as Beth, with Laura Dern as Marmee, Timothée Chalamet as Laurie, and  Meryl Streep as Aunt March. With a cast like that, who can complain?

Fresh and vibrant, this film is faithful enough to the Alcott's timeless story. It is a visually delightful evocation of that extremely familiar place and time in American history, with enough of a nod to contemporary preoccupations to please those seeking a more modern sensibility. 

Instead of leading us sequentially through the familiar story, the film follows its own chronology, constantly flashing back and forth between earlier and later events. I wonder whether someone unfamiliar with the story might find it challenging at times to keep up with where in the sequence the film actually is at any moment. On the other hand, for probably most of the audience, already familiar with the story and the development and fates of the various characters, this is likely not much of a problem and may in fact contribute to this adaptation's novelty and freshness.  

And, of course Jo does indeed find love in the end - and also gets her book published. So the two - at times seemingly competing - trajectories of her life both find fulfillment, as Alcott's readers and the movie's audience all would want!

Joy to the World

This past week, thinking about what I should say this Christmas, I reread all my homilies from my nine Knoxville Christmases past. One thing I noticed was that I have repeated myself quite a bit. No surprise, I suppose! How many new and different things can anyone say? And Christmas is, well, Christmas. We have been celebrating it for centuries. It is an old story. What new is there to be said?

That was the dilemma, sort of, in A Charlie Brown Christmas, which I am sure most of you have seen, probably more than once, since its debut in 1965.  There, when Christmas seemed to have lost a lot of its luster, it was precisely the retelling of the old story in its plainest simplest version - Luke’s story of the angel’s surprising message to the shepherds, the same story we just heard tonight - that seemed to say everything that needed to be said and so changed everything in the process.

Of course, people have been retelling - and adapting - the Christmas story for centuries in literature and, more recently, onscreen. I suppose hardly anyone in the English-speaking world hasn’t heard of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Some have even read it. Many more have seen some of the many movie and TV versions – classic Black & white to IMAX 3-D. Dickens was such a great fan of Christmas that he wrote several Christmas stories, in addition to the one about Scrooge. One of my favorites is The Seven Poor Travellers – about a Christmas Eve spent by the narrator with 6 others in a hostel for travelers. The story includes Dickens’ famous line: “Christmas comes but once a year, which is unhappily too true, for when it begins to stay with us the whole year round we shall make this earth a very different place.”

Making the earth a different place is something of a staple Christmas theme. After all, Christmas is, as Dickens also said: “a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time on the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.”

Of course, as we all also know, not everyone will have a place to go or will be getting gifts this Christmas. For some, this is a day to feel even more lonely or more poor than usual. We all know how difficult opening those “shut-up hearts” of ours can be at times. Hence the permanent appeal of every Christmas story that confirms for us the power of Christmas to do just that – whether for Ebenezer Scrooge in Victorian London, or for Mrs. Hamilton in 1940s New York in the Christmas movie The Bishop’s Wife, or for the Grinch in late 20th-century Whoville. In my own personal favorite Christmas movie, Miracle on 34th^h Street, Kris Kringle gets all sorts of different people to believe in him and be reconciled with one another – simply by doing the sorts of things all those other people had unfortunately become incapable of doing on their own.

Christmas – the Christmas that unites us here together in this church today – challenges us (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis) to believe that, in a world like ours, the Son of God became one of us – and then to imagine what must result!

Which brings us back to the shepherds!

In Christmas pageants, boys often compete to play Joseph or perhaps one of the kings. Not so many try out for the role of shepherd. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, it was Linus who was assigned that role.

Even in 1st-century Israel, shepherds didn’t merit much status either. As so often happens with low-status jobs that provide essential services (think of immigrant laborers today), the shepherds were under-appreciated, and they knew it. To top it off, they were probably pretty poor. The widespread tendency to admire the rich and despise the poor – what Adam Smith (1723-1790) called “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments” – was likely as universal then as it is now.

So it was probably a surprise to everyone (including the shepherds themselves) when the angel announced the birth of a savior who is Messiah and Lord - to them. To them, a multitude of the heavenly host proclaimed peace to those on whom God’s favor rests (the implication being that the shepherds themselves were now numbered among those so favored by God). For perhaps the first time, the shepherds experienced a free gift, rather than a commercial transaction. The gift was nothing less than what Saint Paul, writing to Titus, called the kindness and generous love of God our savior. The shepherds were being invited to experience God’s kindness and generous love themselves, and then to share it with others. And, just as surprisingly, that’s exactly what they did!

There must be something special about angelic messages that suggests urgency, something special about good news of great joy for all people that just takes hold of its hearers and makes them move! So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the infant lying in the manger. As Pope Francis recently remarked: “Unlike so many other people, busy about many things, the shepherds become the first to see the most essential thing of all: the gift of salvation.” [Admirabile Signum, 5]. In the 4th century, Saint Ambrose of Milan (340-397) famously called the shepherds’ arrival at the manger “the beginning of the infant Church.”

The Christmas story which we have heard so many times before and have just heard again tonight, begins by announcing who the Emperor was and what was going on in the world at the time. Saint Luke wants us to understand that the story he is telling really happened as part of the history of the world. Jesus was really born. God’s Son became Mary’s Son, a human being like us.

if Christmas had never happened, the whole history of the past 20 centuries would have been very, very different. And, even more important than that, we ourselves would be very different. As Saint Augustine (354-430) so succinctly expressed it: “If [God’s] Word had not become flesh and had not dwelt among us, we would have had to believe that there was no connection between God and humanity and we would have been in despair.”

But instead, because of Christmas, we do have an alternative to despair! Hence the angel’s reassuring words to the shepherds: Do not be afraid! We heard those same words this past Sunday, spoken by the angel to Joseph. We will hear them again at Easter, from the mouth of the Risen Lord himself, the same Risen Lord whom we encounter whenever we celebrate the Eucharist. “Laid in a manger,: Saint Augustine said, “he became our food.” [Sermon 189, 4]

Of course, all those people all really were afraid, and for good reasons. And for all our holiday cheer, so perhaps are we as well, in this truly turbulent time in our national life, in a country bitterly and angrily divided along ethnic, racial, educational, and geographical lines, at a time when anxiety rather than hope seems to be the dominant feeling for so much of today’s world, menaced as we are by our changing climate with its hotter-than-ever summers, melting Arctic ice, rising sea levels, bigger-than-ever hurricanes, widespread deforestation, and wildfires. It is in just such a world that we hear and celebrate this ancient, yet so contemporary-sounding story of the birth of a baby in poverty, far from home, his very life soon threatened by political violence, his family forced to seek asylum as political refugees.

It’s not for nothing that we pray every day at Mass that we may be safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Our distress is real enough, and our anxiety about it is honest, but so must be our hope - the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

That is why we celebrate Jesus’ birth not with a birthday cake but with the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of the Risen Christ. For this is not some nostalgic holiday pageant, and the baby whose birth we celebrate is not just some distantly ancient historical figure, but God-with-us!

How often have we all heard the saying – perhaps even quoted it ourselves – that so much of life is just showing up? That’s what God did for us on Christmas. He showed up in our world – in a somewhat out-of-the-way place under the less than optimal conditions that are so often experienced by immigrants, then as now, and with only some shepherds taking notice.

But he showed up! And he stayed! He stuck with us! He’s still showing up! He’s still sticking with us – here in his Church! And that in turn makes it possible for us – as his Church – to show up, without fear, to continue what he started, in our world today, this year, and every year.

We celebrate tonight what we profess every Sunday: that the Only begotten Son of God … for us and for our salvation came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man. This is the Christmas story. Tonight, we kneel when we say those words, to highlight the fact and solemnize what we celebrate, but we say those words all year round. The Christmas story is the Christian story – our story – all year round. It’s the story of God showing up and sticking around – to free us from fear, once and for all.

A Catholic church has graced the top of this hill now for 164 years. Back then, so I am told, the poor, unpopular immigrants who made up the Catholic community at the time would walk up this hill for Christmas morning Mass, penetrating the gloom of night and early morning with the light of their lanterns. That is what Christ’s coming does for our otherwise gloomy world, what Christmas calls each of us to do here and now. And so, having climbed this hill to this bright and beautiful church and here heard the familiar Christmas story, this story of God-with-us, we must make sure it really remains our story, challenging us, wherever we will be in Chistmases future. to be remade by it ourselves and so to reimagine our world – and so transform our fear into trust, our frustration into fulfillment, our sadness into joy, our despair into hope, our hatred into love, our loneliness into community, our divisions into unity, our rivals and competitors into brothers and sisters, and our inevitable death into eternal life.

Merry Christmas!

Homily for Christmas Midnight Mass, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, December 25, 2019.