The Last Day of Christmas

When I heard Fr. Vernon Myer, formerly a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, do a devotional class in Advent, I remember him talking about the shift from the use of purple to blue as the Church's liturgical color. Not just any blue, but the darkest blue. He said it was the blue of the sky right before twilight begins - before a perceptible hint of dawn appears.

Living in Phoenix for as many years as I did, I don't think I had as much of an appreciation of all of the (convenient?) theological symbolism that can be drawn from the Feast of the Incarnation being celebrated right around the time of the solstice. Now, though, I can understand the Pagan spirituality that commemorates the movement of the seasons and celebrates this inching from the gloom and dark to warmth and light.

Just about all of our Christian observances have at least some root in Earth-centric traditions of one kind or another, but I don't see this as a problem for my faith. At the same time, I know this is a stumbling block to those of deep faith and those of no faith. I was reminded of this by a non-Christian friend who asked this past week, "Wasn't Jesus born in the spring or summer time? That's what I heard."

I don't even know what Jesus actual birth looked like, what town it happened in, and what, if anything, was outwardly special about it at that moment. I'm not sure it matters, though, because God "pitching his tent and staying with us awhile", as I heard one person put it, was the key moment in history, and certainly worthy of angels' song and astrologers' visit.

The story is beautiful, and the story is important because it is the story of our spiritual ancestors who believed then as we do now - that when we see Jesus, we are seeing God - albeit in some ultimately unfathomable way.

I think that we are also following in the faith of our spiritual ancestors when we allow ourselves to see Jesus as someone who actively calls out the injustice that he sees - injustice towards the sick, the poor, the "sinners", the foreigners, the "unclean".

On this Last Day of Christmas, I wonder what Mary and Joseph thought of Jesus a few days after he was born, when all of the craziness of actually bringing a new life into the world had faded, and they had time to think about who this child would become. I don't find myself wondering, as the singer of a popular Christian song does, if the "baby boy would one day walk on water".

Instead, I wonder if Mary and Joseph sensed the miracle of their baby boy who would one day speak of the blessedness of the poor, and of the sin of oppressive systems and unjust power. I wonder if they knew, on some level, that he'd end up dead because of it.

Putting aside the angels, the shepherds, the wise men, and all the rest, as beautiful and meaningful as they are and as their story is, even in the probable everydayness of that birth, I still think Jesus' Holy Family had some sense of who Jesus would become. Down inside themselves, they knew that this was no ordinary event, even if it may have appeared outwardly so.

Maybe that feeling they had is something like the sense of wonder, song, and light I feel today, on this Last Day of Christmas. I think it's the same feeling our fore-parents had, and the reason why they have told the stories and sung the carols ever since on each of these Twelve Days.

They did, and I still do. I hope you do also.

Merry Christmas everybody.