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Connections&
December 15, 2002- Third Sunday of Advent
John was sent from God to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.
John 1:6-8,19-28
CHRISTMAS IN GRECCIO, 1223
Keeping Christ in Christmas amid the sometimes crass commercialism of the season is not a new challenge. In 1223, Francis of Assisi took up the challenge--and gave us a cherished tradition.
What Francis wanted to do was help people "see with our bodily eyes& what [Jesus] suffered for lack of the necessities of a newborn Babe and how he lay in a manger between an ox and an ass." So, with the help of his friend, landowner Giovanni Velita, Francis constructed a manger, filled it with hay, and brought in an ox and an ass from a local farm. Then Francis and his brothers extended an invitation to all the people of the town to come to the manger on Christmas Eve. Lights were kindled, songs and hymns were sung, and Mass was celebrated in the manger itself, with Francis singing the Gospel of Christ's birth. The saint then preached about the birth of the poor king, the Babe of Bethlehem. Simplicity was honored, poverty exalted, humility praised.
Contrary to popular belief, there was no statues of the Holy Family or shepherds or angels in the manger that night nor did Francis recruit, "live actors" to play any of those parts. Francis' ramshackle manger captured the simple poverty of the time and place in which God entered our human world.
Francis' biographer, Thomas of Celano, writes of that night: "Greccio was transformed into a second Bethlehem, and that wonderful night seemed like fullest day to both man and beast for the joy they felt at the renewing of the mystery."
CONNECTION: Both John at the Jordan River and Francis in his recreated manger proclaim the same joyful news of Christmas: God is with us. In our own individual Advents of poverty and despair, God is with us; in our struggle to find meaning and purpose in this life we have been given, God is with us; in the humility and humiliations we endure, in the messes we make of our lives and the messes others make of their lives that we have to clean up, God is with us. Advent faith calls us to an awareness that, despite the sufferings and difficulties of life, there is always healing; that despite our forgetting and abandoning God, God neither forgets nor abandons us; that despite the cross, there is the eternal hope of resurrection. ¦
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