OH! WONDROUS NIGHT!

Oh! Wondrous Night! In fact it was rather a miserable evening -cold and gloomy. It was getting dark as the winter night drew in. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away. People were hectically doing their Christmas shopping. But we all longed to get back to the warmth of our homes and a hot cup of tea. I certainly did.

So I took a short cut across Town Hall Square. There the trees and buildings were festooned with bright fairy-lights. Around the square were large, colourful tableaux of scenes from Alice in Wonderland –with the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and the Lobster's Quadrille. Some characters, such as the White Rabbit, moved. Humpty Dumpty was forever having a fall. Parents with their young children gazed in awe at this wondrous fantasy world –a world which had fascinated me when I was a child. It still does.

As I moved on from this wonderland, with its Mad Tea- Party, I came to another tableau. This was inside a kind of garden shed. A young mother with her child in her arms gazed intently through its large window. As I silently stood alongside them I heard the mother gently answering her child’s many questions. Who was the baby, lying in the hay? Why wasn’t he in his own bed in a proper home? Who were his mummy and daddy? Why were people kneeling on the ground, and who were they? And what were all those animals doing in his bedroom –the lambs, the cow and the donkey?

The child was fascinated by the scene. And it was so beautiful to hear his mother explaining the wonder of the babe born at Bethlehem. Her simple answers, adapted to the understanding of her child, touched my heart and refreshed my faith in what had become so familiar, so much a part of me over the decades.

And each year I witness a similar scene at the crib in Holy Cross, Leicester -the above photograph. I’m sure this sacred wonderland is repeated at every crib around the world. Mothers the world over use the crib tableau to explain the wonder of the Son of God joining the human race, becoming one of us.

Children –and adults –around the world and throughout the centuries have asked the question, “Why?” After all the many learned attempts to provide an answer there’s only one that really matters. God loves each of us so much that He wants to share our human life so that we can share His divine life of love. God’s love for us; our responding by loving Him –that’s what Christmas is all about.

As I contemplate the crib I thank God for inspiring St. Francis of Assisi to provide the visual-aid of the crib. Generations of people of diverse nations and cultures have delighted in it and learnt from it. The sight of the crib instantly touches the minds and hearts of young and old alike. Our imaginations are fired by the beautiful simplicity of the Son of God being born in a stable at Bethlehem long ago. As people of every race reflect on the babe in the manger they realise that Almighty God has become one of us, one of them. That’s why the baby Jesus is shown as being Chinese, Indian, African or European.

The stories about Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are, indeed, beautiful. And so were the tableaux they inspired in our Town Hall Square. But these belong to the world of fantasy. Not so, the birth of Jesus and the cribs inspired by God’s earth-shattering entry into human history. That’s solid fact. That’s no myth, no flight of an author’s fantasy.

What happened at Bethlehem long ago has changed the whole course of history, the whole destiny of mankind. No wonder the ascetic St. John of the Cross danced for joy with the crib figure of the baby Jesus held lovingly in his arms.

But after all the explanations, both simple and learned, we are reduced to silent wonder. Let us fall on our knees like the shepherds and Magi in the crib. Come, let us adore the babe born at Bethlehem. He is our God; He is our saviour. And that’s no fairy story!

Isidore O.P.

In a fortnight Fr. Peter will reflect on "More than a 1,000 Words"