Reading Francis

I don’t like big crowds.

In big crowds, people are annoying, self-absorbed, and pushy. And by “people,” of course, I mean me. I am at my worst in the midst of a big mass of disorganized humanity. Happy holidays.

Recently, I had a chance to step outside of such a crowd. I was waiting for someone, so I grabbed a seat outside the flow of the crowd and just people-watched. From that vantage point, they weren’t so much a mass of humanity as a constellation of individuals with their own stories and challenges and beauty. It reminded me almost immediately of Thomas Merton’s mystical moment at 4th and Walnut Street in Louisville, as relayed in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . . 

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.

The people in Merton’s Louisville, and the people in the crowd I was watching, were both, in the end, just people. Some were kinder than others, some more successful than others. There were probably some really saintly people there, and probably some really dysfunctional jerks. But mostly, they were just people.

So do I see them as problematic nuisances, annoying, self-absorbed and pushy? Or so I see them walking around shining like the sun?

I think one of the challenges of Catholic Christianity is its tendency to answer either/or questions with both/and answers. Most of us, most of the time, lean toward either/or, because both/and is hard to hold on to.

Christmas is like crowds that way. 

On the one hand, Christmas seems to be the one Christian thing that has survived the secularization of society. No matter what your religious beliefs, it sometimes seems, there is an underlying affinity to the winter celebration that highlights the kindness within us and love between us, even if the details are fuzzy or even non-existent about why we’re celebrating this good feeling together now. In America, at least, Christmas seems to serve as a generic celebration of goodness. (Even if it’s also an excuse for unrestrained avarice and big crowds.)

On the other hand, the secularized version of Christmas, in the interest of inclusion, boils out the whole point of the thing. A Christmas that centers around Santa and trees and elves, either on shelves or played by Will Ferrell, are not at all a festival to honor the birth of Jesus, who Christians believe was God coming among us as a fellow human.

So is the Mariah Carey version of Christmas an abomination? Or is it just an extension of the true heart of Christmas in a more broadly accessible format?

How you answer that might be a reflection of my crowds dilemma, because they are both an extension of the split between “the world is going to hell in a handbasket” and “love is all around us, if you have eyes to see it.” But I think Christmas, perhaps uniquely, underscores that the right answer is both/and.

For those unfamiliar, Christmas is the celebration that God is so crazy-in-love with us humans that He became one of us, to be close to us and help us better recognize that we were made to love God and each other. Merton’s revelation at the corner of 4th and Walnut that everyone around him was “shining like the sun” points to the innate loveliness with which we were all created, and which the broader version of Christmas helps celebrate and animate. The fact that God comes not only to be with us, but to help us find our way, points to the glaring need we all have to get out of our self-absorbed (and pushy) way so that we can embrace that better path. Christmas celebrates both that God loves us enough to meet us where we are and that God loves us enough not to leave us there.

Most of us, I suspect, most of the time, lean more on one of those points than the other. In this season of Advent, waiting for Christmas, maybe we have a new opportunity to step outside of the crowd, grab a seat, and reflect on both our tendency to push and shove and the secret beauty of our hearts that sometimes God alone can see.