The Gospel of John sums up my Christmas joy: the Word became flesh and set up camp with us. The Incarnation. An affirmation of flesh and blood, time and space. Teilhard de Chardin’s Divine Milieu, for me, is a Christmas book.

My childhood Christmas memories are also joyful. I remember my mother bringing out decorations, including a ceramic snowman that I still unpack on Christmas Eve. I remember breathing on the windows at night with my brother, watching ice crystals form on the glass as snowflakes drifted down outside. Lying under the Christmas tree with him, dazzled by the lights, ornaments, and tinsel. Smelling the outdoor evergreen aroma indoors.

Christmas Eve was Mom’s side of the family, which included three cousins: one in his army uniform, one on his way to college, and one with whom I “Indian wrestled” and lit firecrackers on the Fourth of July.

Christmas Day was quieter, at my father’s parents’ home. We had just one cousin there. The magical tree ornaments bubbled and after my grandmother practically force-fed us turkey and dumplings, my brother and I collapsed into semi-conscious contentment, hypnotized by a small carousel with brass angels suspended from a propeller-like canopy driven around its center by the heat of candles. Tiny brass bars dangled under the circling cherubs and struck two little chimes.

Courageous Christian disciples who resisted war and bigotry often ended up in jail while many denominations “remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows,” as Dr. King declared from Birmingham jail.

Then came October 2023 and the ensuing genocide in Jesus’ neighborhood.

Now I see more clearly that Advent isn’t a season that ends with the joy of Christmas. Year round we wait in grief-stricken hope for the coming of peace, justice, healing and the thriving Jesus introduced. And I see how birth today in Bethlehem or Chicago can be like Jesus’ birth: with inadequate housing, under the fear of violence, the threat of hunger, exposure, and the need to flee to safety.

A recent Sojourners article by John and Samuel Munayer describes Advent in Palestine today. It is “not a season of joy.” It is “lived in the shadow of genocide, walls, checkpoints, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and fear.” The slaughter of innocents. Like Palestine in Herod’s day.

For Palestinians, Christmas isn’t about parties and shopping. It is a feast for the oppressed, “for those who know exile and the bitterness of hunger.” It celebrates God’s solidarity with them through a child born under the rule of an empire’s ruthless puppet.

The Munayers reminded me of Rev. Munther Isaac’s Christmas homily in 2023, just weeks after the October 7 eruption. Already the IDF had killed twenty thousand Palestinians, nearly half of them children. (Today the toll is over seventy thousand.) Isaac asked then if the West Bank would share Gaza’s fate. The IDF has killed more than two hundred Palestinians in the West Bank this year, with over sixteen hundred settler attacks on more than 260 communities.

In the midst of grief and outrage, Isaac declared that “we have searched for God, and found him under the rubble in Gaza.” We find Jesus “in a cave, with a simple family. Vulnerable. Barely, and miraculously surviving a massacre. Among a refugee family.” Having returned from a recent trip to the United States, he noted that “They send us bombs while celebrating Christmas. … They sing about the prince of peace in their land, while playing the drum of war in our land.”

Now we grieve the massacre at Bondi Beach in Australia, where two shooters killed sixteen Jewish people celebrating Hanukkah on December 16.

The Munayers note that Jesus was born in a food trough, lying there like grain to feed animals. And he ends his brief life as bread, proclaiming “take this all of you and eat of it. For this is my Body, given up for you.”  This is good news for the hungry, whether starved for food, starved for justice, or both. His friends had seen that he always provided more than enough for everyone. He didn’t just help them survive. He empowered them to thrive. But it is bad news for us who send the bombs and those who prevent food and medicine from arriving, even during a cease fire and winter floods.

So now what? Just forget it already, raise a glass, and have ourselves a merry little Christmas?

So much for merriment. But isn’t there something deeper than merriment? What about the sheer awe, the soul-shaking wonder of life shattering death, of love and healing erupting in the darkest, loneliest, grief-stricken hearts? The shock that this beautiful young friend wants to live in us and go on breaking down walls and feeding the hungry and setting prisoners free? That this same unbreakable vitality animates us?

Beauty is not just pretty. It isn’t kitsch. We may see it in a red maple leaf or starlight or a sculpture, hear it in the loon’s or coyote’s cry, smell it when the acacias blossom or bread bakes, taste it in wine, touch it in an embrace.  It doesn’t so much please or entertain us as take us out of ourselves.

Maybe one of the best demonstrations of beauty is kindness. As Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us,

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

And as Jesuit theologian Leo O’Donovan insists, we also see beauty “in protest against violence, in fury at injustice, in conscientious objection.”

Maybe in my early years of frosted windows and dumplings, life first fed me something, some beauty, Someone unconditioned. Someone who cannot be negated by darkness because that same Someone plunges into the darkness and rubble with us. Inhabits it. Maybe those years beside the lake, listening to loons, skating in the moonlight, or perched on a mountainside during a thunderstorm or having my heart broken by a community’s dissolution planted a kind of madness.

My Carmelite teacher, William McNamara, used to say that God is more you than you are, more me than I am, closer to us than we are to ourselves. True. So, horrifying as it is that Palestinian parents gather their children’s scattered limbs, they are also gathering the Body of Christ, who will not be extinguished. You may have heard the saying, “They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.”

This is my Advent-Christmas madness and joy: that the little child born in a food trough and quickly crushed by an empire is more alive and closer than ever, minute by minute rankling the mighty, threatening us and our shabby heartless empires with joyous, delicious liberation.

“Christ in the Rubble” icon by Kelly Latimore.