Some journeys can't wait even if one is uncertain and insecure of the destination.
SAJI P MATHEW OFM
God has become human. Yes. God is on the side of humans. God and humanity coexist in the same place, in the same body. It is going to challenge the theist and
the humanist alike. No night has been so life-changing as this night. No birth has ever challenged humanity to this degree as this birth. No child has mesmerised and attracted the world for varied reasons as much as this child. Humans fall in love with this child at the very first sight of it. People are infatuated with its sweetness and warmth. It is nice to be around a child who makes no demands.
In the fullness of time Jesus grows up, his uncompromising humanity grows up, and
the challenge begins; contrary to people’s expectations the adult Jesus goes to their worship places, Jesus meets them in their tax-collecting offices and on their busy streets, Jesus visits their homes, and he asks them the primordial question, ‘Where is your brother? Where is your sister?’ And people fall out of infatuation. Christ-birth is a gift to all; but growing up with him is a choice each one makes.
Religion is not just the feel-good-factor of the celebration of a divine child’s birth; on the contrary, religion is allowing the child to grow up as human and stand face to face. Richard Rohr categorically proposes that people do the Gospel no favour when they make Jesus, God, into a perpetual baby, who asks little or no adult response from them. What kind of a mind and establishment would want to keep Jesus a baby? Maybe only one that is content with ‘baby Christianity’. Any spirituality that makes too much of the baby Jesus is perhaps not yet ready for prime-time life.
Leaving Is More Critical than Reaching
Some journeys can’t wait even if one is uncertain and insecure of the destination. Falling for the illusion of stability, security, and power, even at the cost of one’s life and becoming, is an adult sentiment. It could be attributed to the fear of uncertainties that lie beyond. Thus more
and more adults are reducing everything, even God and religion, to their convenience and advantage; and worse still, they are esteemed for the same. They decide the creed and devotional practices of institutional religions. They control the classrooms, newsrooms and courtrooms of a land. They sway the destiny of a nation.
Isn’t it time to depart? I am not sure what
is on the other side of an infantile religion and god-image. By departing from it would we run into the danger of reaching a faithless barren land? Or is the other side a river on which we travel uncertain and undefined yet meaningful? One thing is sure that we must depart, and embrace a prime-time life, a more serious life!
We Make the Road by Walking
Roads are the future. More roads connecting more people are the future. How do new roads happen? How do we make new roads? The title of the book that records the conversation on education and social change between Myles Horton and Paulo Freire gives the answer: ‘We Make the Road by Walking’. Christmas is not just about who came to the manger, but who decided to walk away from the manger. The legend of the three kings who came to the manger to pay homage to the child Jesus ended pointedly, saying, they walked back to their country on another road, meaning a newly-found road. I would imagine that they fashioned a new road by where they chose to walk then on.
A 20th century Swiss psychologist, Karl Gustav Jung, states that the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insolvable. They cannot be solved. They are only outgrown. The outgrowing needs a new level of consciousness, walking on to a new terrain. We cannot solve a problem at the same level of consciousness at which it was created. Moving to the next level of consciousness
is outgrowing. It is an inner, spiritual, and psychological walking. Many great problems at various stages in life are complex. However deep we get muddled in it, the problem remains. The solution is in raising one’s awareness.
With the new awareness and consciousness
we outgrow the problem itself. Christmas story is all about walking into a new awareness and consciousness. In the story of the birth of Jesus, Joseph, husband of Mary had a huge problem. Mary, his betrothed, was with child without him knowing it. He was caught in between—put her into public shame or divorce her quietly? God in a dream challenges Joseph to another level of awareness and consciousness. Joseph outgrew a problem that had no easy solution. Christmas shifts our focus from arguing, solving, and establishing to moving, walking, changing, and growing.
Poets and artists have romanticised the manger where Jesus was born, but amusingly Jesus never cared to return back to it. He is someone who believed in walking, going forth. Jesus was never for tall and rich establishments, reaching to the ends of the earth. Remain established long enough in a place, all sorts of forests grow around you, and you are lost in it. Just to imitate the words and rhyme of Robert Frost, cradles are lovely bright and shallow; but we have places to leave; roads to walk before we sleep; roads to make before we sleep.
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