We’re born to begin… Robots will never be capable of tenderness
A few Christmases ago, Pope Francis quoted a famous Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. She was once a disciple of another famous philosopher who said human beings are “hurled” onto death, simply destined to die. Hannah Arendt turned that around and said: “people, though they must die, are not born in order to die, but in order to begin”. We might add - -to begin a life that will last for ever.
Hannah had lived through the World War and saw the ruins of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, but she was able to point to the positive hope we can take from each child that is born. She said: “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of [children being born] nativity… It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us’”.
These are indeed great words of hope for in a year when we’ve been weighed down with the Coronavirus, fear of illness, uncertainty and death and now facing further restrictions. A child has been born to us. Hope blossoms again. We are celebrating a new beginning.
A child has been born unto us. Yes, Jesus came out of love to show us love. But where did Jesus, the Son of God come from? He came from heaven above. How far away is heaven? The nearest major galaxy to our galaxy, the Milky Way, is Andromeda Galaxy. And if we could travel at the speed of light—a very big, probably impossible if, it’d take us two and a half million light years to get there. Heaven is actually, in a way, further away because heaven is outside space and time.
And, yet, Jesus came from heaven. We should always be amazed at this. Much more amazed even than thinking about our galaxies.
Why did Jesus come from heaven? To show us what heaven is like, what love is, and save us from darkness and sin so that we can love and so generate heaven around us.
Yes, because if we believe and follow Jesus, he brings heaven around us and into our world.
Going back to Pope Francis, on one occasion, in speaking with some scientists about artificial intelligence and robots, he asked them, “But what will robots never be able to do?” They thought about it, they made suggestions, but in the end they were all in agreement about one thing: tenderness. Robots will never be capable of this. The tenderness of love, a love that doesn’t wait to be loved; a love that reaches out even to enemies, a love that forgives, a love that understands and empathises and a love that is practical, prompting us to roll up our sleeves and see how we can make a difference in the lives around us and in our world with its poverty and inequalities and divisions and indifference.
There is a great need of tenderness, of people who know how to dare to care by loving.
Just like Jesus in the crib. He is the God who dares to care. He is God humanised, so that our world can begin again to hope, to love, to live on earth as in heaven. As Pope Francis put it, God did not look down on us, from afar, He did not pass us by, He was not repulsed by our poverty, He did not clothe Himself only superficially in a body, but rather He fully assumed our nature and our human condition. He knows our situation. He feels it. But what he says to us is: I am with you; I will help you; with you I can bring heaven on earth again.
Emily Dickinson had a lovely line in one of her Poems: “God’s residence is next to mine, his furniture is love”.
At Christmas, in a year when we have rediscovered the value of family, nature, and opened our eyes to workers who we often take for granted, let’s decide that in the one life we’ve got, we will try to bring heaven on earth by letting Jesus who brings heaven among us be more present among us through our tender loving care.