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Homilies - Bishop Brendan Leahy

Christmas Eve 2022 Vigil Mass

Christmas Eve 2022 Vigil Mass

St. John’s Cathedral

 

Most people generally like Christmas with its lights and decorations, music and celebrations. People are making an effort to reach out. There’s a festive atmosphere. It’s a positive time in the middle of winter. Yes, it’s a time when we see something of the Light that shines in the darkness, as the First Reading puts it, which is what the Christmas story is all about. We cannot deny the darkness that strikes us in life, in the wars of our world, in the scandals of the Church. But today we remember that the Light is greater than the darkness.

 

God who is Light came down from heaven not only to tell us but to show us he loves us. That’s why we read the Gospel stories of the nativity at Christmas. When we visit the crib, we should let ourselves hear God say to us, “my son, my daughter, you are important to me; I am close to you. I am here with you”. And, then, as one writer has put it, let’s realise deeply that “if someone loves us, if God himself loves us, everything on this earth is easier for us, everything makes more sense: behind even the darker moments of our existence we can grasp the loving hand of God”.

 

I heard of a story recently of a man, let’s call him Michael, now getting on in years recalling his father telling him about their first Christmas Eve in 1947. Michael was then 3 months old and together with his parents they were in a refugee camp in Austria. They were on the run from the Communist regime in Yugoslavia. 

The English commander of the refugee camp called his father privately and told him: “Frank: I’ve orders to hand you over tonight, together with your wife and child, to the Communist Yugoslav secret police (they were allies of the English in the war against Nazism). You know what this means, Frank: it’s either death for you and your wife or jail for many years, and the child will be an orphan. These orders have been negotiated for political reasons between London and Moscow. But I’m not going to obey the orders. I’m going to accompany you secretly out of the camp (and, of course, in doing this the commander was risking his career and court martial for disobedience) and take you to the nearest train station, so you don’t freeze (it was an exceptionally cold winter in the snowy Austrian Alps) and then ... ‘may God be with you!’”

The Commander dropped this small vulnerable family off at a small train station; the waiting room had a minimum of heating. But, then his father saw a military-police patrol asking people for ID documents which he and his wife didn’t have. So Frank took his wife by the hand, and they almost ran out of the station. Outside the temperature was several degrees below zero. They hid in a corner half frozen. They had to exchange a golden necklace chain that the baby Michael’s mother was wearing—itself a gift from her mother—for a couple of litres of milk for their young three-month old son so he could survive one more day.

At that point in the pitch dark, Frank saw a lone sleigh coming down the icy street. The driver of the sleigh saw this young couple with a little child. He stopped and asked ‘What are you doing here? It's freezing cold!’ Frank told him what was going on. The farmer, without hesitation, said: ‘Get on the sleigh, I'll take you to my house in the country, 5 miles away.’

He gave them a room beside the stable with straw beds, and he quickly returned with some tea and cold potatoes (there was very little to eat in the immediate post-war period), and said: 'It's not much, I know, but really Happy Christmas from the bottom of my heart!

This was Michael’s parents' first Christmas in 1947 in exile—as migrants—and Michael’s own first Christmas in this world.

I think we can say that the two characters in this story, the English commander of the refugee camp and the Austrian farmer, embodied in their own way the Christmas spirit. It’s a story that lifts up our hearts.

But now, how about us in 2022...? Millions of people are living tragic situations, in some way similar to those of the story just told. We’ve all met them either personally in refugees coming to our land this year, or seen them on TV and social media images from the many wars going on around the world. So many children are suffering trauma, living as they are under the bombs, often having no food and having to flee their homes.

We’ve seen images not just from abroad but also of situations that exist in our own land. I was struck by what Peter McVerry said recently at a talk given in Mary Immaculate College here in Limerick. He said people have “lost their outrage” about homelessness, we’ve become desensitised to it and it has become “normalised” in this country which is one of the wealthiest countries of the world. He recalled how he gave a talk about eight years ago in which he said we were entering into a tsunami of homeless people, and the figure he mentioned was 5,000 and he was ridiculed. But when it did pass 5,000 it made all the news headlines, but then, a few years later it passed 10,000 and it got only a few little reports on the inside pages of newspapers. Now, it is a record 11,300 and it barely causes a ripple. “We have lost our sense of outrage” is how Peter McVerry puts it.

That’s true not only regarding homelessness and the plight of refugees. We all know of various forms of spiritual and psychological poverty that have hit all levels of our society and are manifest in increasing levels of loneliness and social isolation, emptiness in people’s lives, along with addiction and mental health issues, all of which can often be even worse than material poverty. We can be indifferent to these issues.

Going back to our main story, like the English commander and the Austrian farmer who embodied the Christmas message in their own way, let’s decide this Christmas in our hearts that as well as enjoying the beauty, music and glitter of this season, we’re going to see how we can help each other by loving and lending a helping hand... from the heart in the coming days, weeks and year. It might be remembering people more in our prayers or volunteering of supporting an organisation that assists those in need. We can make a difference even in small gestures, even if, at times, that’ll mean going against the tide. And, above all, let’s recognise we can do this together.

 

Yes, as the Second Reading this evening tells us, we are “to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of our great God and saviour Jesus Christ”. We can be the Christmas Good News for others helping them to believe that “if someone loves us, if God himself loves us, everything on this earth is easier for us, everything makes more sense: behind even the darker moments of our existence we can grasp the loving hand of God”.