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Reflections on Christmas and the Feast of the Holy Family

By Donna Brett


The readings for Christmas (Mass at midnight):

Isaiah 9:1-6

Titus 2:11-14

Luke 2:1-14

The readings for Sunday, the Feast of the Holy Family:

Sirach 3:2-6,12-14

Colossians 3:12-21 or 3:12-17

Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

As I reflected on the readings for Christmas Day and the Feast of the Holy Family (Dec. 26), I found myself relating the story of Jesus' birth into a humble, struggling family to two, more modern, stories.

One is a treasured favorite, Dickens' A Christmas Carol. A Unitarian minister once told me he reads this classic every Advent, so three years ago I too began this practice. For me, the most dramatic passage is when the Spirit of Christmas Present introduces old Scrooge to two wretched, scrawny waifs clawing at his robes--a boy named Ignorance and a girl named Want. Scrooge is both terrified and touched by their gaunt, wolfish appearance and demands of the Spirit: "Is there no refuge for such as these?" The Spirit replies, mocking Scrooge's own words from the past: "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" Thus a tight-fisted workaholic learns overnight to embrace the poor and struggling victims of the heartless Industrial Revolution.

The second book is one I almost put away to read after Christmas because it was so troubling and on the surface so unrelated to this joyous season. In Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, a journalist, tells the stories of several young people who come of age during the nineties in a poverty-ridden, drug-infested neighborhood in the Bronx. One single mother, Coco, by the age of 21, is raising four children, one of whom is afflicted with respiratory problems so severe that continual use of a portable oxygen tank is required. Yet Coco is a ray of hope among the hopeless. She can barely keep her family together, but whenever she comes into a little extra money, her generosity gets the better of her and compels her to buy food and little gifts for as many as she can of those she sees in need around her.

Both of these books have brought home to me the true meaning of a savior coming for all ages and all peoples to be light shining in our darkness. The significance of his birth being proclaimed to shepherds who slept in the fields with their sheep is that he came especially to give hope to the poorest and most vulnerable among us. For me to put aside Random Family because it was not "appropriate" Advent reading would have been to try to escape, as Scrooge once did, from confronting the terrible social challenges of my time. The Scripture readings of this week call out to us to be as flagrantly generous to those in need as Scrooge was after his encounters with the ghosts and for us to be, like Coco, a beacon of hope in a dark tenement building.