December 18, 2009
Christmas 1993: A special feeling of peace
By IRENE EVANS (St. Matthew Church, Mount Vernon | Holy Angels Church, New Harmony)
In 1993 my husband and I were living in a little town in West Virginia, and I wasn’t feeling very Christmas-y. I was beginning to really study and learn more about my faith, and I had just learned that some of the things I was taught as a child weren’t the whole truth. In 1993, there was a lot of attention being paid in the media to questions about the historical Jesus. The Jesus Seminar had just come out with their new translation of the gospels, and they had used colored beads to “vote” on which things Jesus really said or did and which things he probably didn’t say or do. I had spent most of that year reading volume one of John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. It was a really good book and I learned a lot, but I was especially distressed when I read that Matthew and Luke’s gospels have different — and sometimes irreconcilable — details about Jesus’ birth. According to what I read, the historical records show there was no census when Quirinius was governor of Syria, Matthew and Luke have different genealogies, and there is no historical evidence that Herod ordered a massacre in Bethlehem. I just didn’t know what to believe.
So on Christmas Eve my husband and I were at Mass in our little Catholic church in Lubeck, W. Va. It was a nice country church, with plain glass windows behind the altar. I remember one time the priest had to pause during the Mass because deer wandered up to the window and everyone was looking out at the beautiful hills, the sun shining on the fall leaves, and the deer. So on Christmas Eve in 1993, I happened to be sitting right near the manger scene, which was nothing fancy — a home made stable with some statues with the paint peeling off. As I was mumbling the words of the Creed, “For us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man,” I suddenly realized — what mattered was not so much the details of the nativity story but the underlying truth that Jesus came down from heaven and became man! Why? So that he could be with us and teach us about his Father and then die on the cross for our salvation. And I started thinking that the apostles were so lucky because they could talk to him and touch him and be with him — it was probably easy for them to have faith, I thought. And suddenly I realized that we have that same gift — we can be with Jesus and touch him and talk to him every time we receive Holy Communion!
And now every Christmas I remember the special feeling of peace I had that year looking at the manger scene.