Seek and You Will Find “The Great Joy”!

This painting is by Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. If you know his paintings, you also know they are most always teeming with abundant life. Everyone is busy, tending to chores, to animals, to each other. Men and women in this painting are toiling or transacting or talking or taking time for skating, sledding, skiing, always busy, so very busy with ordinary life.

In fact, you may find yourself so caught up in the busyness of the picture as you let your eye revel in the colors, the figures, the charms that you may miss the small figure on a donkey led by a man through the town. They are the same size and their clothes the same hues as the rest of the peasants. They are unremarkable – unless you look closely and remember.

The editors of Commonweal in their holiday issue reminded us to do just that: Remember and make room for the good news, ‘The Great Joy’, that will, in all the chaos and busyness of our lives, still come if we look closely enough. Like Mary and Joseph, it is moving amidst our lives even now.

The Commonweal writers cited a 1966 essay titled “The Time of the End Is the Time of New Room,” in which “Thomas Merton reflects on a single detail in Luke’s infancy narrative: Mary gives birth to Jesus and lays him in a manger because ‘there was no room for them at the inn’. Packed with travelers rushing to register for the Roman census, the inn in Merton’s telling becomes a mirror image of modern mass society, where “each new announcement is the greatest announcement, where every day’s disaster is beyond compare.’ Such a world, awash in distraction, cannot help failing to notice Christ’s nativity: ‘There is so much news that there is no room left for the true tidings, the ‘Good News’, ‘The Great Joy’.”

The editors’ piece also reminded us that the pope chose to commence a synod now and invited all the people to participate now even though we are currently mired in a pandemic. The writers tell us the Pope is saying, “this is not the time to turn inward or surrender to our fears.”

They elaborate further: “The trials many people in America and around the world are suffering are real, and they should not be minimized. As Pope Francis noted in his global prayer intentions for November, what those in pain need from us is neither judgment nor false optimism, but a listening ear and expanded access to care. There will always be bad news. But it need not overwhelm or deter us. As Christians, we’re supposed to see things differently. Merton said it well: it’s into this grim, broken world, ‘this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, that Christ comes unbidden.’ We just need to be ready to recognize and welcome him.” 

As we champion so many good and wonderful causes, as we send out our calls for inclusion and full participation of all people in all matters secular and, especially, spiritual, we can also look closely and remember there will always be room for ‘The Great Joy’ and the Good News that sustains us.

I wish you a joyous Christmas season.