the growing number of homeless. Tents align in orderly rows or are scat- tered helter-skelter across lines of battle in far-off desert places. Soldiers catch their Christmas Eve winks at the steering wheels of Humvees. Other warriors go sleepless the holy night long as they pilot patrolling warplanes miles above earth and thousands of miles from our candlelit sanctuaries.
GETTY IMAGES/BEN BLOOM
ourselves unsettled this Christmastide—on the move from one place in life to another—God has pitched a tent and set up camp. Not content to be a “god above” in a lofty heavenly mansion, the God who gave us Christmas biv- ouacs in earth’s lowest places.
We are a people on the move On the fringes of every major city in Latin America, God’s beloved “marginalized” seek their rest in crude shacks hurriedly built of plywood or cardboard. These vias miserias (miserable ways), as they are called, are the only homes that millions among our human family will ever know. By the tens of thousands, other sisters and brothers in the human family inhabit filthy tents in crowded refu- gee camps. Teeming masses spend their nights shivering in shabby migrant worker quarters.
Surely our God weeps over such conditions, recalling that the beloved Son was born in a similar sort of hovel. Even here in what we still call a first world nation, with unemployment at record highs, many homeowners have been forced to abandon cherished dwellings and move into temporary quarters. Others with even worse fortune find themselves literally living in tents, crates or boxes, underneath freeways and in other places called home by
Down a thousand hospital corridors in every nation on earth, deathly sick and dying ones gasp for breath beneath oxy- gen tents. On a thousand windswept hill- sides, tents are pitched over open grave sites awaiting caskets that will be deliv- ered by slow-moving somber hearses. Those in the passing funeral processions find no merriness this holiday season. The grieving mourners face a new year they can’t imagine being a happy one. On some level or another, as we contemplate our human condition this Christmastide, surely we grasp the sheer reality that “here we have no lasting city” (Hebrews 13:14). In the end, we are all tent-dwellers.
The ‘Christ-mass’ table
But the wonder of Christmas is that into the midst of all these tent villages filled with suffering sarx-bound sojourners marches once again the Jesus parade. The great God of compassion-beyond-imagining claims every contested territory and makes it holy in the holiday season. Once again, as occurred that first Christmas so far and so long ago, God pitches a tent in our midst. The Lord is come. The Holy One sets up camp, and all is suddenly, shockingly transformed. Simple shep- herds break into song. Angel choirs sound forth, and their voices sound a lot like ours.
In silent sanctuaries, from behind flickering candle flames, we sing softly those old familiar strains known by heart: “Silent night, holy night ….” Through hazy clouds of candle smoke or incense we strain our eyes peering for- ward. We behold it dimly at first, and then more clearly: on an altar up front a tent is pitched. Words break the silence and shatter all sadness. A manger becomes a cross becomes a holy table of grace. “This bread—my body; this cup—my blood.” God presses the flesh—yours and mine—all the way into and unto eternity. Alleluia and amen! M
December 2011 15
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