SEARCHING FOR BETHLEHEM IN THE SOUL
Almost everything about Christmas, from its deep real meaning to the piety and even (ironically) the commercialism we surround it with, invites us to be that third child.
But that’s not easy. To be an adult is precisely to be experienced, complex, wounded. To be an adult is to have lost one’s innocence. None of us, unless we die very young, carries the dignity of our person and of our baptism unstained through life.
We fall, we compromise, we sin, we get hurt, we hurt others, and mostly we grow ever more pathologically complex, with layer after layer of emotional and intellectual complexity separating us from the little child who once waited for Christmas in innocence and joyful anticipation. And that can be painful.
Sometimes, if we’re sensitive, the innocence of children can be like the stab of knife to the soul, making us feel as if we’ve fallen from ourselves. But, in the end, that’s an unhealthy over-idealization. We’re not meant to be children forever and innocence will always be lost.
Sometimes, more positively, we get to experience our old innocence and youthful wonder vicariously in the eyes of our own children, in their joyful anticipation and gleeful celebration of Christmas. Their belief in Santa and the wonder in their eyes as they look at the baby-Jesus in the crib help us find a certain softness inside again; not at the same place where we once felt things when we were children and still believed in Santa (because that would only bring the painful stab of nostalgia) but at a new place, a place beyond where we defined ourselves as grown-up (because that’s the place where wisdom is born).
That’s also the place where Jesus is born. That’s Bethlehem in the soul.
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