Reflections during Christmastide

“Jesus stands at the door knocking (Rev. 3:20). In total reality, he comes in the form of the beggar, of the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you. That is the great seriousness and great blessedness of the Advent message. Christ is standing at the door; he lives in the form of a human being among us.” 

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is In the Manger

Viewed from a Christian perspective, Christmas in a prison cell can, of course, hardly be considered particularly problematic. Most likely many of those here in this building will celebrate a more meaningful and authentic Christmas than in places where it is celebrated in name only.

That misery, sorrow, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt mean something quite different in the eyes of God than according to human judgment; that God turns toward the very places from which humans turn away; that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn — a prisoner grasps this better than others, and for him this is truly good news.

And to the extent he believes it, he knows that he has been placed within the Christian community that goes beyond the scope of all spatial and temporal limits, and the prison walls lose their significance.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing to his parents on 17 December 1943 from Tegel Prison where he had been imprisoned for opposing the Nazi regime.

Christmas in a Cold Prison

This contemporary representation of the Holy Family is not beautiful, but it communicates something important that can be lost in beautiful, traditional Christmas images which risk leaving us in our complacency. Here, instead, we see with rare clarity the shocking nature of the Incarnation: the Most High God has come to dwell definitively in the gritty, squalid, splendid, worry-fraught, tragicomic thing we call humanity. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us; one of us, for us 

- Fr C McDonough OP