The one Christmas card that I am tempted to save each year comes to me with Merry Christmas punched in Braille under the usual greeting. It always takes me back to the time some years ago when on Christmas day I dropped in to visit a very special home. I wanted to see a little friend of mine named Pauline. Pauline was a blond, blue-eyed child of seven. The trouble was that Pauline was blind! That day she sang Christmas songs for me, and then she showed me her Christmas crib. It was uncanny to see the frail white wrist guided only by her sense of direction reach in and take out each figure without knocking the others down. “This is a wise man,” then, “this is an angel. See her wings?” I asked, “what are his hands doing, Pauline?” And she answered, “His hands are folded.” I thought that was pretty good for a child who had never seen folded hands and had not yet made her first holy communion.
After a while Pauline took my hand and led me over to her brilliant Christmas tree, which to her was just prickly branches in the dark, and she said in a low, pleading voice that I’ll never forget: “Fr. Kunkel, why can’t I see?” I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I do know that if the first surprise of Christmas is the place, a lowly stable, then the second big surprise is the very helplessness of its tiny guest! All around him the skies were exploding with glittering light and glorious music, but there he lies wrapped in swaddling bands, the boundless, infinite, Almighty God, who has become a tiny, tightly confined infant! The God from whose countenance flash the jagged, yellow lightings, now lies amid sticks of common, yellow straw! The Eternal God, the one absolutely permanent being around which all life revolves, is now born as a tiny wanderer by the wayside!
Perhaps the final big surprise of Christmas is the tiny statue of the Christ-Child in the manger. In all history there is nothing like this! Stroll through the capitals of great nations, saunter through the public squares of large cities, and you will undoubtedly come upon imposing monuments of outstanding people. But did you ever see anybody honored as a tiny infant? Did you ever see anybody celebrated for what he was the very day he was born? Only Christ merited this! In Eden we were made to the image and likeness of god. But in Bethlehem god was made to our image and likeness! I do know that in the intervening years Pauline has been a superb example to the countless people who have known her. And at this time of the year she always makes me think how many people with perfectly good eyesight never really see Christmas!
I guess the only real way to actually see Christmas is to come running down from the hills with the shepherds, swing around a sudden bend in the road, and burst into the cave! There, everything is fresh and new and startling! It is something that neither we nor anyone else has ever seen before, and it is almost enough to lift us out of our shoes!
The first surprise is the stable itself! To think that here lay the end of the trail: all the hopes of four thousand years of recorded history, all the centuries of waiting, watching, wondering, - to think it should all finally lead to this - to a straw-filled manger in a midnight cave at the end of a primitive road in the middle of nowhere! Does it not stop us in our tracks and make us want to rub our eyes? We know that God’s ways are not our ways, and that it is ridiculous to measure the Almighty by the yardstick of us puny human beings, and yet who would have ever dreamed that the prophetic star would have stopped above a lowly stable?
God could not make Himself greater to impress us, so he made himself smaller to attract us! Who could fear a little child? Who could help loving a helpless infant? Consequently, now, nobody has a valid reason for running away from God! The entire swing and spirit of Christmas is toward God! Come let us adore him, adore him as though we were the very first who ever knelt beside that incredible manger. Then, even at this late date, the light from the star will leap over the miles and brighten our lives. The song of the angels will ring down from the skies and hum in our hearts. The smile of the Child will look up from the crib and gladden our souls. For, we shall not be keeping Christmas as a remote memory or as a musty routine anniversary, but as a living, personal, meeting with the little newborn Christ!
And so my dear friends, my prayer and wish for each of you is one of peace and great gladness today! I am sure I speak for our entire staff and the other priests and deacons as well. We are all deeply grateful to each one of you for your warm friendship and loyalty to us and to St. Mary’s. It is our sincere wish that there will come to you and to your families a new warmth and love because you share with us the joy of this Christmas. May our hearts be filled with the very spirit of those carols once heard over Bethlehem in the Judean hills: “Glory to God in the highest . . . Now come - let us adore Him!”