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Reflection for January 7, 2007

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We are well familiar with the Christmas stories of St. Matthew and St. Luke. And on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day it's especially St. Luke's story of Bethlehem and the manger and angels announcing glad tidings that we hear. And glad tidings it should be, because Luke tells us that the very Maker of our universe has been wonderfully born among us; has taken on a family relationship and resemblance to us that he might raise us to a family relationship and resemblance to himself in the bosom of the Holy Trinity. So joy and congratulations and gift giving and tinsel and ornaments and carols are quite the proper way to celebrate.

But besides Matthew and Luke there is another New Testament description of the birth of Christ that we seem to avoid during the Christmas season - and that's the account to be found in the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation. There in chapter 12 we see a birth taking place in the sky. We see a woman robed with the sun, wearing a crown of twelve stars. We see her "in the anguish of labor" crying out. And she's not crying out solely because of labor pains, for opposite her there breathes "a great red Dragon with seven heads and ten horns" whose tail gathers up a third of the stars in the sky and sends them crashing to earth. And what was he doing there? He was waiting for the Christ child to be born so that he might devour him! Quite different, isn't it, from the lambs and peace and pastoral joy of St. Luke's birth story. You can see why the Church doesn't want to mention it - to avoid spoiling our Christmas cheer.

Still the Book of Revelation's account does have a positive ending for the Christ child, because as soon as he is born of that anguished woman he is snatched up to heaven, rescued from the jaws of the Dragon. Lucky for him! But not so lucky for us, because the story goes on to say the Dragon went after the woman and after us as well - her other children, us brothers and sisters of Christ by baptism. And he's been trying to consume us ever since.

And do you know one way he does it? By hitting us with the post Christmas blues! I like to think of the big depression that often looms over me after Christmas as this big, red Dragon who would swallow me up, ridicule my faith and hope (for instance by way of bestsellers like "The God Delusion"), question the value and expense of the gifts I gave people, question the sincerity of my sentiments, fret about the rain, fret about becoming another year older, fret about the need to socialize - in a word, dampen my affections, my feeble flame of love. Which, by the way, is a good way of describing the Depression-Dragon's effect on me, because it says in the Book of Revelation "he spewed a flood of water" after the woman to sweep her and her children away.

But not to worry, for that same Book has a happy ending for us as well. For the whole aim of Christ's birth is to expel depression and its lethal consequences from the face of the earth; in a word to seize that persistent Dragon (who in Matthew's Gospel will take the shape of that monster King Herod) and cast it into a lake of fire. Which may be a way of prophesying that one day we shall have acquired a love so warm, so aflame toward ourselves and others and all creation that this draconian depression I feel today will pass away like vapor - with nary a whimper forevermore. -- Geoff Wood