This weekend, right before Christmas, the northern hemisphere experiences its winter solstice. Darkness creeps earlier and dawn takes longer to break than on any other day of the year.
Winter is the domain of the night, when our ancestors would snuggle to stay warm and whispered stories to one other to keep their wildest nightmares at bay. In the coldest nights all horrors are possible as our control over life and earth breaks down and we discover ourselves at the mercy of the elements and wild beasts. Before humans mastered fire that gave us a modicum of power over our fears, our ancestors must have experienced long winter nights as if caught in the very depths of Hades – as good as dead.
From this lens, Christmas not only anticipates the definitive proclamation of life triumphant over death that comes with the spring Resurrection narrative. It flickers a ray of hope in the seemingly endless deadly silence of winter. It is perhaps most significant that this tiny spark comes in the coldness of nights, under the grips of empire, in the outskirts of the city, and in fields no one dared roam.
From time immemorial, way before cities or empires were built, herdsmen had tended flocks for human nourishment and safety. In living with animals, they not only smelled of sheep and goats; they risked becoming like them. To those who believe themselves safe behind city walls, shepherds are thus a paradox: useful and heroic, but also despised and shunned. Shepherds are the archetype of being caught in a liminal space and it is exactly in this in-betweenness, between the promise of nature and the threat of despair, that the message of hope is proclaimed. Evocatively, Luke the evangelist narrates how a divine messenger broke through the veil of natural darkness to challenge self-evident human beliefs: “Do not be afraid; for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people” (Lk 2:10).
When all seems lost and we are ready to give up; when anxiety threatens to consume, and depression pushes us into an interminable abyss… hope flickers
The message of Christmas is that it is in the dead of night, in the pit of Hades, when, overwhelmed with terror, that divine light penetrates the last of our defences. When all seems lost and we are ready to give up; when anxiety threatens to consume, and depression pushes us into an interminable abyss… hope flickers. Not with power and might, or by annihilating our enemies real or imagined… but with a symbol of new beginning: the Divine Child, reborn in our hearts to give us the strength to live anew.
When touched by hope, shepherds were still terrified… but they recognised this terror as being touched by the holy. In the same long winter night, they dared to get up and walk right into the city that shunned them, “to see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known” (Lk 2:15). This is the boldness of those who, in the deepest of nights, experience “peace” first-hand.
This Christmas peace is not merely the contrary of conflict; it does not simply declare the end of wars. This peace is joy experienced in the heart that makes all suffering, anxiety and violence melt in a warm shroud of blessedness. And the wonder we celebrate is that this joy, born in the peripheries that terrify, is promised as new life to the whole world.
Nadia Delicata is episcopal delegate for evangelisation of the Malta archdiocese.
nadia.delicata@maltadiocese.org