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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

The Holy Family

The Holy Family

Every year we celebrate the Feast of the Nativity – better known to the world as Christmas – one of the two central pivots of the Christian year. The other is Easter, when we celebrate the Death of Our Lord, and above all His Resurrection, since on that Resurrection our whole hope hangs. The meaning of the Nativity is inseparable from the Incarnation, the central miracle by which the Second Person of the Trinity became a man.

Great theologians and artists have approached this happening from many angles; and the people of God, like Mary herself, have held the event in their hearts and pondered over it reverently, knowing that while the truth and reality of the event is certain, not all its aspects will be clear to us until we see the face of Jesus our God in Heaven.

What comment or speculation can I legitimately add concerning the Nativity, when those who have come before me are so much wiser than I am – when perhaps the clear faith of a child will see much that is dark to me? It might be better for me to kneel at the altar and the Crib and say nothing, asking God inwardly for the capacity to become like a small child – like the small Child who lay in the cave-stable of Bethlehem – since unless this happens, the power of the Nativity will have passed me by, and I will not be able to enter Heaven. Nevertheless it is right that we should exchange thoughts about all matters essential to the Faith; and so I venture to approach the Nativity from a special angle.

God does not only give us ideas, to help us on our road towards Him; far more, the effective help we get from Him comes to us through people. When we approach the Crib, we find three people there – Jesus, Mary and Joseph – who are given to us as a model and an earthly trinity, obscurely reflecting the Triune Unity of God, who is not solitary, but contains mutual love within His own Being.

We may approach the Nativity by two roads – either by the road of intellect, like the Magi, who had to make a long and devious journey to arrive at Bethlehem, or by the road of intuition, the quick and direct road by which the Shepherds came. The New Zealand poet, Eileen Duggan, has an excellent poem on the subject, in which she makes this very point, and tends to favour the approach of the Shepherds. But (whichever road we take; and both can page 470 lead us to the same place) we do not come there to look at ourselves, not even in an examination of conscience, and certainly not in a vain attempt to find out whether we are worthy to be present. We are not worthy. We have come to be changed, to receive a gift wholly behind our own efforts to obtain – that is, the life of God transmitted to our souls by the Holy Child who is God.

The Nativity is in truth the Feast of Beggars indicated by the words of Christ when he spoke of those who would be brought in from the ditches and the hedges and the byways, ragged and hungry and malformed. Our joy is precisely because He accepts us as we are. If He did not first accept and embrace us in our terrible inward squalor and destination, we could not begin to go towards Him; if He did not first love us, we could not learn to love Him, to love our neighbour who is made in His image, or even to love ourselves. There is no guard standing with a ticket punch outside the cave of Bethlehem. Our credentials are existence and desire – the desire to be made holy – we do not come clothed in our own virtues; we come there in order to be clothed in His virtues. And the light that shines from the Face of the Holy Child is no consuming furnace; it is the benign light of an overflowing forgiveness, extended to us who are in a sense His enemies, welcoming us and making us His friends.

Yet it is possible that there was no visible light whatever in the cave of Bethlehem, except moonlight and starlight outside the door, and perhaps some small oil-lamp lighted within. The artists who have shown great golden haloes round the heads of Mary and Joseph, and a special cruciform halo round the head of the Child, were expressing by external means an inward glory which we all recognise – the sanctity of the Holy Family. It would be a mistake to suppose that this sanctity was evident to all who came in contact with them. The inn-keeper who told them there was no room in his house for them was no doubt an honest man. If Caesar had come to his house with a great retinue of courtiers and soldiers and secretaries, he would have knelt on the doorstep, and then got up and hustled all the other guests off the premises. But when One infinitely greater than Caesar came there, still hidden in His Mother’s womb, he did not recognise Him.

Why, after all, should he? The sanctity of God is a sanctity that hides itself; and so it is also with the sanctity of His friends. When, by His mercy, we come to Heaven, the great saints whom we meet there may include people whom we have passed by daily with indifference or pity. Later on, when the Holy Family lived at Nazareth, people did not go running through the length and breadth of the land, shouting – ‘Come and see! God has come down to earth and is living among us as a human child. He mended a door for me yesterday. I did not dare to pass through it. And His sinless Mother is also living among us. Come and see! Come and pay them reverence!’

The people of Nazareth must have known that the Holy Family were extremely good human beings; they would have received no evil from them, page 471 and perhaps they obscurely recognised that the town was changed by their presence. One likes to think of somebody sick or sad, who was visited by the Blessed Virgin and whose state was changed by her; or a man troubled by debt, who was relieved by Joseph out of his own small earnings; or some child rejected by others, who was comforted by Jesus. These things must have happened. But they must also have been accepted by the people of Nazareth as well within the range of ordinary human experience. The perennial difficulty which believers experience in being wholly convinced that God is present in their hearts by means of the Sacraments – this difficulty which springs from the nature of the virtue of faith itself – the people of Nazareth were not free of this difficulty. Indeed, in their houses and at the synagogue – for it is well to remember that both they and the Holy Family were Orthodox Jews – they must often have called on God’s help without the faintest suspicion that He had become incarnate and was living in a house five streets away.

I emphasise the Hidden Life of the Child Jesus because it corresponds so very closely to our own experience of the life of God present in ourselves and in others – we are given no certain sign of its presence; we must often walk through a world in which no inward or outward indication proclaims to us the Presence of God or even His existence; yet we know that we are united to Him by faith and a non-sensible love, and in this our hope and our freedom and our safety lie.

Though the suggestion may seem a bold one, I think we could consider the possibility that Jesus did not exhibit either to His Mother or to St Joseph any overt signs of His Divinity during His life within the circle of the Holy Family. Otherwise His decision to stay in Jerusalem at twelve years’ old, to converse with the Temple rabbis, would not have come as a wholly unexpected shock and surprise and cause of grief to them. Mary bore her Child in poverty, away from her own house, in a town filled with strangers. The circumstances must have been unpleasing to her, even if she accepted them, as she accepted all things, direct from the hand of God. Near as she was to that Child, the nearness of being His Mother and carrying Him within her own body was in a sense almost irrelevant to her actual union with Him. Any Christian whose soul contains the life of grace has a more intimate contact with Christ than Mary had, but her circumstances of physical motherhood alone, miraculous though that motherhood was. If her soul had not been itself continually united to Him through faith, her justified title of the Mother of God would mean less than our own unity with Him through Baptism and belief. The total and unlimited generosity of her response to God’s will is the reason why we now rest at her feet and ask for her blessing. Of course, in Mary, since she was free of Original Sin, the spiritual and physical circumstances were welded together in a great simplicity and wholeness, and her response was to both kinds of event in the same movement of the will. That is why we see her as the Harmoniser of our Lives.

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We have all thought again and again about the relationship between Our Lady and Our Lord, so often indeed that there may be little I can say to illuminate further what already stands in broad light as the perfect pattern of all our Christian lives. But there in the shadows behind the Crib stands that other figure, the Protector, wholly human, whose thoughts are his own, who spoke no Magnificat, the most hidden of all the saints, our father Joseph who is also my own patron saint. And like a child writing a letter to a father who lives in another country, to which he hopes to travel some day, my thoughts go towards him and begin to turn into words:

‘Dear Saint Joseph – Here I am; here we all are, waiting for the Feast of the Nativity. We don’t feel too optimistic. There are wars here and there throughout the world. It seems hard these days for the old and the young to get along together. Sometimes we would much prefer to end this life and be safe with you in Heaven. But we know that’s not the right way to look at it. You stayed on earth, looking after the Holy Child and His Mother whom you loved more than any other mortal man has ever loved any woman; doing jobs, suffering aches and pains; trusting in God but by no means certain of the outcome of any public or private event.

No doubt you were unemployed at times. Perhaps people abused you and the Child before whose feet they should have been kneeling, when you went round in hard times looking for work; perhaps they told you there was plenty of work for willing hands, and that you and He must be idle and incompetent. But we know you did not abuse them back. You simply went and looked in another place. But if there had been a carpenter’s union in your time, you would certainly have joined it, and given a just vote at all its meetings, sometimes for action, sometimes against it, according to your own weighting of the circumstances, swayed by the desire for no man’s approval and the fear of no man’s disapproval. For you were just.

‘My dear friend and father quite often I am comforted by a rather peculiar possibility – that there may have been in a sense a sinner present within the Holy Family – I mean, of course, yourself. Probably you never committed an actual sin. But you were not free, as the Holy Child and His Mother both were, from the burden of Original Sin handed down to us from Adam. Your will was not of itself rockfast; your intellect was obscured by the clouds ours, too, are obscured by; your passions were capable of disorder. They say that God held the shield of His mercy always before you so that you never actually stumbled. Yet it has sometimes pleased me in fantasy to suppose that some time – when you were a boy perhaps – you plucked a peach from a tree without your father’s permission, or lost your temper with a schoolmate and clouted him. I can’t see the Blessed Virgin doing it. I can’t see the Holy Child doing it. But I can see you doing it. And the thought curiously comforts me. At any rate, there was no spiritual snobbery in your home. Those Holy Ones, with their special gifts, one of them born without Original Sin, one of page 473 them bearing within Himself the Divine Nature – they warmed your shoes at the fire, they paid you the full respect due to the head of the house, they consulted you about practical matters and went by your judgment because you were a real husband and father.

‘Certainly you were not the father of the Holy Child by natural generation; but you had accepted Him as your own in what would appear to many people scandalous circumstances. At first you were uncertain what to do (as I suggested, your intellect was not in itself necessarily more perfect and more lucid than ours), but as soon as it was clear that God wanted your cooperation, you gave it with the utmost love and generosity. A sinner in charge of the Holy Family! And yet how suitable it was that we through you should feel wholly included in that first marvellous household which became the Church herself by extension in time and place. We need never feel strangers at the door of the house of Nazareth.

‘Why do we love you so much? Perhaps because you seem to us a possible model, a possible saint – we who have families to rear and endless household worries. You would have no difficulty in understanding why we get discouraged; and many of your friends must have been sad men, grave sinners who nevertheless understood the comradeship and liberating yoke of labour – you must have often been able to cheer them up and lead them without any moralising a little nearer to the God they feared and longed for.

‘My old friend Joseph, Jewish to the bone, how does it please you, there at the heart of the life of Heaven, when we Catholics – you were there right at the beginning of the Church – sneer at the men and women of your race – “Ah well, of course, they’re Jewish, that accounts for it!” It is only because you are alive with God’s own charity that you continue to bless us and help us while we crucify by our words that race who were your own flesh and blood, who were the sacred seed-bed of the Church, and who are still linked to us by innumerable subtle bonds. Purge us entirely of that old and bitter folly! Joseph, son of the race of Moses, pray for us!

‘Open the stable door for me. I do not really know much about theology or even about prayer. I only know that the palms of my hands are sweating and I feel incredibly stupid. Open the door for me, and let me come in quietly. I will kneel beside you in the shadows. Quietness is what I need most of all. The Child is very quiet. He smiles a little; but He does not laugh or cry. And the fact His Mother is here, a few feet away, fills me with terror and happiness.

‘Joseph, I think I love you most because you communicate to our unquiet and doubtful souls the enormous peace and silence of God. Speak to the Holy Child some time on my behalf; and continue to look after my family, and all the people who are afflicted by anxiety and wander all their lives without hope in the wide affluent deserts of our society. I am praying for the rich people, Joseph, for they are the most helpless of all. Bring them here where they can learn a peace they have longed for but never known. Give them your poverty.

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‘Words are quite useless as a means of approaching Him. He is God; and He has not yet learnt to speak. I will stay here now and be quiet. Joseph, give me your silence so that I can carry it away in my heart.’

1967 (484)