People often ask for reading suggestions this time of year. One book I always recommend as we approach Christmas is “The Prison Meditations of Father Delp” (Herder & Herder, $22.98).
A Jesuit priest, Father Alfred Delp (1907-1945) wrote with his wrists manacled, largely during Advent, while awaiting execution by the Nazis. A sampling:
“Life means waiting, not Faust-like grasping, but waiting and being ready. … Anyone who remains stuck, waiting in fearful expectation just to see whether or not he will survive, has not yet laid bare the innermost strata. For the fearful expectation was sent to us in order to remove our false sense of security and behind it is this other metaphysical waiting that is part of existence.
“One thinks of all the meaningless attitudes and gestures — in the name of God? No, in the name of habit, of tradition, custom, convenience, safety and even — let us be honest — in the name of middle-class respectability which is perhaps the very least suitable vehicle for the coming of the Holy Spirit.”
After suffering brutal imprisonment and torture, Delp was hanged on Feb. 2, 1945, and cremated. In accordance with Nazi regulations, his ashes were scattered over a sewer field.
All of which put him in deep solidarity with the Son of Man who took on human form and entered the world as a vulnerable baby. “My chains are now without any meaning,” Delp could write after all, “because God found me worthy of the ‘Vincula amoris’ (chains of love).”
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), the British author and Christian apologist, is always worth a re-read, and you can dip in to his works just about anywhere.
In “The Everlasting Man,” he has this to say about the birth of Jesus:
“The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of [the Christmas] story on human nature. … It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials. … It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness … that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity.”
Perhaps, what with all the preparations, party-going, and cooking, you’re a bit behind in the sleep department.
Here, you could turn to “The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor” (Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, $20.56). The well-known Catholic novelist and short story writer (1925-1964) suffered from lupus and died at only 39.
From a letter to her friend “A,” dated October 20, 1955:
“The business of the broken sleep is interesting, but the business of sleep generally is interesting. I once did without it almost all the time for several weeks. I had high fever and was taking cortisone in big doses, which prevents your sleeping. I was starving to go to sleep. Since then I have come to think of sleep as metaphorically connected with the mother of God. “[Contemplative poet Gerard Manley] Hopkins said she was the air we breathe, but I have come to realize her most in the gift of going to sleep. Life without her would be equivalent to me to life without sleep, and as she contained Christ for a time, she seems to contain our life in sleep for a time so that we are able to wake up in peace.”
Finally, I can’t resist sharing the below email I received several years ago from a young man in New Orleans and that still strikes me as the best Christmas present ever: “Heather you have blown open the doors to an entirely new dimension of Christian living that I never knew existed. You have made real for me the fact that life is Christ. That Christ is in all: the good, the bad, the badder; the sunrise, the sunset, the overcast; the priest, the professor, the prostitute; the consolation, the desolation, the confusion; the chapel, the workplace, the bathroom. We have a God who got his hands dirty, and I have always been too scandalized by that mystery to truly accept it, along with all its ramifications in my life. Because accepting it meant that I couldn’t quarantine Christ anymore to the fragmented parts of my heart, to the minutes in the chapel, or to the beads on my rosary. No, He truly wants ALL of me, ALL of my humanity. And this is WILD! and THIS fact had BLOWN UP my entire worldview and my every minute of living in this world! So, thanks for your life and your presence in this world, it certainly makes my life much brighter and my view much broader, which is a pure gift. And thanks to Him who made it all, who paid it all, and who bade it all good. Peace be yours today my friend!”
Blessed Christmas to all. And as we look forward to the New Year, let’s blow open the doors to a new dimension!
