A Reflection for the Nativity of the Lord, Mass at Dawn
Find today’s readings here.
There are multiple sets of readings for Christmas—as the Lectionary puts it, there’s the Vigil Mass (think Christmas Eve, 4 pm), Mass during the Night (“Midnight Mass”), Mass at Dawn, and Mass during the Day.
Depending on which way you squint at things, this is either a great practical joke played on preachers who need to have multiple homilies after also being up in the middle of the night or else simply an invitation to preach about Christmas more broadly than one specific Gospel.
But even though I am preaching both at Mass during the night and Mass during the day this Christmas, I am going to play the joke on myself and reflect on the readings for the Mass at dawn here. My brief experience while assigned full-time to a parish was that this Mass was the least well attended, which is understandable. An early Christmas Eve vigil is great for kids; Midnight Mass is a beautiful and compelling tradition, and if you wait for Christmas Day, it is much easier to herd everyone over to church at 10 am than 8 am.
So perhaps you have not heard this particular set of readings for Christmas before, though you certainly know the story. In the Gospel for the Mass at dawn, we join the shepherds just after the angels have left them, and they decide to go and see for themselves “this thing that has taken place.”
That is already a powerful image for our own embrace of Christmas: These shepherds, out on the outskirts of town, with their flocks overnight, have an unexpected and dramatic encounter with divine power—and then they are brave enough to go and see for themselves what “the Lord has made known” to them. Are we brave enough, and perhaps curious enough, to go and look into the things which God had made known to us?
Before the shepherds return to their watch over their flocks, the Gospel tells us that “Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” In his recent encyclical on the Sacred Heart, “Dilexit Nos,” Pope Francis has an extensive reflection on this idea, which bears quoting in full:
The heart is also capable of unifying and harmonizing our personal history, which may seem hopelessly fragmented, yet is the place where everything can make sense. The Gospel tells us this in speaking of Our Lady, who saw things with the heart. She was able to dialogue with the things she experienced by pondering them in her heart, treasuring their memory and viewing them in a greater perspective. The best expression of how the heart thinks is found in the two passages in Saint Luke’s Gospel that speak to us of how Mary “treasured (synetérei) all these things and pondered (symbállousa) them in her heart” (cf. Lk 2:19 and 51). The Greek verb symbállein, “ponder”, evokes the image of putting two things together (“symbols”) in one’s mind and reflecting on them, in a dialogue with oneself. In Luke 2:51, the verb used is dietérei, which has the sense of “keep”. What Mary “kept” was not only her memory of what she had seen and heard, but also those aspects of it that she did not yet understand; these nonetheless remained present and alive in her memory, waiting to be “put together” in her heart. (No. 19)
How do we keep the memory of what God has made known to us even while we do not yet understand it? That is also part of the courage and curiosity with which we are called to explore and to see for ourselves “this thing that has taken place” in our experience of Christmas.
Too often, we can approach our religious lives as if we—or at least somebody, some religious authorities somewhere—are supposed to be able to answer all the questions we might have in advance. Questions then become searches for information, a riddle looking for an answer. And while some questions of faith are answered in that way, by introducing us to some beautiful part of the tradition of which we were previously unaware, there are other kinds of questions of faith as well.
Those other kinds of questions call for us to go into the depths of our own hearts and the depths of God’s heart as well, in order to “put together” realities that we have experienced but will only understand over time and in cooperation with God’s grace. Shortly before Christmas, David Brooks wrote an evocative and beautiful column in the New York Times, describing his own experience of faith “as a yearning for something beautiful that I can sense but not fully grasp.”
The miracle of Christmas is that faith is given to us not only as a yearning, but in the same way—precisely in the same way—as someone hands you an infant to hold for the first time. Not only something, but someone beautiful is placed into your hands, and for a moment you do not worry about whether you can fully grasp what is happening, because all of your attention is consumed by and concentrated on what you have just been given to hold.
May we keep that experience present and alive, and “let every heart prepare him room,” eager to welcome the one who brings joy to the world.
