The Mystery of Christmas
Pierluigi Banna - I can’t live this Christmas without thinking of what a student from Bari wrote in a note, posted along with many others, on a Christmas tree at his university: “Living has become exhausting, and I no longer have much desire to do it. I wish I could fall asleep and never wake up again.”
I can imagine this young man getting brave to come out, even though he isn’t known to tell what’s been bothering him for four years. He writes about it at the start of his message. Appreciative and widespread calls for resilience and proactivity have failed in their intent to bring him out of the permanent crisis ... so we’ve learned to call it.
More than strategies and advice, I believe that this note, a voice crying out in the wilderness of so many others still unknown, awaits an encounter with the luminous silence of a friendly face.
Silence is right for someone who is not fast to analyze, find, and direct. It is right for someone who stops, firstly, to listen, without running away from self and others.
Those who are in no hurry to inundate us with words are convinced, as J. Fosse wrote, that “our inner solitude ... is something that binds us to God, through silence.”
It happens to meet people like that, who bring out a kind of light from deep within us. Daniele Mencarelli describes them as “interstices of light” in his “Burn the Origin”: then “the fragility of childhood comes back to life without shame.”
It is as if, suddenly, in front of these people, the failed intentions, the imagined profiles, dissolve to lay down all the ostentatious masks of life finally. Thus the freedom to show oneself for who one is returns.
One could describe the mystery of Christmas as the luminous silence of a God who stood looking at us as a child does, without first asking us to have to change anything, and indeed without even knowing how to speak.
By his mere presence he had the power to illuminate the darkness of the heart of everyone who approached him: the poor, cold shepherds, the rich and wandering Magi, but also those who today feel that there is still something wrong in their lives.
In a mysterious way, the thread of this luminous silence links the nativity scene to the ultimate scene of the cross: a presence that looks at you in silence and by its fragility illuminates your own.
As Leo the Great wrote, a stupendous exchange (admirabile commercium) happens in the mystery of Christmas: God takes a body as fragile as ours so that man can have a life as divine as his own.
In the decisive moments of his life, the Word of God, the Word of God, doesn’t speak, but is silent. He does so to operate on something amazing that is even more evident thanks to His silence. To make us love our lives, He surrounds our frailty with a body, His own, that has the power to give a new light to everything of ours.
This is why Vladimir Solov’ev even goes so far as to write about Christmas: “It is here He, now...in the turbid torrent of life’s anxieties, you possess a secret full of joy: powerless is evil, and eternal we are: God is with us.”
The luminous silence of a God who, to embrace our frailty, stands to take on a body like ours, can dissolve all forms of shame and resistance to bring that peace which “can only come from a heart disarmed of the anxiety and fear of war”—as Pope Francis writes.
Man's heart is disarmed; that is, it lays down the weapons of anxiety of control and fear of judgement when it encounters someone who hasn’t been ashamed to know his condition.
As Fr. Giussani already effectively recognized, “We would never feel understood except by someone who has in himself something of us.” God has something of us in himself. I want to tell the boy from Bari and his many young and old friends that God is with them.
Pierluigi Banna
Pierluigi Banna is an Italian Catholic theologian and scholar, born in Catania in 1984. He completed his undergraduate studies in Classical Studies at the University of Milan in 2008. Banna was ordained as a priest in the Diocese of Milan. He currently serves as a faculty member at the Facoltà Teologica dell'Italia Settentrionale (Faculty of Theology of Northern Italy)
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