Christmas Conversions
unholy mangers & dispatches from the Great Frost
Each year, kneeling before the Child lying in the manger (cf. Lk 2:12), we can look at our lives in this special light. It is not the light of the glory of this world, but “the true light, which enlightens everyone”
Conversion is a never-ending story. The worst thing that could happen to us is to think that we are no longer in need of conversion, either as individuals or as a community.
To be converted is to learn ever anew how to take the Gospel message seriously and to put it into practice in our lives. It is not simply about avoiding evil but doing all the good that we can. That is what it means to be converted. Where the Gospel is concerned, we are always like children needing to learn. The illusion that we have learned everything makes us fall into spiritual pride.
Pope Francis, address to Roman Curia, Dec 22, 2022
On Wednesday, as I traveled home in a blizzard, Zelenskyy traveled to Washington DC.
On Thursday, Francis called the Curia—and all committed Catholics— to conversion, casting a new sort of light on Zelenskyy’s plea for aid.
Zelensky’s visit is a call for conversion just as much as it is a patriotic rally. Although he is asking for weapons, militaristic fervor and financial aid, what we could perhaps better give the cause of peace is poverty, solidarity, and love.
Zelenskyy addresses a nation that, like his opponent and aggressor is also a warring nation. We have abused our power to invade others the way the Ukrainians have so grossly been invaded. We have stormed through Mairoupols in Afghanistan and Iraq and erased identities and left behind us voids. We are death, has Oppenheimer quoted, destroyer of worlds.
Our greed and selfishness as a country have sown death, not seeds of life, around the world. Cars choke the air with pollution, the heat of our industry has destroyed coral reefs, and songbirds are extinct from pesticides and fallen trees.
And are the humans who toil for their daily bread, who labor in slavery on the gulf coast, who die in factories to make the phones and computers I type this on. We are a world intertwined with death. Our daily lives now depend on the bloodshed of children in factories, farm workers on modern California plantations, and the labor of prison workers to survive. Are our lives ones of peace?
No, we live war. Zelenskyy and his people, although may he not be saying that, are the latest in a long march of casualties bearing the cost of the bubbles of comfort in a gilded DC Christmas setting and the suits and pearls of congress. On the heels of Zelenskyy’s departure came the polar vortex. An uncontrollable chaos marking the birth of the infant.
Where is God this Christmas? Born in Ukraine. Do we dare look at the Christ child and see ourselves in his light? Do we dare listen to Zelenskyy’s plea and hear a call to conversion?
What can stop the machine of war?
It seems as though billions of dollars in weapons are what is needed to stop a war, but Francis points to a more personal effort that is even more costly. Only our conversion—our refusal to be complacent toward the elegant devil of hypocrisy, of self-satisfaction, of greed; our refusal to judge our neighbor unworthy of our love—only that conversion can reverse the whirlwind of violence.
What can stop the machine of war?
A small baby, a condemned criminal, a door opened to the stranger, the smallest act of love.
“We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own,” wrote Bishop Ken Untener.
And so let us, by our own conversions, sow love. We may never see the end result in the world outside us wracked by evil. But we will bear the fruit of that transformation in our own hearts and in our lives. And that’s the reason Emmanuel came among us in the first place.