Before the Innocence of God

A Meditation for Christmas

It is the feast of the innocence of God; and since He is now true man, it is equally the feast of human innocence. One enters that small cave shelter, where animals are fed and drop their dung – and one kneels down at a distance from those three people, the only true royalty the earth has ever possessed – at a distance because the human heart cannot easily bear the light of innocence.

By its very existence it searches and judges as no law ever will or can. One would like to get up and go away. Yet one stays, kneeling rigidly, with hands clenched and knotted together and the chin against the chest – because the deeper knowledge is that there is nowhere else to go. Here is the soul’s light and nourishment and its only source of being. Elsewhere one will find only drugs and distraction, shadow fruit, mirages and poisoned water and the jaws of the lion.

One is aware of many scars deep in the soul left there by old encounters with the lion who devours innocence. Yet by the mercy of the Child who is also God one is alive now and kneeling at the centre of the world, in the cave shelter –

Where He of his great charity
Is robed in all humility

Bare and bright, bare and bright
As clear coals on a windy night . . .

And so by the last of many gifts, the gift of perseverance, we may see Him in heaven.

But here and now one sees Him only by intellect and imagination, not by naked sight; though obscurely, like an always smouldering fire, the heart burns for Him and is satisfied with nothing less than Him. And so there is an element of torment in even the happiest life on earth, since we do not possess the One whom we were born to possess for ever.

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The innocence of Our Lord is shown to us most clearly in his Nativity; for then He had, as it were, a breathing-space before his love led Him to plunge into the night of our sins. His Mother and his foster-father did not have to shrink from his light, for they had neither sins nor the scars of sin to make them afraid. The two beasts between whom He lay, scarred no doubt by man’s cruelty, were not sinful, because all beasts obey the law of God. At the feast of our Redemption He would hang in agony between two thieves, rejecting them no more than he rejects the sinless. His innocence then would be no less than it was at the moment of his birth, for He was and is always the Holy Child: but it would be veiled by the blackness of our human night.

I pray that at the moment of their deaths all men, in union with his suffering, whether they know it or not, may be granted a share in his innocence, and so enter Heaven as children, each bearing the Holy Child at the centre of his soul.

Kneeling among the stones and straw under the clear gaze of the Holy Child, it is the faults of chronic stupidity, not even actual sins, that trouble me most. That good woman who wrote me a bitter rebuke for my public opposition to legislation that prevented a young cabaret artiste, well known for her part in an English scandal, from visiting this country – I had replied to this woman with a blistering comment on the mating attitudes of young New Zealand males – and she, much disturbed, had written again to tell me I would roast in hell for corrupting the young. I had terrified one of the little sheep, already frightened of the dark, till she mistook my stupid self for the lion. And then there was the Maori primer child I threatened with a strapping for some crime against the grim gods of the classroom – I forget what – his dark eyes look at me still in grief and bewilderment.

The order of things is reversed – small matters loom large and large matters seem negligible. The coarse jokes I tell at work don’t matter – they dissolve like bubbles on the stream – and the actual faults of the flesh seem to have shrunk to vanishing point. The Child does not even know they exist.

But I remember the time of the house-warming party, when my own children were wakened by the noise, and I went through to sit in a chair between their beds and calm them by making fiery rings in the air with my cigarette. From an adult point of view the party was innocent enough – but no such gathering is free of its quota of boredom and malice – and the same light which streams on me now streamed on me then, accusing me not of actual sin but of blindness, coarseness, dullness, and a false direction of the soul. So what any priest would brush aside in the confessional seems now like a coat of dust and cobwebs. Yet nobody has told me that I cannot stay. I am permitted to be present at the feast of God’s innocence. To remain here seems the best – to remain at the edge of light, neither accepted nor rejected. When the light of God shines into the soul one cannot actually pray – for prayer is apage 745 movement of the soul, and any movement would be away from the light. The prayer must consist in keeping still.

There are two things which happen to encourage me. The first is the realisation that I am not alone in the cave of refuge. Around me, visible and invisible, kneel an enormous multitude – people of all races, all nations, all times. They are my brothers and sisters, who have come here, they hardly know how, to receive the blessing of the Child. Their presence comforts me; for they too are deeply imperfect yet not denied the virtue of hope.

And the second thing happens when I raise my eyes and look at the Child’s wholly human Mother. Her face reflects His light as the moon reflects the sun – and the brightness one might otherwise shrink from is made sweet and bearable to human eyes. Moved by love, I said to her long ago – ‘Your face is my theology’ – and that is true, for whatever I know of God I have learnt by looking at it. From her I derive the confidence to approach the Holy Child, at this midnight Mass when we celebrate the innocence of God.

I kneel again at the altar rail and the priest places the Host on my tongue, saying ‘The Body of Christ’. (It is the Holy Child whom one possesses and is possessed by even here on earth – He Himself has entered to heal the soul that cannot heal itself. So we too are made members of the Holy Family.) ‘Amen’.

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