Christmas is coming. Christians are busy making cribs, stars, sweets, and goodies that light up the season. The festivities and decorations that adorn it come close to the festival of light of the Hindu community. We are still in the Advent season and are in a time of empty cradle. We are waiting for the cradle to be inhabited by our Lord Jesus Christ. Like the empty tomb, the empty cradle is a powerful symbol. Both are interlinked. We can let it speak to us in multiple ways. We have to decode its message lest advent becomes a lost time for us.
The empty cradle can narrate to us how Jesus is absent in our homes, neighborhoods, workplaces, and several other areas of our society. It can open us to the character of our faith, love, family life, society, politics, ecology, etc. The empty cradle speaks the language that we know and understand. But it is difficult because it will tell us where we lack Jesus, where we have no room for his presence in our life. It does challenge the vision of our life that we hold so close to our hearts. It will often deconstruct our symbolic universe.
The genius is not pre-given union with his/her symbolic universe. Genius works out meaning in union with God, Humans and the world . This is why it may take a genius in us who has to rise to make meaning and sense of the empty cradle in our life. All of us have a genius in us . But of late, we seem to like to remain dormant and take the easiest path.We seem to ride our death drive. Freud’s death drive is interpreted as a drive or enjoyment that we have by coming to some level of dormant consciousness by Gilles Deleuze . We let things happen to us and try to come to a level where we are more passive. This is why perhaps, Christmas will come and Christmas will go and the genius is us stays asleep and we are not able to decode the message of the empty cradle.
The Apostle and the early disciples of our Lord led the genius in them read the sign of the empty tomb. They saw in the absence of the body of Jesus , the risen Christ and rose to faith. The empty cradle also is the power and the presence of the risen Christ. But we need the eyes of faith to open our lives to welcome him in our lives. The empty cradle speaks in tongues. It has a different message for each of us. The season of advent then challenges us to open our minds and hearts to this message and thus prepare us to welcome Jesus.
We cannot miss the life that Jesus our Lord is bringing to us this Christmas. To come to experience this life, we will be impelled to search for the message of the empty cradle. Once we discern the level of absence of Jesus in our life, we are already open and ready to say maranatha. Opening ourselves to the message of empty cradle, we can therefore, prepare ourselves to the coming of Jesus.
While we recognize the empty spaces of our personal lives , we will be enabled to discern the empty spaces that are bereft of Christ in our society. While seeking Christ at Christmas, we have the challenge to become love like Christ and feel in the empty spaces in our society. We can discern that in the birth of Jesus, we have the birth of hope and strive to become hope to our people.
At several levels during Christmas, we spatialize time and temporalize space. This is why Christmas becomes very important time and place for us. Indeed, an empty cradle is also spatializing time as well as temporalizing space. It is indicating how Jesus is absent at several levels in our lives. We then are moved to spatialize and temporalize hope. Our hope is filled with the presence and the power of Jesus.
We can enflesh this hope in our life and in that of others. This enfleshment is the birth of Jesus in our lives. This enfleshment makes Christmas happen to us. Thus, Christmas is not a passing present to us. It will become a lasting present to us. But the lasting present requires the moment of grace be intensely present in our life. Christmas, therefore, is not a lost time. It is a time of grace that takes hold of our life and turns it into love that will touch the life of very other person that comes across our life and offer them Christian hope.
