The Nativity always provides an opportunity to return to original Christendom. In the first place, there is the message of Jesus: the experience of God as Father, with characteristics of Mother; unconditional love, mercy and complete surrender to a dream: the dream of the Kingdom of God. In the second place, there is the Jesus movement: those who, without adhering to any confession or dogma, let themselves be fascinated by His generous and radically human saga and take Him as a valuable reference. In the third place are the theologies about Jesus, found in the Gospels, written 40-50 years after His execution on the cross. The communities underlying each of the Gospels elaborated their interpretations about the life of Jesus, His practice, His conflicts with the authorities, His experience of God and of the meaning of His death and resurrection. However, they obscured His figure with so many doctrines that it is difficult to know who the historical Jesus who lived among us really was. And lastly, there are the Churches that attempt to carry on the legacy of Jesus, one of which, the Catholic Church, claims to be the only true guardian of His message and exclusive interpreter of its meaning. Such pretension makes ecumenical dialogue and the unity of the Churches practically impossible, other than through conversion.
We tend to say now that no one Church can appropriate Jesus. He belongs to all of humanity and represents a gift that God offered to all, from every corner of the Earth.
Taking the Catholic Church as a reference, we note that in her millenarian history, two tendencies, among other minor ones, were highly developed. The first is very much founded on guilt, sin, and penance. The Catholic Church overlays those realities with the specter of hell, purgatory, and fear.
In essence, we can say that fear was one of the fundamental factors in the penetration of Christianity, as Jean Delumeau has shown in his classic, Fear in Occident (El miedo en Occidente, 1989). The method in the time of Charlemagne was: accept conversion, or you will be converted by the sword. Reading the first catechisms from Latin America, such as the first one by Fray Pedro de Cordoba, Christian Doctrine, (Doctrina Cristiana, 1510 and 1544), this tendency is clearly seen. It begins with an idyllic description of heaven, followed by a horrendous description of hell «where all your ancestors, fathers, mothers, grandparents and relatives are… and where you will go if you do not convert.» There are sectors of the Church that, even today, use these categories of fear and hell.
Another tendency, more contemporary, and I think closer to Jesus, emphasizes compassion and love, the original justice and the good ending of creation. It understands that the history of salvation occurs within human history, and not as an alternative to human history. From it comes a more jovial profile of Christianity, in dialogue with modern cultures and values.
The feast of the Nativity is linked to this last tendency of Christianity. What is celebrated is a God-child, who lies crying between the cow and the bull, and who neither evokes fear nor judges anyone. It is good that Christians return to this figure. It represents the archetypical puer aeternus: the eternal child that, deep down, we never stop being.
One of the best disciples of C. G. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, analyzed this archetype in detail in her book, Puer Aeternus (Paulinas, 1992). It contains a certain ambiguity. If we leave the child behind, it unleashes regressive energies of longings for a world already gone, one which was never totally overcome and integrated. We continue being childish.
But if we put the Eternal Child before us, then He elicits in us a renewal of life, innocence, new possibilities of action that run towards the future.
These, then, are the feelings we want to nourish in this Nativity, in the midst of a somber situation for the Earth and for humanity: Feelings that we still have a future and can save ourselves, because the Star is magnanimous and the puer is eternal, and because He became flesh in this world and will not permit it to totally drown. The humanity and joviality of the God of all nations were manifested in Him. Everything else is vanity.
Done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.