Stockings filled by God

This column is in memory of Bernice Lennox, whose funeral I celebrated Nov. 29, 2022.  She died at the blessed age of 99. When I was appointed pastor of St. Thomas More Parish in Baton Rouge in July 1990, I had the good fortune of getting a parish that published not just a bulletin every week with Mass schedules and other upcoming events.  St. Thomas More sent to each home in the parish its own weekly newspaper, “THE TOWER.”  
It was able to do this because of a team of five or six women who volunteered their talents, who in some cases were professional: example, Bernie Lennox, graduate of the LSU School of Journalism.  She was a darn good journalist and the source of lots of fun and laughter down the hall from my office.  All I had to do was write a column, which I squeezed in on Tuesdays after the 6 a.m. Mass.  The following was my Christmas column for 1995: 

Please to put a nickle.
Please to put a dime.
How petitions trickle
In at Christmas time!…
The Common Colds Committee
Implores you to assist.
They’re canvassing the city,
They’ve got you on their list.
Demonstrate your mettle
For half a hundred causes
Give for holy Charity
Wherever she appears.
And don’t forget the Firemen and the Southern Mountaineers.
Christmas is coming,
The mail is getting fat.
Please to put a penny in every proffered hat.
If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’pence let it be.
If you haven’t got a ha’pence you’re just like me.

With only nine days left to Christmas, you may identify with Phyllis McGinely in her poem “Dear Madam: We Know You Will Want to Contribute.”  You have filled others’ stockings until you feel quite empty, both spiritually and financially.
Well, good!  Now you are ready to get down to the serious business of Christmas and let God fill you.  God took flesh in Jesus so that his love might be seen in us.  At Christmas we are challenged to put flesh on all of those words we hear in the Scriptures and even use ourselves: peace, love, compassion, reconciliation, self-giving.
St. Francis of Assisi, who created the first Christmas creche nearly 800 years ago, understood well what God intended. In that first Nativity scene which he created on the property of a friend, Giovanni di Grecchio, in a mountain cave at midnight, Dec. 24, 1223,  St. Francis placed next to the manger only Giovanni’s white ox, Olivia, and a neighbor’s homely donkey.  No one played the roles of St. Joseph and Mary, the shepherds or the wise men.  There was only a bare stone to serve as an altar for the Christmas Mass and in front of it the animals and the empty manger.
St. Francis, after all, was the poet of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon.”   He knew how to make his point.  Gradually, the villagers who gazed upon the scene were amazed at God’s love that did not hesitate to come among them in a birthplace so ordinary and bare.  This was a God who wished to fill the emptiness of their hearts.  
The point of the empty crib and the two common farm animals was to make us see the lowliness into which the son of God was born.  St. Francis knew the meaning of incarnation; he appreciated the power of the senses.  If we are touched by the scene, then God’s word might become flesh in us too.  We might be moved to alleviate the poverty of those who are broken by it.  We might shelter those who have no place to rest.  Spirit and grace are words that seem removed from our everyday world.  Yet, it is precisely in this world that they must take flesh.  They found expression in the blood and bone of the child (and later the man) Jesus.  So too must they become part of our life.
This Christmas we pray that Christ may find rest in the cave of our hearts so that we may place our flesh at his disposal to live simply, justly, and generously for others.
Merry Christmas y’all!

Father John Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at [email protected].