大象传媒

By now this feels like the quietest night of the year, after the gawdy excess of Christmas and before the frenzy of the Boxing Day sales. Memories, hopes and fears come creeping out of hiding as we reflect on the year just passing, and wonder about the year to come.
I went into labour thirty two years ago tonight with my third child. We were living in Zimbabwe, and my parents and mother-in-law were staying with us for Christmas. It was soon after midnight and everybody had gone to bed. My husband and I drove to the hospital through the deserted streets of Harare, in the starlit warmth of the African night. My son was born at midday, after a gentle birth, as these things go.聽
Three of my four children were born in Africa, where thousands of poor women die in childbirth every year. I鈥檝e experienced life-threatening complications in pregnancy, but that Boxing Day birth could be called a text book delivery. Yet no text book can express what it means to hold a newborn baby to your breast and weep with wonder at the miracle of life. To speak of such things, we need poetry, music and art. Perhaps we need ancient stories of angels singing to shepherds, and of wise men coming from afar to worship the child who has been born.
Last year, my Christmas baby himself had a son. I鈥檇 forgotten how amazing it is to experience a child鈥檚 first year of life. The silent wisdom of an infant鈥檚 gaze, which seems to absorb the entire world. The delight of the first smile of recognition. The thrill of a baby learning to crawl and to walk, playing with sounds, speaking in scribbles. I鈥檝e realized anew what it means for a fresh generation to come into being. I鈥檝e discovered the astonishing capacity of a baby to draw the family together and create a new world of love and vulnerability at the very heart of things.
Seven years ago, I was once again awake through Christmas night, keeping a bedside vigil beside my dying mother-in-law. She was ninety years old and, though she鈥檇 been suffering from cancer, there was a profound peace about her that night. Her hand on the bedclothes was gnarled, her cheeks sunken, her skin translucent. We鈥檇 arranged flowers around her bed, and we鈥檇 put a photograph of her beloved husband, long dead, where she could see it. Occasionally she opened her eyes and murmured his name. I felt as if she were journeying through that long dark night towards a reunion with him.聽
My mother in law was an inspiration to me. She was a strong woman who鈥檇 struggled to overcome the effects of a loveless and abused childhood. Like many women of her generation, she was left alone with young children when her husband went to war, and faced years of rationing afterwards. At the sight of a banana, she could never resist saying, 鈥淲e couldn鈥檛 get bananas during the war.鈥� When my children were young, it was a game to see how often they could get Nanny to say that.
At her funeral Mass, I looked around at three generations who owed their lives to her determination to create a better family than the one she鈥檇 been born into. Her thirteenth great grandchild was born a few hours after she died. Hers was one of those quiet and modest lives that heal the world, the kind of life described in the last lines of George Eliot鈥檚 Middlemarch.
In her dying months, my mother-in-law received back the love she鈥檇 poured out. Bedridden and incontinent, she was nursed gently towards death by her children and grandchildren. I reflect on that now, as my own mother grows increasingly frail and vulnerable. I feel the complex dynamics of our mother-daughter relationship yielding to a protective tenderness, and a sense of gratitude for all that my mother struggled to be and to do for her three daughters.聽
Children, parents and grandparents change roles as we go through life. This year, I heard a television interview with a young Afghan refugee who was pushing his grandmother in a wheelchair across the hostile landscapes of Europe. The interviewer said in astonishment, 鈥渂ut that鈥檚 thousands of miles!鈥� 鈥淚t鈥檚 very hard,鈥� agreed the young man. 鈥淲ill you ever give up?鈥�, asked the interviewer. No, that eighteen year old replied, he would never give up. He would keep going.
For me, as for many others, the abiding image of this year is the body of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a Mediterranean beach. Like Mary and Joseph fleeing with their child into Egypt, Aylan鈥檚 parents were desperately trying to protect their children from the violence that鈥檚 as real today as it was then. John Donne鈥檚 famous poem, No Man is an Island, includes the lines, 鈥淚f a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.鈥� If that鈥檚 true of a clod of dirt, how much more true is it of a child?聽
Syria, place of so much suffering, is also the cradle of the ancient Church. Here is a choir of the Syrian Church, telling the story of the nativity from Luke鈥檚 Gospel in ancient Syrian/Aramaic chant. I offer it as a prayer for all whose lives are torn apart by violence, war and terror.
The birth of Jesus enfolds within itself the peace and joy we long for, and the trauma and suffering we endure. It displaces our ideas of a God of wrath and judgement, and invites us to see God in the helpless and the forsaken, the refugee and the outcast, the newborn child and the victim on the cross.聽T.S. Eliot鈥檚 poem, The Journey of the Magi expresses the paradox of the nativity.
Luke鈥檚 Gospel tells us that Mary pondered all these things in her heart. I converted to Catholicism when my four children were small. I remember kneeling in front of the dusty pieta in my parish church, drawn towards this powerful symbol of maternal love and sorrow. As a feminist and a convert, I experience Mary differently from some women who grew up as Catholics, for whom Mary has been an oppressive model of submission and obedience. I see her as a woman who dared to say yes to God even though her pregnancy would scandalise the neighbours and she risked being stoned to death for adultery. Her Magnificat is a powerful vision of justice which tells us that God has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly, has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away. For me, Mary reveals a God who speaks and acts through women鈥檚 faith and courage.
Yet I know how much women still struggle to find a voice and be heard in the Catholic Church. In October this year, nearly three hundred cardinals and bishops from around the world held a meeting in Rome, a Synod on the Family, to discuss the challenges facing families in the world today. But only thirty women were invited to attend.聽
Earlier this year, I started a Facebook group called Catholic Women Speak, which is now a worldwide network of more than a thousand women. In May, some of us decided to produce a book of short essays and reflections by Catholic women in time for the Synod, to give women a voice. Miraculously, we found a publisher despite the short notice. At the beginning of October, we had a book launch in Rome attended by over a hundred people. Contributors and supporters came from all over the world 鈥� old and young, single and married, gay women and nuns, academic theologians, musicians, parish workers , teachers 鈥� all of us sharing our stories and celebrating our faith with laughter and music and wine. It felt like a miracle, but the final miracle was when, after several refusals, we were finally allowed to deliver free copies of the book to the Synod hall for the bishops to take. This involved several taxi journeys through Rome and attracted a few puzzled looks when two women walked into the hall carrying boxes of books. After the first week we heard that all two hundred and fifty copies had gone, and we had to deliver fifty more. That experience taught me so much about trusting God and working and praying with others for a shared vision. One of the contributors to the book wrote that 鈥淲omen have moved from silence to speech, from invisibility to presence, from submission to co-responsibility.鈥�
Silence takes many forms. It can be a fragile gift easily destroyed by the frenetic pace of modern life, or it can be oppressive and stultifying. The year ahead beckons to us through the silence tonight, whispering of hope and new beginnings, but also shadowed with the fear of yet more violence and misery to come.