Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Homily of Bishop Colm O’Reilly for Christmas Midnight Mass

The celebration of the Feast of Christmas in this Year of Faith should take us to the heart of the Mystery of the Incarnation.  It puts us in touch with the Son of God who came to share life with us and offer us the great gift of sharing his life for ever. The Feast of Christmas is truly a moment of awesome wonder.  

Some of the greatest artists of all time have used their genius to express in painting, musical compositions and poetry the wonder of this great Mystery. They contributed to a deeper understanding of this Feast. Rembrandt, a Dutch artist, was a great exponent of a style of painting known as chiaroscuro, making use of bright light and dark shadow to great effect.  He used this way of painting to illustrate the scene at Bethlehem, making the Infant in the manger the centre and the source of brilliant light.  

From the Child light is reflected on to the faces of Mary, Joseph and the Shepherds.  He painted himself into the picture, in the light and the dark.   He seems to have been able to draw on his own troubled life to show how the Son of God entered fully into our world with all its darkness.   

Another great artist of our own country and time was able to do the same in his poetry.  The Monaghan-born poet, Patrick Kavanagh, wrote in his poem A Childhood Christmas about the light and darkness of Christmas as a six year-old child saw it. As a child he was moved by the wonder of a frosty Christmas dawn. He was touched by the contrast between the light and the dark.  As his mother milked the cows, he saw he saw the light of her lamp and connected it with the star of Bethlehem.  

“The light of her stable-lamp was a star and the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle” he wrote.   

Tonight the first words of the First Reading are about darkness.  It was the darkness that descended on the Hebrew people when they were deported into exile.  For some it was more than the darkness of a strange land.  The eyes of some had been cruelly gouged out by the Babylonians who were their captors. For a distressed people the Prophet Isaiah had hope.   A brilliant light would shine and joy and gladness would replace their gloom.    

The Gospel tells us how the words of Isaiah were to be fulfilled.  St Luke connects the darkness and the light in the story of the birth of Jesus.   The Gospel does not gloss over the harsh message of darkness and rejection that is included in the telling of the story.  Mary and Joseph, as St Luke tells the story, were caught up in the cruelty of the Romans who had been the latest to overrun the Land of the Birth of Jesus.  

Following the order of the Emperor, Caesar Augustus, they had to travel the rugged journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.  This was a pointer to what was to come. So too was their being turned away from the where they sought shelter.   One could say that already before his birth Jesus was being rejected.  

In Longford we have known what it is like to be enveloped by darkness.  This was the kind of Christmas we had three years ago when we had the dreadful accident which destroyed our Cathedral.  We now look forward to the one that will see us back there for the first time after its restoration is complete.  In the meantime this year and next year we need to think about the opportunity that restoring St Mel’s Cathedral is offering us.  

We are rebuilding a fine and ancient Church wrecked by a disastrous fire.  

The circumstances in which this happened have made Longford’s Cathedral better known than any other in Ireland and also well known outside of the country.  We have been given both a heavy cross to bear and a great challenge.  

While we have a Cathedral to rebuild we have an opportunity to say something about the resilience of our faith.  It should be our hope that when St Mel’s Cathedral has been restored we will be able also to say that we were able to be a light that shone in the darkness.  

The late Father Sean Corkery who came from these parts wrote a book about Clonmacnois at the time when the Pope visited there.  He said of the ruins of the great monastery that “what seemed to be the graveyard of all our hopes had become the hope of all our graveyards”.   

It is my hope and prayer that something similar can be said about how we brought hope out of gloom since our Cathedral was destroyed in 2009.  If we have a restored Cathedral and a renewed faith in two years’ time, we will truly have good reason to rejoice.