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.