Reflections on Christmas and the New Year # 1
I intend this writing about one central meaning of our Christmas celebration to be the first of two reflections on this holiday/holyday celebration. This one will focus above all on Francis the Great’s 2020 encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship. (About which I have written 5 commentaries on this blogsite, all in November 2020.) The second will contrast Francis with Trump as “cultural icons” for two very different political and social futures for our world in 2024.
My wife and I ended this year’s Christmas Letter with the following citation: “The urgency to get out into the world, to the margins, is what Jesus’ incarnation is all about. When Jesus later says ‘Come, follow me’ he is not talking about climbing a ladder to heaven. Jesus is heading downward, into the world of the poor and oppressed. It is along that road that he invites us to journey with him.”
“Downward into the world [and] along that road” can and should mean many things to different people and situations. In this Christmas reflection I wish to explain what the Pope means by social friendship with reference to what my mentor Lynch means by his teaching that faith has a body or must be embodied in the real world of social experience (in his 1973 book Images of Faith).
Neither Francis nor Lynch (two great Jesuits) mean something simple. I, then, have the freedom to give a fairly simplistic explanation while acknowledging that I’ve but scratched the surface.
Clearly, Jesus’ ‘follow me” does mean direct service to the poor, homeless street folk, refugees and immigrants in our cities. Yet it also means, and commands, restoring and building up the relations of trust and hope within our human “city” (whether extended family, ethnic tribe, or small village, whether town or city, local or national) – relations so trampled and torn by the polarizations which dominate our public (even familial) lives.
For if, at Christmas, we again celebrate and pray for “peace on earth, good will toward men”, those words clearly imply the foundation of such peace – the sense of basic trust and social friendship without which any human (humane, civic, civilized) society is impossible.
Francis’ discussion of such social friendship is appropriately detailed, covering many different aspects of social life, in the nation and world – from discussions of war and violence, to poverty and work, justice and climate change, law and civic justice, and more. I suspect it will, long after he and I have both exited this world, be considered one of the great papal social encyclicals, one of the major building blocks of Catholic Social Teaching which started in 1890 with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (about new social conditions in the industrial age).
Yet the grounding principle which moves through these many dimensions andss crises remains that given by its title “Fraternity and Social Friendship”. And yes, pace many feminists, also “Sorority” or the social friendship among women and between women and men. We trust our friends or lose friendship when we lose trust. And this is true not only among what today we consider close friendships, but among work colleagues, the other drivers on the road, fellow voters and taxpayers, and so on.
Lynch’s discussion of “the body of faith” is less discursive or expansive than the Pope’s. His is more a theoretical effort to change how we imagine faith, from something transcendental to something primarily horizontal. From what binds us to God to what binds us to our many kinds of neighbors. And most importantly, it is that latter relationship of faith – to friends and fellows, sisters and brothers in this very ordinary and secular world – that is the most fundamental. Without a realistic sense of faith in the human community (well-seasoned, of course, by appropriate forms of distrust, skepticism, and wariness), any supposed faith in God is little more than an illusion (substituting as both Marx and Freud correctly noted, for the absence of faith in humans and humanity).
Both Francis and Fr. Lynch, then, as I understand them, remind us that Christmas means Jesus coming into this messy world (of dirty shepherds and royal princes) to bring realistic forms of peace and transforming forms of justice. A good – and hopefully somewhat merry – Christmas to all readers-friends. And should you wish some reading about all this for the holidays or thereafter, I highly recommend starting with Francis.