Today, there is much talk about rethinking Christianity, which I support for obvious reasons, and I venture to propose, especially during these dates, re-feeling Christianity.
I feel invited to leave aside “the Western hat” for a few days and to open my soul wide to the nakedness of the Word that accompanies the celebrations of the Christian community.
If we predispose ourselves to feel, to feel with our viscera, perhaps everything turns out less cold, since the liturgy makes sense if there is experience. Without experience, the liturgy is a ritual that may or may not say something. It seems to say little to many people, and my reflection is that an attempt is made to warm it up with carols and a lot of text to compensate for the absence of a cave experience.
Jesus insists that I stop to listen-feel, the meaning of the cave for my life and that of the Christian community, and that of the family.
The cave is not an end in itself; it is an end of a journey, a stage. An essential stage to understand the incarnation. That is to say, Christianity remains just a good ideology if it doesn’t descend from the head to the depths of experience. The cave is something like the depths of humanity, where life is felt, because it is a natural space, without cement or bricks, without partition walls, open.
The cave is a natural opening in the hard rock of life and therefore a space for refuge from the rain, from the law, from destitution and from physical cold and from our interiority.
The cave is within us and outside. Inside, it’s that marginal place of my being that I don’t like, because it’s dark, damp, and cold, unvisited because I’m afraid to go in. And yet it is that place where it is night, and there is no artificial light, which intimidates you to look because you don’t know what or whom you might encounter.
Perhaps, I am getting lost finding people who look at me with affection and that tenderness makes it easier for me to let go, to drop the walls that have separated or divided us.
It’s true that these days we have to do many things, but only one is important now, to clarify that gaze, to discern that fear, to dust off that memory, with the child in my lap, that is.
The cave is that natural opening of nature that welcomes and shelters and that Francis of Assisi in his experience of Christmas fills us with: animals, vegetation, streams… all expectant, all in their pure state.
It is the new creation, the one that was given to us almost 14 billion years ago and that has been happening, miraculously, cell by cell, molecule by molecule… that one we are destroying, because we are afraid of the cave, of the depths of life, of history, and of God, because the cave contains God made flesh, just as the mother’s womb contains the child who will be.
Within myself, if I manage to leave fears behind and peer in, I discover myself inhabited by Love. That smiling child, who changes color and features depending on where the conflict is greatest, whether it’s with people in my family, my parish or religious community, or if it’s conflict between nations that leave behind caves of refugees across the geography of many areas, bordering the cave he chose. Perhaps for that reason.
To enter the cave, I have to bend over. Woe to those of us who don’t know how to bend over, we miss the Treasure! Also, to enter the cave of creation, I have to lower my sense of ownership and respect…and much more to enter the one of people, that is the way to become builders of peace, getting down from the pedestal on which, almost without realizing it, I enshrine myself.
And, finally, and no less important, the cave has no partition walls, it is an open space. There we meet.
Happy Christmas Time in “cave” mode.
Magda Bennásar Oliver, sfcc
English version translated with AI