I’VE HEARD A very old story about Christmas: When Adam and Eve were in the garden, they often sang with the angels, the most perfect sound ever created. When they were banished, the song fractured. Neither choir—human nor angelic—could sing perfect praises to the Creator of the universe alone.
On Christmas, however, a miracle occurs. The heavenly hosts reunite with mortal shepherds—the band is back together, the choir again complete. At least for a day, heaven and earth are reconciled in song.
Why is this memory of the Nativity important for us now?
In the ancient worldview, everything earthly had a spiritual counterpart. “What people in the Bible called ‘Principalities and Powers’ was in fact ... the actual spirituality at the center of political, economic, and cultural institutions of their day,” wrote theologian Walter Wink.
When the powers (or heavenly choirs of angels) integrate with humans around God’s values, we glimpse heaven on earth. But, according to Wink, “when an entire network of Powers becomes integrated around idolatrous values,” we get what he called the domination system. We get what we see in the U.S.
While many Christians are wrestling physically against fascism’s local metastases in our cities and rural areas, we recall that we contend not only with, as Paul wrote, “flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness” (Ephesians 6:12).
God sees our angels, our spiritual selves.
The monstrous personalities associated with “this present darkness” are only flesh and blood. But they are animated by and are animators of spirits of domination, cruelty, greed, and private self-loathing. From White House press conferences to videos of ICE attacks, from banal congressional debates on stripping Americans of health care to the murder of public figures, these savage spirits infect and spread. We see them, feel them.
And yet: the Nativity.
What happens when our world encounters the Christ Child? Every mortal deserves to be gazed upon with the eyes of Love. That squirming, powerless child looks at us, all of us, with profound love. To God, we are more than flesh and blood. God sees our angels, our spiritual selves. God wants our “little lights” to raze this domination system to the ground.
Vasily Grossman, a Jewish Ukrainian war correspondent on the Soviet front during World War II, wrote in Life and Fate that his faith had been “tempered in Hell,” given what he had seen and endured. Still he wrote, it is “not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man.” Tenderly, Grossman describes “the powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness,” as the secret to love’s immortality. Human history is not a battle of good over evil. “It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness,” Grossman wrote.
Why is the miracle of heavenly hosts singing with the shepherds important? Because when angels and humans reunite, the domination system crumbles; the voices of savage spirits retreat, and the kernel of human kindness sends up shoots. As Wink reminds, “Every act that weakens the Domination System strengthens the new order of God.” This is the secret to love’s immortality.
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
