I remember the parish scene on Christmas morning in Ireland – all those people who had come home, the pews full of generations of each family. And my words of “special welcome to all who have come home for Christmas”. Here, I wish them well as they leave, and those of us who remain here during Christmas promise to accompany them with our prayers and they promise to remember us at home. We will celebrate Christmas here. We will celebrate it the way we know, the way we remember. With mixed nostalgia we try to recreate what an Irish Christmas once meant to us in the hope that we can perhaps touch again the meaning that meant so much in a different time, in a different place. In between carols, we read Kavanagh’s “A Christmas Childhood”, delighting in his ability to capture “the winking glitter of a frosty dawn”. We decorate our Chapel. We have a Christmas tree where we hang our prayers written on pieces of diamond-shaped coloured paper. And a pretty crib. Mass on Christmas morning with a cup of coffee afterwards, and no doubt, something through it to warm the heart. The real warming of the heart will hopefully have happened for all of us some moments prior to that. The proclamation of a Gospel story … the sharing of the Eucharist … the contemplation of the child in the crib … to bring us into the mystery of the God who “imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven”. Fr Declan Hurley Irish Chaplain, Paris. December 2004 |