We must also make ‘creches of the soul’ to welcome the Lord’s coming
A Christmas nativity scene at Bac Thanh Church in Nha Trang diocese. (Photo: UCA News)
Noel is called the season of Christmas creches in Vietnam. Creches are erected at all parishes in rural and urban places. Many are made of simple materials such as paper and cardboard while others are made from more expensive items. Many creches are as small as a hand and others are as big as a building. They are set up in deserted fields and busy shopping centers.
When contemplating nativity scenes, people can have great admiration for their artistic beauty or expensive decorations, but surely creches that stir and touch us deeply must make each of us feel the emotional closeness and easy familiarity.
Therefore, Vietnamese people like to make nativity scenes as models of small houses with thatched roofs and bamboo walls, next to earthenware jars of water, plows and other farm tools.
We also like to decorate them with rice straw on which the Baby Jesus lies, and place small oil lamps and a few statues of buffalo boys playing the flute instead of Western-styled figures, next to him.
“The most appropriate spiritual mood to celebrate Christmas must be similar to the way we make nativity scenes”
Maybe the basic idea of this kind of nativity scene is to highlight poverty and simplicity in the national cultural context. But there is a key point here: those objects are completely familiar with and close to each of us as if it were us to live in the scenes. We want to do our part and to place familiar things in our life next to the Infant Jesus.
Such a simple and popular consciousness turns out to be especially relevant to holding Christmas celebrations even in the theological sense. Jesus entered the world not to build a new world order in the political or social sense, nor did he come to demonstrate God’s authority over humankind. On the contrary, he became a man to strengthen his relationship with us, to shake hands with people and help them recognize a close and loving God, so that we could feel the closeness and call him “Father.” God comes to embrace people and let them be able to come to him.
Therefore, the most appropriate spiritual mood to celebrate Christmas must be similar to the way we make nativity scenes. In other words, we must also make ‘creches of the soul’ to welcome the Lord’s coming. According to the circumstances of each of us, we should design spiritual creches in our own way, but it is absolutely imperative that we use what is most familiar to our lives as materials to make creches for the Child Jesus.
Such materials, which are often the ones we are most concerned about, can be great worries about our livelihoods, future, successes, failures, society and Church. They are concrete joys and sorrows in our daily life. They can also be feelings for our spouses and families, and they can also be our strife, weaknesses and depravities.
We should place what is closest to our minds next to the Christ Child, instead of saying empty prayers. Surely he will especially love to dwell in creches of souls decorated with such things. They will be sanctified as they are graced by God’s presence and embraced by him. That is also his desire when he entered the world: to become a human being so that humans could be sanctified and be closely and intimately united with God.
This article was summarized and translated by a UCA News reporter from a Vietnamese article published by dongten.net here. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
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