Merry Christmas, my friends!
I wish you all the blessings of the peace of Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate on this day. It’s a day of tradition and family time, a time when we work to best live out our ideals of joy and togetherness. It’s one of the most celebrated holidays across the world, and one of the few days when almost all Western countries close down and people are allowed to spend time with their loved ones.
For us at the Maria Skobtsova House (MSH), it’s both a normal Christmas and completely abnormal.
Most Christmases since we’ve lived in Calais, we’ve spent the 24th of December at MSH, sharing gifts with the guests of the house and spending joyful moments together laughing and dancing. Most of our guests don’t come from Christian cultures, but they enjoy celebrating with us anyway; for them it’s a way to distract themselves from the stressors they are facing.
But not this year.
This year the house is filled with activity: women rushing to and fro, gathering their things, showering, dressing, and preparing to go out. You see, the next steps in these women’s journey is fully dependent on the weather, which is unstable most of the winter. This year there are a few days of good weather surrounding Christmas Day, so the women are planning and preparing for their departure. The house is unnaturally quiet, with a calmness that only comes with the absence of guests and their children.
Suddenly we receive an urgent message from some guests who are stranded at a bus stop in a town 30 minutes away. There are no buses running today, so they are asking if we can come pick them up. We try to find alternative solutions: trains, other buses, etc., but in the end I have to drive to collect them. They are grateful for the ride, but obviously discouraged and tired after spending a cold night outdoors. I smell the smoke of a campfire clinging to their clothes as they enter the car.
The drive back is mostly quiet, the women too tired to speak. One of them shares a message she has translated on her phone. She says, “Thank you for your kindness in coming to get us. We’re sorry that you had to come all the way here.”
“You don’t need to apologise,” I tell them. We continue on in silence.
On our return to MSH, the women immediately eat, drink some hot tea, and go upstairs to rest.
We spend the rest of the day preparing for dinner, which is shared by candlelight surrounding a table that is too big for the small number of people who are present. The only guest who are left are the ones I picked up earlier in the day. They arise from their slumber shortly after we finish the appetiser course, and they join us for the remainder of the feast.
The meal is delicious, primarily consisting of Italian dishes provided by the parents of one of the volunteers who have come to spend Christmas with us. We share laughter and stories, enjoying each other’s company and some quality time of togetherness. The whole time, however, I can sense an uneasiness, a slight anxiety about the fate of the women who’ve left us today, and the powerlessness that we feel at not being able to do anything more than we already have.
Yes, this Christmas is different from any I’ve had before, but it is beautiful.
This juxtaposition of joy and anxiety is a defining characteristic of our life in Calais. Not just on Christmas, but every day. In some ways the life we live here is a facade: hiding just beneath the surface of our happy interactions with the guests is the fear that we may lose them to the waves of the English Channel. They experience the same feelings. We know that the peace we experience in this house is temporary, a bandage on the wounds of those who live with unspeakable trauma, yet choose to open themselves to joy in our presence.
But the story of Christmas gives us hope. In Christmas Christians believe that God literally came to walk among us. The God that created the universe and all it contains chose to become like his creations, living among the lowest of the low, experiencing poverty and homelessness, hunger and thirst. Likewise, he experienced joy and love and peace and happiness with his creations.
Through his incarnation as a man, he has given us the example to incarnate his love to those we serve. We choose to live this dual life of joy and sorrow so that we can be the hands and feet of God incarnate among what Scripture calls “the least of these.”
On this Christmas we experienced the highs and lows of the human experience, just as our Savior did so many years ago. Let us remember to live each moment and each day in the memory of the God who chose to leave his throne and come down to live among us because of his great love for all of humanity. Let us love without reservation and open ourselves to the joys and sorrows of those around us for the sake of the God who loves us, for the God who gave his life for us.
This is the meaning of Christmas.