The Tribune

This column is dedicated to all parents and families with newborn infants.

When a newborn opens his or her eyes, they are seeing the world for the first time. They are disoriented, finding their way, becoming human through the face, gaze and love of others, especially parents and family.

A baby begins to explore the world though the wonder and awe of new things. They put all manner of things in their mouths. They touch things. Various sounds and sights often mesmerise them. Babies discover the world through play, learning and exploration.

As we age, we should grow in wisdom and insight. We no longer need to learn not to bite into a goat pepper like its candy or fruit. Children quickly learn a variety of basic lessons. A certain wisdom tends to come with adulthood and our senior years.

Still, with ageing, our sight and insight is sometimes diminished. Our biases often become more entrenched. Our blind spots can widen and deepen from mere spots to gaps.

The disappointments, failings and tribulations of life can narrow our vision, and shutter our eyes and imagination. Glaucoma of the spirit can render us unsighted.

Pride of all degrees and flavors, including intellectual pride, can obscure new insights, discoveries, and ways of thinking beyond what we learned in our formative years into adulthood. This includes those of us who may dogmatically adhere to various ideological confines and borders.

Sometimes we fail to see nuances and a wider palette of colors and thought. Our vision is more panoramic when we are able to hold certain contradictions and ironies in creative tension in our imaginations and hearts.

It is remarkable the number of “learned” men of his era, including scientists, who pilloried Charles Darwin’s ideas and studies on the origins of the species and natural selection. They could not see anew because they were paralysed by outdated and defensive thinking and mindsets.

Even the great Albert Einstein sometimes had limited vision. The Catholic priest cosmologist, theoretical physicist and mathematician Georges Lemaître, possessed profound insights and theories of an expanding universe and “the primeval atom”, the precursor to the Big Bang model.

The idea of an expanding universe triggered a profound and difficult question: “What happened at the beginning of time?” Einstein famously upbraided Lemaître: “Your calculations are correct, but your physics is abominable.”

Nevertheless, the priest’s core insight was correct, which Einstein later admitted. It was the man of faith who helped the brilliant agnostic to see something new. To his credit, Einstein, who remained open to growth, advised: “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

Along with the conceit of pride, one the great blinders, which encrusts or closes our eyes, is anger. This deadly sin often blinds us, seizes our emotions and will, causing us to make harsh judgments and to see phantoms and ghosts which exist mostly or only in our fevered imaginations.

Anger may cause us to spin out of control and to do and say things we regret. It can induce judgements that are deeply flawed. Anger, like cataracts, can incapacitate us from seeing the reality before us. Anger robs us and our loved ones of peace.

What might a newborn teach us? The birth of a child in a family may help us to refocus beyond family divisions, past or current conflicts, and other valleys of pain and hurt.

Like a newborn, it is often good to have a certain disoriented vision or second naiveté, empowering us to explore and to reimagine the world, oneself, others, and the mystery of creation and God in fundamental and new ways.

Lord, help me to see with new eyes should be a refrain of Advent and Christmas!

Isaiah 43:19 is an invitation to seeing with eyes, hearts, and imaginations wide open:

“See, I am doing a new thing!

Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the wilderness

and streams in the wasteland.”

Do you not perceive it,” asks the prophet? Through God’s redeeming love and power, and our response to this love, life-giving springs and ways may be made in the wilderness and wasteland of our sinfulness, addictions, brokenness, diagnoses of ill health, impending death, and our fears, pride and anger.

Abundant streams of hope and healing may appear in even the driest and most barren caverns of our dusty souls.

There is a specific newborn who offers the promise of new life. The Incarnation of God in human history in the person of Jesus Christ transformed human being and longing.

At Christmas, we celebrate and commemorate this new way of seeing with and through the eyes of Christ. Christmas is an invitation to love. The Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, SJ, a theologian whose prose was highly poetic, articulated this invitation.

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

Fire often purifies. It purifies the resonance and call of the goatskin drum. The fire of love can purify the soul of spiritual and moral blindness. This Christmas, how may we purify the ways we think of other people and the manner in which we act toward others.

How can be purify our judgments, our conceits, our indifference, our words, our negative and harmful thoughts, our closed and checkered eyes? This is a personal journey. It is also a communal journey and mandate.

We look again to Isaiah:

“Learn to do right; seek justice.

Defend the oppressed.

Take up the cause of the fatherless;

plead the case of the widow.”

As a people of faith and as a society striving to be more civil, just, humane and Christian, how do we better pry open our often shuttered eyes to the inequality, hunger, and lack of opportunity for many of our fellow human beings and citizens?

Do we perceive the needs and rights of the marginalized, as well as the entrenched structural reasons for inequality? This includes the various economic monopolies and conglomerates which horde wealth, often protected by some in the political class, who benefit from certain arrangements of power and mammon.

The Incarnation and remembrance of this divine love at Christmas reminds us of the radical dignity of ourselves, the very same radical dignity inherent in others. A reminder of this dignity may allow us to see with new eyes, often closed by the burdens of our daily lives and the human baggage we all need to discard.

In his Urbi et Orbi (to the City [Rome]) and the World Christmas blessing of 2022, Pope Francis offered: “If we want it to be Christmas, the Birth of Jesus and of peace, let us look to Bethlehem and contemplate the face of the Child who is born for us! And in that small and innocent face, let us see the faces of all those children who, everywhere in the world, long for peace.”

Through the small and innocent faces and eyes of newborns in our families and communities, let us look with more open and wondrous eyes, how may be better friends and family members, more forgiving, more merciful, more loving.

Through the eyes and faces of vulnerable children in our society, may be better realize the demands of the Kingdom of God, beginning with a society in which no child in this country should go hungry or be in need of the basic material and nonmaterial goods of life.

May we grant to ourselves and to others more gentleness, kindness and harmony. And we might ever recall in good and tough times the balm offered from the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth: “Joy is the simplest form of gratitude!” A blessed and joyous Christmas.