This Most Tremendous Tale

The Catholic Thing

By Fr. Benedict Kiely.
Long before the ancient and much-needed credal formulas, defining the parameters of our basic beliefs, like the great Councils of Ephesus and of Nicaea, the 1700th anniversary of which we will celebrate in 2025, the very first creed was uttered during the drama of the Easter days.
When the two disciples who encountered the Risen Lord on the road to Emmaus rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the others of their astounding experience, they heard the words: "Yes, it is true, Jesus has risen from the dead." That is the very foundation of our faith. If, as one inane clergyman said many years ago, the Resurrection was merely a "conjuring trick with bones," then we should all eat, drink, and be merry and, perhaps, become Hare Krishna devotees. Yes, it is true: Christ is risen, and all has changed.
Before that fact, we pause and ponder the cosmos-changing, precursory fact, the very reason we celebrate Christmas, without which the Resurrection itself would not have the foundation it required.
We are in the "in-between time" from Christ's first coming at Christmas, to His Second and Final Coming on the Last Day. That phrase comes from the Anglican poet and clergyman, Malcolm Guite. What he means is that, since Christ's birth in Bethlehem, His First Coming, we await His Final Appearance, on the Last Day. All time since His birth is the "in-between" time, as we await his Final Coming, which will not be hidden and in a stable unknown to the great and the good, it will be terrifying.
All those who denied Him, condemned Him, and continue to wound His sacred body with their sins and hatred - let us never be so presumptuous as to say that is not us - will, as the Advent carol says, be "deeply wailing." Our meditation for Christmas is the simple question of who and what we celebrate during the Christmas season.
Jesus Christ, born of Mary, is God. When we genuflect, as we do, during the Creed on Christmas Day at the words, "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us," we are acknowledging, both with our words and the physical attitude of worship and obeisance, that simple truth. Body and soul are, for a rare moment, in harmony.
It is either true, or untrue, there is no middle ground. The idea of the agnostic, a spiritual and intellectual sitting on the fence, is a feeble one, it lacks courage; the fence can also be a rather painful place to perch.
Sir John Betjeman, the late English poet, put it rather well in one of his Christmas poems. When being considered for the position of Poet Laureate, the Guardian newspaper described him as "arbitrary and irrelevant;" something the Guardian would naturally know all about. Betjeman, with his characteristic good humor, enthusiastically agreed that he was irrelevant.
Except that he wrote:
And is true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all.
"This most tremendous tale:" the truth we affirm in the Creed, the dogmas of the Faith, the two-thousand-year-old history of Christianity, the beauty created by Christian culture, the doctrine of the dignity of humanity, and finally the beauty of holiness exemplified in the lives of the saints, all of it depends on the answer to that question: "and is it true?"
If it is, everything is changed. Life, morals, attitude, culture, politics, all of the mundane in the true sense of the word.
Betjeman continues the poem posing the question that, if it is true, all that we think is important, not just for Christmas but throughout our lives, cannot, as he says,
with this single Truth compare
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
Christmas is a time of joy, of hope, to truly merry-make, to be with friends and family, to acknowledge the truth that we acknowledge has changed our lives, and for the better.
But this celebration, this joy, this "in-between" time that we who call ourselves Christians are living in, until His Second Coming, the day and the hour we do not know, this in-between time, is to prepare for His Second Com...