Liturgies

Homily Advent
December 13-14, 2014

First Reading:
from Louisa Rebgetz ABC Oct 2014

A baby born to an asylum seeker in Brisbane is not entitled to apply for a protection visa, a Federal Circuit Court judge has ruled. Ferouz Myuddin, now 11 months old, was born prematurely in Brisbane's Mater Hospital at South Brisbane in November 2013 after his mother was transferred from the detention centre on Nauru due to concerns about her pregnancy. The Immigration Minister had denied him a protection visa, saying he was an unauthorised maritime arrival and that it has always been the intention of successive governments that children born to illegal maritime arrivals, are taken to have the same status as their parents. He was one of about 100 babies born on Australian soil to asylum seeker parents who arrived via boat.
The Myanmar government passed laws many years ago that denied citizenship to that particular minority. Ferouz's father had been on the run since the Burmese army killed his own father when he was seven years old. His entire family are actually not entitled to citizenship in the country that they originally came from and they are not entitled to citizenship here in Australia
"How much more do we need to put this family through?"

Second Reading:
Are from The New Zealand Herald, Nov 29 and The Age Nov 30 2014
The woman 30 had been living with her aunt and uncle in Quakers Hill in Sydney's west when she became pregnant and kept her condition secret for nine months. After giving birth to a healthy baby boy in a western Sydney hospital at 1am, she discharged herself early that afternoon and took her baby and placed him in a deep concrete stormwater drain around 500m from her home. The baby was put through a small opening into the drain. Five days later, a father and his daughter heard a crying sound coming from a drain as they cycled on the M5 motorway and, thinking it was a kitten, discovered the baby boy miraculously alive.
(Pause)
It is not known whether a newborn baby found buried 30 centimetres deep in sand at Maroubra beach was stillborn, died after birth or was killed. But the baby's unclothed body was deliberately buried and later discovered by two brothers, aged six and seven, who were digging in the sand dunes on Sunday morning. Police said the two nippers were playing at the foot of grassy dunes at the southern end of the beach when they unearthed the baby and called out for their father. Horrified sunbakers and swimmers watched as police arrived and set up a blue tent to recover the remains of the baby under a sunny, blue sky.
Gospel
Matthew 2:13-15

13 Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14 And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt 15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
This is the word of our Lord

Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem for Roman tax purposes and Matthew has Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus travelling to Egypt to escape Herod’s soldiers who sought the presence of a new king as told by the wise men. Caught between the Romans and the local people with talk of Jewish kings and possible rebellion Herod had infant boys under the age of two killed and the authorities believing it was in this nation’s interest.
Christmas in Australia this year is being celebrated in a nation of troubled times.
The Christmas story is that of the intimacy of love’s presence in the birth of a child, a love that engenders a hope that outweighs the intrusions by societal pressures and political powers; a presence that is within the most vulnerable and played out against by very brutal adults, questioning love and its capability to be an ongoing presence.
A family seeking asylum gives birth to a child in Australia and is deemed ‘stateless’, placed in ‘limbo’. Then an unimaginable happening, but for the early Sunday morning passers-by and a baby boy’s faint audible cries from a partially opened concrete storm water drain; five days of post birth solitary confinement, five days of an unloved and uncomforted existence, abandonment beyond belief, a miraculous discovery happens. This good news was then eclipsed by another discovery, a beach burial of an infant girl. There are many instances of despair and brutality that go untold. Todays early morning news told of a 3 year old child in Morayfield north of Brisbane dying of SIDS last year however this incident is now being linked to the death of a 7 month old infant brother this year in a suspicious home fire, the person of interest being a woman. I feel that we may have and are witnessing times in which due to dire circumstances children have and are suffering.

Our Advent homilies this year are of the child, the revisiting of our childhood Christmases, so I will relate some of my memories, memories that are vague and disjointed as was our family's cohesiveness. My father was in a highly respected profession and my mother in a private, solitary and servitude home place, possibly not unlike many families of my era. My father had a detachment and domineering presence within the family and my mother had intense phobias and anxiety.

From a young age Christmas giving became the convenience of a monetary gift or a promise to buy some of necessity, no doubt having a number of children made such a task difficult. I recall as that as I grew older, around 8 or 9, I attempted to create the Christmas that I had become aware of with in other families. Secretly with a few coins I purchased a trinket from the local newsagency, hand drew it’s wrapping paper and its card and gave it to my mother. On another occasion I remember writing on a card M-a-r-y, C-h-r-i-s-t, M-a-s-s, this being a play on the wording of Merry Christmas. My parental response to this card was one of chastisement and the correction of my misspellings. For me these words held the essence of Christmas, namely the family attendance of an obligatory Mass, overdressed in a stifling packed out church and a very boring solemn sermon with great devotion to the purity of Mary and the Christ child, our savour, who would grow up and die for us! As for Joseph he took on an obedient subordinate grandfatherly role. When stripped of its contrivances and overt authoritarianism I feel an essence of truthfulness within a story of the birth of a child and one that is present in all such occasions however as noted in our earlier readings this can be lost or denied by society, individuals, groups and political policies.

Our Christmases were treeless with the exception of one time when a visitor to our home just prior to Christmas observed with some shock that we did not have a family Christmas tree. A small silvery tinseled tasseled twisted wiry tree was purchased and placed in the back of the house. When Christmas was done it was stuffed back into its box and over subsequent years became a greatly deformed, detinseled and tattered tree; possibly the saddest Christmas tree imaginable.

'Christmas is too commercial, so we won't worry about gifts, your birthdays are special, we’ll get you something then!’ My mother would reinstate each Christmas. There was never any gift giving between my siblings, even to this day and birthdays came and went with little gift consideration. So from these few recollections I as a child experienced bland, wonderless and sweet forbidden Christmases however my most pleasant memories of Christmas to this day were of eating mangoes and cherries.
I recall a visit by my aunty, which was not at Christmas time. Being a Good Samaritan nun she spoke fervently of meeting a wonderful man who had knocked on the door of her convent in Sydney. This person had just come from a mental institution and was a good Catholic and a poet. A school textbook contained some of his poetry and when she had us retrieve this from our school bag, she read a particular poem. Recent news of the 5 days spent by the baby boy in his concrete crypt resurrected this poem within me.
Francis Webb’s poem, Five Days Old, is of life over things that make for death. He suffered from schizophrenia and feared his capacity for violence. Having been born in Australia he fought in the Second World War in England where he stayed on. One Christmas, being family less, he was invited to share Christmas with a young couple. It was at this time Francis was also asked to nurse their newly born baby of 5 days. In doing so Francis mediated on how the tiny, not the immense will teach us, us who are so lacking, distant and divorced from life; which is similar to a condition of death! In his poem compassion spreads and gathers people around the Christmas infant, people who are exiled, isolated and excluded. Francis embraces this to the point where, in the final line, the isolated ‘I’ becomes ‘we’, or put another way, those who have been passive in troubled times become active. To me this is our Christmas message with regard to that which is the most vulnerable amongst us, a child, and I feel that this message is one that we all can embrace.
As I share this poem you may feel the in intense trepidation of Francis, his awkwardness, embarrassment and fragility which then transforms to that of an immense sense of awe which as he cradles this venerable vulnerable newness of life within his large trembling hands and is overcome with love.

Five Days Old
(for Christopher John) 1959
Francis Webb

Christmas is in the air
You are given into my hands
Out of quietest, loneliest lands.
My trembling is all my prayer.
To blown straw was given
All the fullness of Heaven.

The tiny, not the immense,
Will teach our groping eyes.
So the absorbent skies
Bleed stars of innocence.
So cloud-voice in war and trouble
Is at last Christ in the stable.

Now wondering engrossed
In your fearless delicacies,
I am launch upon sacred seas,
Humbly and utterly lost
In the mystery of creation,
Bells, bells of oceans.

Too pure for my tongue to praise,
That sober, exquisite yawn
Or the gradual, generous dawn
At an eyelid, maker of day;
To shrive my thought to perfection
I must breathe old tempests of action.

For the snowflake and face of love,
Windfall and word of truth,
Honour close to death.
O eternal truthfulness, Dove,
Tell me what I hold_
Myrrh? Frankincense? Gold?

If this is man, then the danger
And fear are as lights of the inn,
Faint and remote as sin
Out here by the manger,
In the sleeping, weeping weather
We shall all knee down together.