The Anniversary of the Nativity

Man is man's pleasure. Singing-girls, all restraint cast off, lavishing pleasures without reckoning; and young men whom bondage has possessed and over whose souls servility holds sway — they have permitted him everything. An enslaved world, cowed and abject, drives its victims into the furnace of one-man rule; disease and hunger, poverty and ignorance gnaw at it, and it fears to rebel. And the god is a collection of statues in the public squares, the pleasure-haunts, and the dance halls.

The tyrant alone is master of the universe and lord of lords; he roams the earth and rampages, and for his dominion victims are poured out. And the victim is a witless people, blinded by ignorance and enslaved by the strength of the arm, which denied its own humanity so that it might eat and be filled; it worshipped the sun and the moon and every material shape upon the earth. The individual tyrannized over the whole with a savage tyranny, and the flock followed him like a herd and submitted to his will with total submission. At this stage of moral retreat and lost values, and in the midst of humanity's tremendous battle — the battle of the struggle between spirit and matter — the Word went forth from the mouth of eternity and took flesh in the womb of a virgin of Jerusalem, who gave birth in a grotto in the country around Bethlehem, near to our own land, to a wondrous child called Jesus, the awaited Savior. Flights of heaven's angels and shepherds of the wilderness attended his birth, as it is written in the Book, and for the first time the earth chanted the hymn of liberation, of rebellion and revolution, and stripped from itself the pall of fear and terror and submission to the tyrant Caesars and the Caesars' followers; and the people knew that it was itself Caesar, and that there was no Caesar but it. And the first anniversary sent forth a victory for the popular will among the nations and for social justice among men; and the Nazarene was the first man of revolution, the messenger of love, virtue, and brotherhood upon the earth. The tormented of Judea sang the melody of salvation, and all the tormented of the nations repeated its resounding echoes; and the anniversary hallowed a wonder among the wonders that tear down and build up all things, and an uprising among the uprisings of the spirit which create the values of goodness, truth, and beauty, and gather up in justice and fraternity the scattered fragments of man in all his elements, his colors, and his classes.

For the sake of man — straying, tormented, bewildered, creative — it came to pass, and in the conscience of the believers who battle in the cause of truth its immortality has shone. Much of sacrifice, and much of divinity.

And you, O divine Child, are a ululation on the lips of the tormented, a prayer in the depths of the faithful, a curse in the mouth of the oppressors, and a lesson on the road of those who stray. The one thousand nine hundred and fifty-second year has passed, and still you are the ululation, the prayer, the curse, and the lesson.

Time has run its long round in the arena of the many-rounded ages, and for many — indeed for the greater company of us — the anniversary has changed and swerved from its sanctity, its revolution, and its sermon. It finds us tonight gathered around laden banquet tables, before us cups brimming with every kind of wine, as we carouse and sin and transgress and do wrong and race one another in display and in vaunting ourselves each over the other.

While the naked sleep in our streets,
And the poor knock at our doors,
And the hungry sigh over the crumbs of our tables,
And the oppressors sit enthroned upon our constitution.

Your grotto glitters with lights in every one of our houses and glories in its colors, but you — you are far, very far, from our hearts and our souls, our intentions and our deeds and our thinking, as far as the stretch of history that divides your birth from us. And the foundlings we begot despite ourselves in the nights of our straying and our debauchery are despised still in our societies. Conscience has died, and instead of despising ourselves we have despised them, kept far from them, and disowned them, though they are innocent creatures; and instead of our paying the price, it is they who pay it — in humiliation and brokenness, in a pure heart, and in a resentment that will not tarry long before it bursts into a revolution that sweeps away what we call our civilization and our culture. And still every one of our nights yields its tens made by these crimes — even on this anniversary of your birth. We celebrate your birth today and make ready your crucifixion tomorrow; and between your birth and your crucifixion tormented humanity crosses the sea of existence in the ship of pain, ingratitude, and unbelief.

Love does not know its way to our hearts.
Brotherhood has no existence among us.
Tolerance is feeble.
And virtue is barbarism in our clubs.
Those who have hollowed your grotto in their hearts are the far, far distant ones from us.
We rise up one against another — and would that it were a revolution from the radiance of your revolution and a light from your teachings; it is a revolution kindled by the hotbed where destructive ambitions clash within us, fighting the battles of the ruinous selfishness inside us.

The world is a race in the invention of the machines of death, and a crush the like of which history has never known — a crush upon the road of existence, driven by the motive of absolute possession of the universe and of what lies beyond the universe.

O Lord — thought has gained the mastery of the horizons You opened before it, and it doubted Your truth and philosophized over Your birth and the mystery of Your birth; yet it was not long before it bowed down, humbled and small, before Your mission on earth — You who with love tore down the thrones of tyranny and with understanding bound man fast to man. And these teachings You left to us — I come back to them tonight and find myself a new man; I bow before You, great, great indeed; I stretch out my hand to my brother citizen in respect and affection, and I walk in faith and in certainty of the cooperation between us, of our succoring one another, and of the tightening of the bonds of brotherhood among us; and I keep far from those who beat their breasts crying "O Lord" while their hearts are empty of every trace of You. Such men know You in their distress and their need, not in the fullness of their joy and the abundance of their goods.

The anniversary of your birth is the Song of Songs on the lips of the tormented and the wretched of the earth; these hallow you in their misery and their torment, thank you in their joy and their gladness, and set their hope on you in their despair and their despondency.

You are the song and the remedy, the hope and the praise.

O wondrous Child!

Your anniversary — I would have it a pickaxe to tear down what is crumbling among our houses and to build upon the ruins a house of your houses and an edifice of your edifices, to which man of every color and race, every class and rank, may come for shelter.

Matter builds high, runs riot, and rules — but the victory belongs to the spirit.

The candle burns that it may give light.
Knowledge is building up, not tearing down.
Culture is enlightenment, not leading astray.
Man rises above man by the virtues.
A little understanding and a little love — peoples are made happy and nations arise.