The Dec. 12 "Christmas" episode was as real, and ordinary as the coming of God into the world was real and ordinary - warm, human baby flesh coming to an ordinary couple in an ordinary town. It was one of the few shows I watched that, instead of focusing on presents, reflected the reality of what Christmas is - the Birth of Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary. Not a surprise, since the heart of the show is the Twelve Steps of AA, a recovery program for addicts based on belief in a Higher Power. The third step of AA is "to make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God."
In this episode, Bonnie and Christy invite Bonnie's lonely sponsee Patty to spend Christmas with them. Bonnie is feeling very affirmed because someone has chosen her to be her sponsor, and Patty seems to hero worship her for staying sober for so many years. However, Bonnie walks in on Christy telling Patty family stories of Bonnie's drunken holiday mayhem and neglect when Christy was a little girl. Christy and Patty are chuckling over the stories. Bonnie's inner response is quite different.
Bonnie, jolted by her own memories, falls into a private horrified, tearful reflection on her past self, a reflection which is intensified when she, Christy, and Patty join their AA group to go Christmas caroling. (And I mean singing religious carols!) At a house where they stop to sing, a loving mother, father, and child come to the door. Bonnie, inwardly confronting the glaring difference between this family and the family life she gave Christy as a child, suddenly turns and runs away into the darkness, away from her daughter and her friends, but mostly away from herself. She no longer believes that she is lovable. She feels worthless.
Bonnie runs and runs; when we see her again, she is in the most surprising and poignant place: lying cuddled in a plastic, life-size Mary's arms in an outdoor Nativity scene. How perfect this is! Bonnie has run away from her self-image as rotten mother straight into the arms of the Mother of God. Only the prayers of God's Mother can help heal her, the mother who held a God who was warm, soft, fragile human flesh, a God Who chose not to be born in a rich man's mansion, but among animals and under the stars in a place anyone at all can comfortably reach.
What child is this who, laid to rest, on Mary's lap is sleeping? This is God's child and Mary's child, Bonnie Plunkett, very wounded, and recognizing that she is in need of God's Providential Care. Bonnie, who has run lost through dark streets and finally seen a star, the star of the Epiphany, and come home to the home of the Holy Family. For Mary is Mother of us all. If she is Mother of Jesus, she is also the Mother of His Body, the Church. "Church" with a small "c" is the universal Church, which is everyone in this world. And what does Mary do for everyone who runs to her, a lost child? She leads all of us back to her Son, her Son Who is the Way, the Way Home to the Father.
Christy, running to search for her mother, discovers her there in Mary's arms. Bonnie, often so self-absorbed, has had an epiphany, a revelation, of many wrong things that she has done in her past. Humbly, sobbing, she apologizes to her daughter for her past behavior and asks her for forgiveness. Christy, amazed, explains that she was able to laugh over the stories because that time in her life seems so distant to her now because her mother has come so far in her recovery.
In the humble, approachable stable God has become palpably present once again: God, living within Bonnie, has spoken healing words of apology. God, living within Christy, has spoken healing words of forgiveness and affirmation of Bonnie's motherhood. Christ promises to always be the Way we can travel through dark roads to find our way home to self-knowledge, knowledge of Him, and Peace and Reconciliation. Through Him, two family members have once again become one in understanding and love and broken down the walls that kept them apart.
One of the most famous stories of Coming Home is Jesus' story of the Prodigal Son. Father Bob Dalton, a Glenmary missionary, has often counseled recovering alcoholics, and learned much from them. At one time, he had a large copy of Rembrandt's "The Prodigal Son" in his living room. He says that during his sessions with recovering alcoholics, they'd read the parable of the Prodigal Son together (Luke 15) and then just study the picture. Dalton observes, "Almost universally what I found was surprise. 'God loves me.'.....I can remember one young fellow, he just stood in front of that picture for the longest time, so long that I was getting very uncomfortable. I thought, O.K., now what do I do? Finally he said, 'Wow, I'm worth something after all.' (from the "Glenmary Challenge," Winter 2019.)
Bishop Robert Barron's reflection for December 22 explains why we can all say "God loves me" and "Wow, I'm worth something after all!" God chose to love us by coming into even more intimate relationship with each one of us through becoming one of us!
"The central claim of Christianity—still startling after two thousand years—is that God became human. The creator of the cosmos, who transcends any definition or concept, took to himself a nature like ours, becoming one of us. Christianity asserts that the infinite and the finite met, that the eternal and the temporal embraced, that the fashioner of the galaxies and planets became a baby too weak even to raise his head.
"And to make the humor even more pointed, this incarnation of God was first made manifest not in Rome, Athens, or Babylon, not in a great cultural or political capital, but in Bethlehem of Judea, a tiny outpost in the corner of the Roman Empire.
"One might laugh derisively at this joke—as many have over the centuries—but, as G.K. Chesterton observed, the heart of even the most skeptical person is changed simply for having heard this message. Christian believers up and down the years are those who have laughed with delight at this sacred joke and have never tired of hearing it repeated.
"Reflect: Reflect on the nature of God’s love–that he would stoop down to become one of his creatures and be born into poverty and obscurity."
Step three of AA is "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God." Don't we all have to do this, at some point in our lives? Aren't we all, somehow, prodigal sons and daughters? Don't we all have to let go of our own addictions to pride, success, money, security, possessions, even certain people, and the "perfect" unreal roles we play, and finally make the decision to accept that only God is our Way Home?
Maybe the 'easiest' Face of God we can approach is that warm, cuddly Baby in that tiny, ordinary town of Bethlehem, the Newborn too weak even to raise his head. Maybe He is the One we can trust to care for us. To lead us out of those dark side streets we are lost on because we've run away from the people in our lives and mostly run away from ourselves, not really believing that God could love us, or that we're worth anything at all. Maybe first we can follow the star through the darkness and rest, safe, on His mother's lap. Because she is sure to pray for us and lead us straight to her Son. And her Son is the Way straight home to our loving and forgiving Father's Heart.