When I walked into the parish house, I caught a smiling glimpse of a man in long, emerald green robes passing into the church. The receptionist kindly handed me the ticket she had so generously reserved for me at the eleventh hour, and I made my way back outside to assume a place in the queue awaiting entrance into the Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
While I stood in line, I asked questions of those around me. To a man behind me, I asked him and his wife if they could explain who the “celebrant” of the service is, and what the distinction between priest and deacon was. To a group preceding me in line, I discussed seating arrangements (only to find out they knew as little as I did, seeing as they were also curious Jews there for the first time). While previous qualms had inhibited my drive to attend this auspicious service, I felt increasingly sure of my decision as I stood on line waiting for entrance. I was already having the interfaith experience I wanted.
Entering the cathedral, I was delighted to feel I had a designated seat, a place set aside for me. Many evenings had I come and strolled through the pews of St. Patrick’s, ogling the ornate shrines to St. Bartholomew, St. Peter, St. Patrick. Many a time I had stood beside others, eager to watch them light their candle and cross themselves before passing on to the next saint’s altar. While I will never experience this house of God as a Christian, there was a sense of relief in entering as a designated attendee.
When the choir led the congregation in hymns, I sat quietly, humming them to myself. It has been nearly a decade since I developed what might be deemed a fetish with Christmas carols, independent of time, place, or season; only yesterday was I trying to dodge my discomfort of singing “O Come All Ye Faithful”’s final line “Christ the Lord” by inserting “umbilical cord.” Disappointedly, I realized the freedom I feel to sing carols in my own domain does not exist when in a church. There, I know my place, and so I stood quietly on this Christmas Eve and listened with rapt attention to the angelic verses of Panis Angelicus and Silent Night.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan gave a homily which provided an interesting exegetical insight on the nativity, picking up on a motif which actually runs through the Hebrew Bible and into the New Testament in a way which elucidated not only the story of Jesus’ birth, but also that of Moses. His Eminence spoke of the magnum mysterium, the tremendous mystery within the birth of Jesus and the concept that God could be born. Dolan explored this notion by discussing a dialectic in this nativity moment: it is both the most unreal and supernatural moment in Christian history, but also the most natural and human moment in human experience. The birth of a child fulfills a yearning for something more inherent in each person, and demands that one provide for the tender needs of someone unable to provide for him or her self. This image of a baby’s birth as the beginning of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection is therefore a universally resonant moment.
When I considered the Cardinal’s ideas, I felt he had observed a motif used through scriptural texts, this moment of birth as the start of a leader. Interestingly, the Hebrew Bible sole elongated birth scene is that of Moses’ in the beginning of Exodus. When Moses is born, he finds salvation through the waters of the Nile which lead him to ironic redemption in the house of Pharaoh; this is, of course, going to be reversed when Moses ultimately brings the nation of Israel through the waters of the Reed Sea, to similarly ironic salvation in a desert. And so too, the Jesus narrative works similarly. The narrative of Matthew 2:16 tells a reprieve of the Moses birth story: Jesus is born, but Herod has issued an evil decree to murder all young boys to prevent Jesus from coming to take over, as the wise men have foretold. Mary, Joseph and Jesus flee (ironically) to Egypt. Yet ultimately, Jesus, too, is meant to free humankind and provide salvation, as he himself was once “freed.” The Cardinal’s words sparked a wealth of thought in me, surely more than he thought would resonate with a Jewish attendee.