The true light, which enlightens
everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came to
be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own,
but his own people did not accept him.
The story about Christ’s birth has been told in the Gospels and down through the ages to help us know him whom “the world did not know … or accept.” Ever since our childhood, no story could be more familiar to us, and today, once again, we celebrate its mystery and concreteness . . . But perhaps we need “stories about the story” to gain fresh access to “him who came to what was his own.”
In the late 1970s, the old Belgian Dominican chaplain at my aunt’s monastery used to go to the NYC Public Library to research wonderful medieval French Christmas stories, which he then used each year when preaching to the nuns. Perhaps they were so effective in bringing the Lord’s Incarnation home in a fresh way to a religiously sophisticated community because of their simplicity and charm. A few weeks ago I came across a contemporary story that wasn’t intended to be a Christmas story, but it struck me as such. In a paradoxical way, both protagonists are Christ figures.
This is a story told by Dr. James O’Connell, a street doctor who has dedicated himself to caring for the homeless in Boston for over 30 years. Stories from the Shadows is a collection of his reflections about his encounters on the street and in shelters with these vulnerable people teetering on the fault lines of our society. The homeless, whom society counts least and puts last, are often faceless and nameless, lost in plain sight, and forced to live on the fringes of society, struggling for simple shelter and a warm meal. Today we remember that the Son of God came into our world also totally vulnerable, totally poor, a helpless child of a homeless couple soon to become refugees in their flight to Egypt shortly after his birth. This is hardly a fitting image for God! And yet, in all its concreteness, the first Christmas reveals to us that the divine is hidden quietly inside the human (especially at its most ordinary and distressed), and that reality, at its deepest foundation, is good, even “very good.” Because Jesus took our humanity to himself, totally, every person’s humanity is sacred, to be revered, listened to, honored, and served with love. We all belong—to Christ and to each other. We are one in Christ Jesus and, despite appearances, connected to each other. We need each other. The story I’m about to tell has this as its core meaning. Christ came, and continues to come, as disguised under every type of humanity that walks the earth. His birth is about spiritual union, an essential oneness, an unbreakable wholeness with all of us. Jesus was born homeless, and at the end of his life hung among thieves. He is born in our midst, and we are born to new life.
In a reflection entitled “The Footsoak,” Dr. O’Connell begins:
A sea of reluctant faces stared intently as I entered the Nurses’ Clinic at
Pine Street Inn for the first time in early July of 1985, barely two days after
finishing my residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
During the month of June, I had served as the senior medical resident in charge
of the Bigelow Intensive Care Unit, the bustling hub that cares for the
hospital’s most complex and desperately ill patients. Buoyed by the sense of
invincibility that accompanies such a passage, I strode into New England’s
oldest and largest shelter, containing over 700 beds and located barely six
blocks from the hospital, with a swagger than drew a stern grimace from the
nurses.
This tepid reception by the nurses took me by surprise and left me deflated. One of them said: “Pardon our skepticism, but we’ve been burned too much and don’t trust doctors to take good care of our folks. But you will do just fine if you listen to us and do what we say. You’ll have to forget much of what you were taught in residency. Nothing changes in the life of a homeless person unless you slow down and take the time to earn trust and develop a lasting relationship. Consistency and presence are essential. Have coffee, play cards, share bits of yourself. Never judge. Remember that people have lived through hell and listen carefully to their stories. With that as bedrock, delivering health care might just be possible.”
In fact, virtually all visits to the Nurses’ Clinic began with a footsoak. The waiting area had ten chairs, all occupied by shelter guests soaking their feet in buckets of warm water mixed with an antibacterial called Betadine. This ritual was instituted by the nurses not only for comfort and hygiene but also as a sign of service and respect. The head nurse informed Dr. O’Connell that his apprenticeship would begin with a couple of months of learning the art and skill of soaking feet. She set aside his stethoscope and medical bag. No medical questions, no chief complaints, no review of systems, no diagnosing. He was told: “Just tend to the feet and ask what else you can do to help.” Dr. O’Connell relates:
I dutifully soaked feet for almost two months. In keeping with the obvious biblical allusion, the footsoak inverts the usual power structure and places the caregiver at the feet of each patient and far from the head. This gesture of respect for the literal and figurative personal space of each homeless person is critical and a marked contrast to how I was taught to take charge during clinical encounters, invading privacy each time I placed a stethoscope on the chest, peered at a retina or examined a throat. After wandering the city for hours, suffering exposure to the extremes of weather, and then standing in a series of queues awaiting entrance to the shelter, a bed ticket, and the evening meal, homeless persons relished the chance to sit and rest while someone cleansed and soothed their feet.
The head nurse asked me to concentrate on an elderly gentleman with schizophrenia and massively swollen legs. I knew this man well from the MGH emergency room, where he was brought several times a month by EMS. Despite our efforts, he never followed our instructions and refused all medications. His feet were so badly swollen that we needed separate buckets to soak each foot. After about a month, he looked down quizzically at me, smirked, and addressed me for the first time: ‘I thought you were supposed to be a doctor. What the hell are you doing soaking my feet?’ Dumbfounded, I couldn’t think of anything better to say than, “I do whatever the nurses tell me to do.”
Then a relationship of mutual healing opened up. Soaking feet was the portal to the hearts of both patient and clinician. To me, this is iconic of the Christmas revelation and the grace it offers again and again.
“And the Word became flesh.” Jesus was
born into our world as a “nobody” . . . amidst the rest of us “nobodies.” But
we, his own, often do not recognize him for who he truly is, nor accept him.
That goes for ourselves as well: we often do not recognize and accept ourselves or one another for who we truly are in his eyes. Not, perhaps, until he got on his knees and began to
wash his disciples’ feet . . . and ours, espousing them (and us) to himself in
such a concrete and definitive way. He started as a homeless baby in a rude
wooden manger, wrapped in swaddling bands, and ended up fastened to the wood of
the Cross, outside the city walls—fulfilling the revelation of God who is among
us and for us. Christmas has a long arc; it is a startling story inserted in the
Gospels to point to the Cross and the transformation of the
humanity of each of us by a quiet, identifying love beyond all telling. We have
become one with Christ and each other. This is an extension of the Incarnation.
It is our Christmas story.
