Christmas is one of those seasons when everything has to be perfect. In our home, “perfect” means everything must be real. No artificial trees or greens for the Bradfords. After all, we’re celebrating the most important birth in human history—the birth of God in time: Jesus, Emmanuel! Nothing can compete with the realness of that event, or touch more deeply on the meaning of our humanity, our fallenness, our infirmities, our blessedness, and ultimately God’s testimony of how much he loves us in spite of it all. Real trees and lots of candlelight are important symbols for my family.
Real things also remind us that Christmas is just the beginning of the story. The promise fulfilled with the coming of Christ requires sacrifice. The beautiful innocence lying peacefully in the manger will spend himself for us and die a man of sorrows, but through that sacrifice he will rise again in glory. Our Father sent “his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life,” and that promise is fulfilled at a tremendous cost (John 3:16). The real tree we decorate has been cut off from its life source and will die, and the candlelight that fills our home only burns by consuming its wax. Both are perfect symbols of self-gift, but, as symbols, they are perfect through their imperfection: Only the artificial doesn’t die.
Christmas is a time for rich and lavish celebrations both at home and church, but those celebrations would be empty if we didn’t spend time meditating on the most profound and distinctive truth of our faith: that God’s Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. They would be empty if we didn’t contemplate the Incarnation as a sign of the depth of God’s love and the fulfillment of his ancient promise. By assuming our flesh and giving himself up for us, he asserted the dignity of our human flesh as individuals created in God’s image. All human flesh.
Disability is something not opposed to our human dignity but integral to it.
Disability can challenge some people’s perception of human dignity. Many secular people believe dignity is dependent on achievement or the perfection of skill, or they believe beauty, wealth, or other superficial qualities contribute to one’s inherent dignity. Even Christians can be challenged to understand disability in an incarnational sense. It’s easy for us in subtle and unintentional ways to relegate persons with disabilities to some “other” status. This becomes evident by excluding people with disabilities from full participation in the life of a parish, by disapproving looks when someone without full control of his or her body or voice bursts out unexpectedly during Mass, or by walking past these individuals without acknowledging them so we can shake hands with the person standing just beyond them. Welcome is almost always just beyond them. Incarnation is not invisible.
Sometimes when people are confronted by disability in their family, community, or parish, the “all human flesh” part of human dignity becomes challenging to accept. There must have been a mistake. How do we explain the fragility or disfigurement caused by some conditions, or the cognitive impairment of children and adults whose capacity to reason is compromised? That isn’t the image of God many hold in their minds. How can disability be beautifully and perfectly manifested in the Incarnation? Some ask if disability is manifested in the Incarnation.
We can confuse ourselves trying to find answers to these questions, but the answer isn’t difficult. It is simply the reality of our fragile humanity after the fall. As Dr. Miguel Romero, a theologian who writes often on disability, has said, “Among the consequences of this primordial spiritual wound [the fall] are the various impairments, illnesses, and injuries that coincide with our natural creaturely vulnerability.” He goes on to state that these realities “do not diminish our incarnate, creaturely dignity. Moreover, no degree of bodily impairment, illness, or injury can displace the fittingness of our composite nature in the good order of God’s creation.”
So, disability is something not opposed to our human dignity but integral to it. We will most likely all experience disability in our own flesh before we die. But no so-called “defect” can keep those who bear a disability in their mortal bodies or minds from reaching their intended end: their proper perfection by grace. Everyone participates in his or her own experience of relationship with God and one another, through which sanctification is worked out with “fear and trembling,” as St. Paul told the Philippians (Phil. 2:12–13). How that “working out” is realized for every person happens through his or her unique and individual relationship with God.
Some wonder if persons who bear a disability throughout their lives will still experience it in heaven. After contemplating the visible wounds of Christ in the resurrected body of Jesus, Dr. Romero writes that St. Thomas Aquinas quoted St. Augustine on the martyrs: “These wounds in their body will not be a deformity, but a dignity . . . on their bodies, they will radiate not a bodily but a spiritual beauty.”1 The implication, Dr. Romero writes, is that “as the resurrection body expresses and extends the brilliance of the soul’s beatitude, it will shine with the immense ornamental beauty of wounded fragilities healed, hidden glories revealed, fractured beauties redeemed and perfected.” Dr. Romero concludes by speculating that “in the resurrection life, the blessed will retain those physiological distinctions which are the underlying natural dispositions that for some were reduced to corporal defect in the state of corruption.”
So, as we continue in the Christmas season to contemplate the richness of the Incarnation—from the beauty of the Christ Child in the manger to the glorious Resurrection of the one who was crucified and now lives and reigns over sin and death—we have the opportunity to also contemplate the beauty of human diversity represented by the Incarnation of God’s Son. Jesus carries the wounds of a criminal’s execution in his resurrected flesh for each of us. Can we not, in this new year, make a commitment to reflect on the “immense ornamental beauty of wounded fragilities” in humanity’s diversity—in the disabled, the poor, and the marginalized? Our parishes can be places where the wounds of loneliness and isolation—wounds that are caused by exclusion, not by nature—are healed.
Let’s break down whatever it is that divides us. In the Jubilee Year of 2025, let’s open our doors and our arms to all those who bear his image in their incarnate beauty. Let’s embrace what is real with all of reality’s imperfections: They have been given dignity by the gift of Jesus.
1 Augustine, De civitate Dei 22.19; cf. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea on John 20.4.12
