What was God thinking?
A Christmas reflection by Fr. G. Simon Harak, S.J.
*Originally written in 2011. Food insecurity statistic updated to reflect 2020.
After four weeks of Advent awaiting the coming of the Savior, December 25th can leave us a bit puzzled, if not disappointed.
We need a savior — it doesn’t take much in the way of spirituality to figure that out. We just need to look at the “signs of the times.” With a government pledged to “perpetual war,” and more and more wealth taken from the needs of the many to benefit the very few (and yes, those two facts are related), with ongoing environmental degradation, and with nearly one in every six people living in the US now “food insecure,” our world, our country needs some serious saving.
But what do we get on Christmas day? Not a team of expert economists, not a super committee of legislators, not a war council or a national security organization, but a baby — an infant (root meaning: “can’t talk”), someone insecure, vulnerable and needing assistance, not offering it. What was God thinking?
Here’s part of an answer: about a generation ago, just about all the major paleontological scientists gathered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. They brought their prized fossils with them. After a week of discussion and analysis, they determined that it was cooperation, not competition, which led to the development of the human race. And what was the catalyst for that cooperation? Babies.
The “problem” with human babies is that they’re dependent for so long. It’s years before they can “run with the pack.” So the early humans had to develop “base camps” (discovered by Richard Leakey and Glynn Isaac) where the women could nurse and care for the babies. The men would go out and bring back the resources to share with the women and children. That in itself is unique: humans are the only hominids who share; apes forage for themselves.
And then everyone had to report on their day. Language, teachers, and education became necessary. Further, a sprained ankle was no longer a fatal injury. The disabled human could stay in the base camp until he recovered enough to hunt and gather again. What made the human hominids powerful, then, was not their ability to dominate or to develop superior weaponry. It was their sharing communities, their superb cooperation and, because of their babies, their exceptional capacity for taking care of the weak and vulnerable.
So when it came time — and it seems to come around each year — for us to need a savior who had to recall us to our lost sense of common humanity, it makes sense after all that God would send a baby.
In our care for the vulnerable and oppressed, and in our pledge to the power of nonviolence, we can together share every day in the supreme project of the God of Peace, begun on Christmas so many years ago.
Fr. G. Simon Harak, S.J. (1948–2019) was the founding director of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking. In his six years at Marquette, Simon built a thriving research and co-curricular center that actively explores the power of nonviolence.
Simon frequently emphasized that community is at the core of nonviolence in his sermons and teachings. We are grateful to Simon for sharing his lifelong witness to nonviolence with so many.
