Image above: The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonard da Vinci. National Gallery London
The birth of Christ at Christmas is a call for each person to go back to the cave, the source of life.
St Luke tells us that when Jesus was born his mother laid him in a ‘manger’ because there was no room for them in the inn. What exactly this ‘manger’ was and what was its significance has long been debated, but there is also an interesting tradition that he was born in a cave.
Whatever the historical value of this tradition its symbolic significance is immense. The birth in a cave has often been portrayed in art, and nowhere more marvellously than in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Madonna of the Rocks in the National Gallery. Here we can see the Mother, seated in a cave among the rocks beside the primeval waters. The symbolism is clear. The birth of the Messiah is to redeem the whole creation. His mother sits among the rocks from which the earth was formed, beside the waters from which life came in the earth, Mary has become the Mother of the new creation, in which God comes to dwell among his people.
The birth of Christ therefore recalls us to something which is of perennial significance – the need to return to the beginning, to the source from which the world came. This is something which has to take place continually in our lives. We have continually to return to the source of our being, to the fountain of life, to the state of infancy, like the babe in the manger, to what the Chinese call the ‘uncarved block.’ The Church today is being called as a whole to return to her source, to rediscover her origin, to go back to the cave, where her Lord was born. This means that we have all at some time to go out of this world, out of the cities and shops and factories, out of our homes and families, and find again the innocence of childhood, the freshness of nature, the springs of eternal life.
This is a constant theme in all religious traditions. In Israel every year at the feast of the Tabernacles or Tents the people were called to go and live in tents, to remind them how their forefathers lived in tents in the wilderness and there received the Law from the hands of God. It was a going out of the city, of civilisation, back to the desert, where God had spoken to his people. So also at the birth of Christ, John the Baptist was called to go out into the desert to prepare his way, and Jesus himself, before he undertook his ministry, was driven by the Spirit, as St Mark says, into the wilderness. He is born in a cave outside the city, he goes out into the desert as he enters his ministry, and finally he is crucified outside the city. Surely all this has a meaning for us. The city surrounds us on all sides. Millions of people today live in vast cities, walled in by steel and concrete, cut off from the sources of life. Christmas comes to remind us of the need to go out of the city, out of the sophistications of civilised life and find the babe, the innocence of childhood, lying with his mother in the cave beside the waters of life.
There are other religious traditions in which this theme is repeated. The Buddha had to leave his home with his wife and child and to out into the forest to seek for Nirvana, the changeless state, free from the sin and suffering of the world. In India there is a pilgrimage every year to a place called Sabarimala in Kerala, to which hundreds of thousands of pilgrims go every year. It is a temple in a forest, and the pilgrim has to go on foot through the forest to reach this sacred place. It is a reminder to the people that once a year at least they must leave their homes and families and journey through the forest to the holy place where God is to be found. Even more remarkable is the festival known at the Kumba Mela, which takes place every twelve years at the confluence of different rivers with the Ganges. A year or two ago it was reckoned that 50 million people attended the Mela at Allahabad in the course of one month. Again it was a reminder of the need to return to the source, to the waters of life, outside the towns and cities, free from the ties of families and friends.
I myself had the privilege recently of visiting monasteries in Europe and America and returning to the sources of monastic life. I found in America a number of monks living in huts in the forest, attached to a monastery but living on their own. It will be remembered also that Thomas Merton lived as a hermit in Gethsemane for many years and was planning at the end of his life to go into a deeper solitude. Everywhere today the urge is being felt to get out of the cities with their incessant noise and movement and to rediscover the silence and the solitude of nature. I was particularly impressed with a community outside Barcelona in Spain, which was founded by some young men who had previously been hermits in the famous Benedictine monastery of Monserrat. They found that tourists at Monserrat made the life of a hermit almost impossible, and moved to a solitary place among the hills outside Barcelona. There were three men living in hermitages among the woods, visiting the community further down the hill from time to time. The community was composed of young men and women, living an extraordinarily dedicated life. I have never known a community in which the prayer seemed to grow out of such a depth of silence. Unfortunately I was unable to visit the community at Taizé, which attracts so many thousands of young people from all over Europe and the world, but perhaps that is the most impressive sign in Europe today of this need to leave the world and find the source of life in a prayer which goes to the depths of silence and solitude in the presence of God.
But the deepest experience which I had of this mystery of the cave, of the return to the source, was in visiting monasteries in Italy. I spent a week in Camaldoli, where St Romuald established his ‘hermitage’ in the 11thcentury, far away among the hills and woods above Arezzo, where St Francis lived in a cave among the rocks and received the stigmata. But most moving of all to me was the visit to Subiaco, to the cave where St Benedict lived for three years as a hermit. The thought of that young boy leaving his home and his studies in Rome and going out into the hills and woods to find a cave, where he could live ‘alone with God,’ as his biographer St Gregory tells us, was an inspiration to me, especially as there is a portrait of St Francis in the monastery of St Benedict said to have been painted in his own lifetime, and showing him for all the world like a young hippie with long hair and a beard, linking him with all thousands of young men today who leave their homes and city life and go out in search of God in so many different places.
It was from the example of young men like St Benedict, St Romuald and St Francis, who left him and city life to go out into the hills and forests and find a cave where they could be alone with God, that the Church was renewed in the Middle Ages. Is there not the same need today to leave the towns and cities which are threatening to pollute and destroy the world, and to rediscover the sources of pure and natural life, to go back to the desert, to the hills and woods, where the Christ-child is born?
For some this will mean actually leaving the city and going out into the hills and solitary places, for others – and that is most people – it will mean going back to childhood and finding the babe dwelling in the ‘cave of the heart,’ in the secret place, where God is found, and the Mother brings forth her child, new-born to eternal life.
This article was first published in The Tablet 22 December 1979