God on the margins

“Where are you for Christmas?”, people kindly ask me. And I find myself replying, “Well, I feel really blessed – because I’ve been asked to celebrate Midnight Mass in the hospice and then, on Christmas morning, two Masses in the prison.”

I do think it’s a beautiful tradition that bishops are asked to go out at Christmas to celebrate with those who are prevented from coming to church – so that the Church goes out to them. It seems all of a piece with Pope Francis’ exhortation to pastors when, speaking at the end of the Synod on the Family, he told them their duty was to welcome the sheep, but then corrected himself to say, “I made a mistake here. I said welcome: [their duty is rather] to go out and find them.”

I will gladly go on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to find Christ’s sheep. And I know I shall meet Christ in them. After all, the Lord told us, did he not, “I was … sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me” (Mt 25)? It's about going to be with people in Gethsemane. And Pope Francis amplifies the Lord’s words when he says in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium that when we reach out to those who are in need, we touch the suffering flesh of Christ.

This was brought home to me a year ago when I celebrated Christmas with L’Arche. L’Arche has, for half a century, welcomed people with severe learning disabilities. My friends were struck when I told them it was the loveliest Christmas Mass I’d known. Why? Because people with learning disabilities create a communion around themselves. When I am with L’Arche, I understand why Jesus says, “When you give … a dinner … invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; then you will be blessed" (Lk 14:12-14). When I’m at L’Arche I see the truth in Francis’ statement in Evangelii Gaudium that the poor are the privileged recipients of the Gospel, and that to share in their lives is to be truly blessed.

One of my best Christmases as a child was when we invited Stuart to join us for lunch. My father befriended Stuart when he used to visit Wandsworth Prison. When Stuart wasn’t in prison, he lived on the street. I shall never forget the joy on Stuart’s face when he saw the lunch my mother had prepared for us that Christmas Day! Soon afterwards, Stuart was found dead. And the police called my father because his was the only telephone number Stuart had on him. So my parents found themselves the only mourners at his funeral.

I shall be thinking very much of Stuart and my father as I go to celebrate in Wormwood Scrubs and Hackney Hospice today and tomorrow – praying that I find the right words to “comfort [the Lord’s] people” as the Prophet Isaiah says – with words they recognise as coming from the Good Shepherd himself, their Shepherd who waits to lead them near restful waters and revive their drooping spirit.

Bishop Nicholas Hudson is an auxiliary in the diocese of Westminster