Christmas night in 1983, Father Leo and I trudged up the long street bringing us up to our house in a working-class neighborhood of the capital city of Chile, Santiago. When we finally arrived at our street, children began running toward us. It had been a rough, but hope-filled year. Christmas that year had the feel of ending a very long and dark time of fear, and of courage, a time of dark confusion, but also luminous hope. Everyone seemed weighed down, at the end of a year that we wanted to leave behind us for good.
Areas like our residential district of Peñalolén, rising on the foothills of the Andes Mountain range, were vulnerable to invasions of the small tanks and water-cannon vehicles of security forces, since most of our homes there were made of wood, with corrugated metal rooves. Bullets and tear-gas canisters easily pierced the walls.
The cat-and-mouse racing about of protestors and police during the long nights of bonfires and the banging of empty kitchen pots that year were exhausting. Searches through hospital emergency rooms and holding cells at police stations was a regular practice, along with funerals here and there throughout the city, which also often devolved into confrontations between masses of helmeted police and mourners.
We priests were often caught up in the middle of such events, observing the protests, witnessing the violence, providing first-aid stations at many chapels, accompanying the mourning families of victims. I grew accustomed to the sound of machine-gun fire at close range, to holding a desk lamp over the scalp of a beaten protestor without fainting, while a doctor sutured a wound from a police baton, and other such tense moments.
This summer night, though, the children ran and screamed with glee that we were—finally!—arriving. The neighbors came over and shook our hands, and we all wished each other “Feliz Navidad!”
The neighbors came over and shook our hands, and we all wished each other “Feliz Navidad!”
Small glass jars were used for glasses, filled with good Chilean red wine, and were raised in welcome, as the thickly wired grates over the hot coals were loaded with the pieces of chicken and beef, sausages and hot dogs, and the sliced rolls (just to toast them a little).
The sausages cooked more quickly and were placed in the rolls for passing around to everyone as appetizers before the main meal. Potato salad by the buckets and thinly-sliced, soaked onions with cilantro on top were set out on the tables, covered with the tablecloths of a dozen different houses, and set with all the forks, knives and spoons that could be rounded up from up and down the street.
It was all in the open air, in the middle of a Southern Hemispheric summer night, and we all were happy to have the time to talk to one another, after the hectic year that was coming to a close.
The children were anxious to receive their festively-wrapped gifts, piled up near the Christmas tree—a bush, really, that had grown a sparse coat of pine needles, natural to the warm climate of central Chile, and was festooned with handmade paper ornaments, and an angel on top. The setting was perfect to accommodate everyone in the neighborhood, with a darkness that allowed for the stars to really shine out beautifully—a hall with a celestial ceiling, fit for a king’s birthday party.
It was all in the open air, in the middle of a Southern Hemispheric summer night, and we all were happy to have the time to talk to one another, after the hectic year that was coming to a close.
The laughter and shouting, with Papa Noel (identical to our Santa Claus) distributing the gifts, rang out. The gifts were carefully calculated in number and size for every child, two gifts each, after collections were taken up among the neighbors weeks before by the organizing committee. Of course, extra gifts were on hand for any latecomers or young visitors casually invited at the last minute from other nearby neighborhoods—there were always a few unexpected guests to attend to at such gatherings.
The pieces of grilled chicken and slices of meat were plentiful, and we quickly gave thanks for this rare bounty. Father Leo spoke quietly in the hushed moment, of the God who was born among the poorest of the human family, living in solidarity with the homeless, the least regarded and those on the margins of society. A great “Amen!” went up, and the music from a pile of cassette tapes began to blare out from the portable stereo someone brought out, as we began the meal at the makeshift tables, benches and nearby rocks that were just right for sitting on.
Father Leo and I sat among the family members of the retired couple we rented our small home from. Don Juanito and Doña Raquel, using the customary honorific titles that their ages called for, were at the table as were their daughters and son, and their respective spouses.
The children didn’t stay seated for long, and were running around with the other children. Theirs was probably the largest family at the gathering. The elderly couple had come to the area and built the first house, before there was a street or a neighborhood, the same thick adobe home Leo and I rented from them many years later.
We thus gently and warmly closed our celebrations that Christmas night, and as the rays of sunrise began to pierce through the peaks of the Andes above us, we beheld the glory of a people reconciled with God, with one another, and with all of Creation, in an endless new festivity of a hope-filled existence, content and open to gratefully accept the gift of Christ among them, with a future of greater justice and peace, hallmarks of God’s Reign.
Columban Father Bob Mosher lived and worked in Chile for 30 years, and is now assigned to St. Columban’s Residence in Bristol, Rhode Island.