JESUS IS BORN IN AN AMBULANCE

Sifting through the past, I come upon this—something I wrote many years ago on a social network:

I confess: I have little love for this December carnival. Artificial nature dressed as a corpse bride. Commerce costumed in soup-kitchen charity for the wealthy. Ribbons and bows of frantic urgency. I care little for lights and songs that endlessly repeat. I care little for skirmishes over dates. I care little. I go on waiting—restlessly—for the meaning of a nativity at my feet and a heavy coat at Midnight Mass. I hate being asked, “Are you serious—are you really going to Midnight Mass?” I pull my coat tighter and move on, like a tree still waiting to be planted.

Nothing has changed, except that I have learned to like more and despise less. Today it is easier to witness what unfolds around me without my heart racing, though Christmas still does not warm me.

Jokes about difference are customary: the virgin, the angel—anything is possible. It doesn’t trouble me. Just as customary is the inverse: because something is different, belief hardens into imposition, creed into law, religion into something unquestionable. That doesn’t trouble me either. I simply do not linger.

I think I am searching for the Child. Perhaps a birth. Or a return. But the ground of the Earth is so dark, and the heavens are breaking open with so much water, that I can find no golden straw on which to lay hope. And then I remember Caeiro:

One spring afternoon, late in the day,
I had a dream like a photograph.
I saw Jesus Christ come down to earth.
He came down a hillside,
A child again,
Running and rolling in the grass,
Tearing flowers only to throw them away,
Laughing so loudly he could be heard far off.
He had run away from heaven.

It isn’t difficult to imagine that if Jesus were being born for the first time this year, emergency rooms would be closed; that, because of a strike, Mary would give birth off-schedule; that the Child would arrive in an ambulance racing against time; that Joseph would write the lyrics of “Imagine” on a wooden board as a birth certificate and let his hair fall loose like Lennon’s. And in January, the Magi would switch on their phone flashlights, recreating a star-filled sky the way stadium concerts do. It isn’t difficult.

The problem with Christmas is the absence of virginity—in things, in memory, on tables, in inheritances, in days. The past is traced over in haste and renamed tradition. I know there are devotees of the season: those who start counting the days while still in short sleeves; who breathe out “the best time of the year”; who plan their clothes; whose calendars inevitably roll toward crowded tables. I won’t argue. From this unsatisfied vantage point, I continue to look for a flannel, a light—or several—that won’t leave me watching this film alone at home.

How are homes built where ruin has already passed through? What can be drawn on a bruised sheet of paper? Which note survives when the needle crosses the scratch in the record? How many mouths have eaten from the same fork? None of this is literal, and none of it is merely rhetorical. The answer lies in Faith.

If Jesus were born this year, for the first time, he would arrive in an ambulance, sirens cutting through the night. And even if no one believed that love itself is on strike, it would be Mary showing us that Jesus can be born anywhere—because he comes from a place still virgin, a place not yet wounded. As the poet says:

This is the story of my Child Jesus.
Why should it not be clearer
That this is truer
Than all that philosophers think
And all that religions teach?

Originally published in Portuguese in the newspaper Diário Insular

Translated by Diniz Borges