The Mystery of Christmas Through the Writings of János Pilinszky

0 See ak December 24, 2025

The poetry of Christmas is beautiful, but the roots of this poetry are infinitely deeper, and in fact, it has not yet borne its true fruit among us.

God, writes Simone Weil, created the world out of pure love. Creation is not the work of God’s power, but of divine love’s renunciation. And since the world is the work of renunciation, we too can only respond to this divine love with renunciation. Hence, at the heart of every true creation, every true action and undertaking, lies the opportunity for love and the liberating presence of asceticism.

But creative love would not have been complete if God himself had not undertaken incarnation. Creatio, Incarnatis, Passio: the overflowing, the “excess” of the same unconditional, the same holy Love, which “ultimately lifted Christ onto the cross.”

János Pilinszky Photo: Fortepan / Hunyady József

Our entire existence is the drama of the divine “excesses” of love. At the center of this drama is the mystery of the Incarnation with its immaculate signs of divine innocence. Thus, in the spirit of creative renunciation, Christmas is both a celebration of the acceptance of all creation and its transcendence in love.

God’s love and freedom are its true place: hence its universality. Therefore, so that its good news illuminates everything, so that in space and time everything that is beautiful and true, whether known or unknown, points to it and can rightly draw light from it.

But like the divine spark that dwells in our hearts, pure love: even God incarnate could only enter our midst almost imperceptibly. True, it is a small, immeasurably small light—but it is real. It is the same gentleness that brought the created universe to obedience, and with the power of its tenderness, convinced the world beyond the defeat of the cross.

In the Christmas crib, this innocent God lies with the innocence of a little child, whose love will never again leave our hearts in peace. His peace is the eternal companion of all unrest, his gentleness of all strife. The outward trappings of Christmas are worthless without this pure, innocent, and universal love. Will it ever bear true fruit among us?

(December 17, 1967)

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There is nothing more depressing than contemplating the cruel laws of life. That we live off each other; that we devour each other; that the “order” of nature is built on hunger and fear, like a bleeding pyramid.

And into this cruel order “entered” the Lamb of God, our Jesus, born and incarnate, to redeem the cruel order of the world.

Without changing anything about the “bleeding heap,” he radically reversed its meaning. He did not deny that we “devour one another.” Rather, he said that we are all food and nourishment. Already here, in this world, within this “bleeding heap,” he transformed cruel realities into the reality of love when he distributed himself as real food and real drink—setting an example for all of us.

Since the first Christmas, since the incarnation of the Son of God, we have become the food and nourishment of all things instead of the prey of all things, and we know that behind the terrible laws of nature, the eternal sacrifice of love is the ultimate reality.