What have you got to lose ?

Phibsborough was a great place to be a child in the late seventies and eighties. There were endless art and fancy dress competitions and all sorts of community games to enter. You’d find all sorts of people at each event. Mostly, you’d find community and friends.  

I remember two ladies, Mrs. Daly and Mrs Burke who went to endless trouble to organise competition after competition. I used to enter the art competitions with my sister and brother. While both of them had definite artistic flair, my talents most definitely lay elsewhere. I could never quite master perspective. The people in my pictures were barely human looking and my trees outgrew my houses. Despite multiple entries, over many years, I just never quite made it as a prize winner. Anne-Marie and Jim would walk off with first and second prizes for their age group and I used to get the token consolation packet of animal biscuits prize for losers. On one notable occasion aged about seven, after yet another humiliating defeat, I successfully identified one of the judges on the path home and managed in no uncertain terms, to my mother’s mortification, to indicate my disgust with him in gesture.  

Losing is rarely the end point we seek from our experiences. Who enters a competition to lose? Who loves with the desire to never have that love reciprocated or rejected? Who wants to lose a war or a general election? Who runs a race to come last? Who enters a court case and answers in such a way as to be found guilty? Losing is rarely what we seek. Losing is rarely the point we want to make or the experience we seek to undergo.

Have a close re-read of the Gospel again. Who then is this Jesus in the dock? And why do we hear about his imminent death just before we begin to prepare for His birth as Messiah? Maybe then today’s gospel is the most sacred story of loving loss. The God I will welcome at Christmas is being born today in this gospel and it’s not Mary or Joseph who need to get ready for Him. It’s me. And it is not what I get from what I do that will offer me meaning, but who I become as a result of it. And so today, Jesus gives me permission to lose. Today, Jesus tells me that if by love I lose everything, then I will gain everything. Today Jesus tells me to recognise His Kingship not by wealth, not by kingly goods, not by power, not by gain. Today, He invites me to recognise Him in loss. And His Kingship will not punish, will not put people on trial, will maim neither body nor soul. His Kingship is the ultimate servitude of love, and is so, through the most tortuous loss. 

 And so, soon we will be offered four weeks preparation. Jesus will be in the crib on Christmas morning. Who will we be who welcome Him? What are we prepared to lose in order to become? My art competition disasters didn’t make me a better painter. I never got the prize I sought. But they offered me the opportunity to enjoy my siblings wonderful paintings and for myself, to learn to lose in love rather than anger. Our losses for love may get us no more than the booby prize, the packet of animal biscuits and we may come nowhere in this world’s eyes.

 But maybe the eyes of the infant God, before whom we will stand, will love in us, everything that is left behind when we have nothing more to lose.  

Ms. Helen Walsh
26th November 2006