Getting Over a Really Bad Dream

In the early hours of October 28, 312, a man had a dream that changed the history of the church forever. As Lactantius reported it, the dream was of the first letters of Christ's name, superimposed on one another in the form of a cross, which made it look like a sword. Underneath the sword were the words: "By this sign you will conquer." The dreamer, Constantine, facing a battle to the death the next day for the imperial throne, took the dream seriously enough to have the symbol painted on his soldiers' helmets and shields. He won the battle, and gave our God the credit.

Things have not been the same since. What began as a new era of toleration for Christians throughout the Empire soon devolved into systematic, centuries-long, State-governed programs of imposing Christianity upon people by force. To the conquerors belonged the spoils --- including the right to dictate personal faith. "Constantinian Christianity" was a way of going out into the highways and by-ways and compelling people to come in, or else. Islam learned the lesson from us well; by the eighth century, Muslim leaders were doing the same thing.

We might still be doing it this way if some Christians had their say about it. For example: remember the last revision of the Hymnal? One of the biggest arguments in the committee was over what to do with "Onward Christian Soldiers." Nobody wants to give up that great tune. But the words are something else, e.g., "Like a mighty army moves the church of God…marching as to war."

Just what we need for the war on terrorism, and to play a mediating role in Jewish-Muslim conflicts. As James Carroll reminds us in his very disturbing book, Constantine's Sword, for well over a thousand years the cross has been to Jews a symbol of Christian persecution, and to Muslims a symbol of Christian imperialism. We might add to Carroll's analysis the observation that the modern expansion of Christianity by persuasion more than by force has not helped all that much. It has only made our Jewish and Muslim friends even more nervous about what our true motives are. They remember Constantine all too well. And tremble. If our words don't get them, our swords will.

Personally, I hope that Lactantius got Constantine's dream wrong. Down deep, I think he probably did; truly revelatory dreams tend to work more to up-build people than to divide and conquer them. Among the many outrages perpetrated on people in the name of the Christian cause, surely one of the most horrific is the use of a symbol for the cross on which our savior died for all as a battering ram to storm the sanctuaries of other peoples' sincere worship.

This Christmas season might be a good time, before we go back to our crosses, to leave up a little longer our crèches. St. Francis started something really promising at that midnight mass in 1223, bringing a manger scene right into the sanctuary. It was, and is, a scene of gentleness, that extols the wonders of faith shared by the poor and the powerless of the earth --- just the kind of people in whom our Lord seemed to be most especially interested.

I wish we could make Jesus more visible in our nativity scenes as the "swaddled" newborn that he was. Certainly, Luke didn't want us to miss seeing him this way. Usually an elegant writer, he slipped into repetitiveness in reporting, first, that Mary "swaddled the baby in swaddling clothes." And then, he emphasized it again: the angel told the shepherds that they would find the baby "swaddled in swaddling clothes." In other words, Mary wrapped him tightly. Just as Joseph of Arimathaea would, after he took Jesus' body down from the cross.

With all due respect to Constantine, the dream of Amahl, which I think is what Amahl and the Night Visitors is really all about, goes him one better. It gets Amahl to the crèche, long before anyone has to get to the cross. And it gets him there in the company of some pretty impressive people. Probably they weren't kings, notwithstanding our penchant for making them so. Nevertheless, you get the point. The place where the kings of the earth belong is not at the front of armies, but in a cave, paying homage to the real Prince of Peace. Or on a winding, congested street in Jerusalem, helping a beaten and dispirited man --- who was once swaddled in love by a mother wise enough to know that his life would be beyond all earthly protection --- to carry his cross.