Atheist writer Jean-Paul Sartre once composed a beautiful Christmas meditation (I)

The year was 1940; the place, a prison camp for French prisoners in Germany.

Some prisoner priests asked their fellow prisoner Jean-Paul Sartre (1), the famous existentialist philosopher, to write a short meditation for Christmas Eve. Sartre, an atheist, accepted and wrote these beautiful lines. Did grace visit him at that moment, even if the philosopher later denied it?

"It is your right to see the Manger scene. Here it is. We can see the Virgin, Joseph, and the Baby Jesus. The artist put all his heart into this drawing. You may find it naive, but listen. Just close your eyes and I'll tell you how I see these three inwardly.

The Virgin is pale and looks at the child. What should be painted on her face is an anxious amazement that has only appeared once on a human face, for Christ is her child, the flesh of her flesh and the fruit of her womb. She bore him for nine months. She nursed him, and her milk will become the blood of God. She holds him in her arms and says: “My little one”!

But at other times, she's speechless and thinks: “God is here”, and feels a religious fear for this mute God, for this child, because all mothers are transfixed like this at times, by this fragment of their flesh that is their child, and they feel in exile before this new life that has been made with their life and who is inhabited by foreign thoughts.

But none has been more cruelly and swiftly torn from its mother, for He is God, and He surpasses in every way what she can imagine. And it's a hard test for a mother to fear for herself and her human condition in the presence of her son. But I think there are also quick, fleeting moments when she feels both that Christ is her son, her little one, and that he is God. She looks at him and thinks: “This God is my child! This divine flesh is my flesh, He is made of me, He has my eyes and this shape of mouth is the shape of mine. He looks like me, He is God and He looks like me!

Excerpt from “Bariona ou le Fils du tonnerre”. The complete text can be found in Les Écrits de Sartre by M. Contat and M. Rybalka, NRF, 1970.

(1) Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French existentialist philosopher (1905–1980)