Dear Family: Christmas Musings from a Pastor without a Pulpit
Dear family,
It’s Christmas Day, the sun is shining, presents have been opened, and the mid-day slump has begun, at least around here. I started writing this last night, just after I returned from a sweet evening service at a nearby church, where I joined with the choir in singing “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” and listened to a reading of “Stubby Pringle’s Christmas,” along with a snippet or two of the Christmas Story as told in the gospel according to Luke.
It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that I would go to church this year. I agonized for an absurd amount of time over where I might go, and if, even, I should go, which is strange. (Well, the agonizing part isn’t so odd; did you know I’m the corresponding secretary of the local chapter of Overthinkers Anonymous?) Of course I have always loved Christmas Eve, but it’s hard to go from leading, planning, and preaching a service to simply taking the message in. I just wasn’t sure my heart was up for it this time around.
The view from my morning chair: A small white-and-brown dog is entranced by the Christmas tree lights early on Christmas morning.
And yet I went, and I’m glad I did. Not because the story was sweet (it was) and not because singing is joy-inducing (it is), but because I’m realizing that I needed some way of sitting in community with the big, rich, and sometimes overwhelming feelings that I associate with Christmas Eve.
That may sound odd. I think that culturally, Christmas Eve is often associated with a feeling of joyous anticipation. And I agree ~ even in a household that no longer includes small children, the anticipation is a palpable thing.
Anticipation, yes … but also a touch of somberness. Melancholy, even. Maybe it’s just me who winds up in that emotional neighborhood each year on Christmas Eve, but honestly, I doubt it, especially this time around.
No matter what the powers of capitalism and empire might try to tell us, Christmas Eve isn’t, I think, the time for “good cheer.” It’s too important, that moment, as we await, and bear witness to, the labor that will bring about the birth of the Incarnation of Love, born back then and over there, but also right here and right now, in our own hearts.
So anticipation, yes … and melancholy, yes … and, of course, part of that sense of melancholy is simple exhaustion. Errands have been run, perhaps cards mailed (well, not by me, but maybe next year?), cookies baked and gifts wrapped, holiday parties attended. Menus for feasting are planned and homes cleaned in preparation for guests. Here in the northern hemisphere, the nights are so long and the dark descends so early, and let’s be honest, whatever time I get to bed, it is past my bedtime! The fatigue is deep and undeniable.
But the fatigue I’ve been thinking about lately is deeper than that. It’s something of an existential exhaustion, a soul-weariness. I’ve seen it in you, and I’m guessing you’ve seen it in me. Perhaps it’s arrogant for me to presume to speak for anyone other than myself, but it feels safe to say that many of us are tired of living in a nation divided. We are weary, many of us, of having to fight the Powers that Be on behalf of the vulnerable amongst us, tired of a world that puts the demands of Empire ahead of the needs and rights of children and refugees and those who are ill and in need of care. We are exhausted by violence, misogyny, by the small-mindedness of racism, and by the very visible suffering of the people in our communities who have no homes, and no hope. We are exhausted by the constricting feeling of constant outrage we have real cause to feel, and the onslaught of bad news both here in around the world.
In the midst of all that, is it any wonder that weariness might lay us low? And, in fact, though we’re called to sing praises along with the shepherds in the Christmas story, there’s more than just joy of the Good News of Jesus’ birth going on in this holiday. Kathleen Norris puts it this way:
“It is not merely the birth of Jesus we celebrate tonight, although we recall it joyfully, in song and story. The feast of the Incarnation invites us to celebrate also Jesus’ death, resurrection, and coming again in glory.”
It may seem harsh to go there on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, but how can we deny that we know how this whole story plays out?
Norris again: “It is our salvation story, and all of creation is invited to dance, sing, and feast. But we are so exhausted. How is it possible to bridge the gap between our sorry reality and glad, grateful recognition of the Incarnation as the mainstay of our faith?” {Kathleen Norris, “Christmas Eve Vigil,”appeared in “Goodness and Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas,” Michael Leach, James Keane, and Doris Goodnough, eds; Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY. 2015}
How, indeed?
This was the question that kept bubbling up in my prayer time within the past two weeks or so. And, oh, blessed be, the answer emerged for me once again just last night. A simple answer! Well, to be clear, it’s not an easy answer to actually live, but it is quite simple. It’s a line that was formulated by Fr. Gregory Boyle in his first book, “Tattoos on the Heart,” and it lives in a note in my phone that I return to again and again because it’s that important to me. Are you ready?:
“A spacious and undefended heart finds room for everything you are and carves space for everybody else.” (Boyle, Gregory. Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (p. 87).)
A spacious and undefended heart. If I’ve learned anything in my life, I’ve learned this: fear and anger cause a tightness in my heart that harms me and makes it far more likely that I’ll be part of the wounding rather than part of the healing in our world.
“A spacious and undefended heart finds room for everything you are and carves space for everybody else.”
We see that, of course, in Jesus ~ I’m not thinking so much the infant Jesus (any more than any other infant), but in Jesus the man … who comes to us as Love in the flesh ~ Love Incarnate. If ever there was a spacious and undefended heart, surely it beat in Jesus’ chest.
We see that heart – Jesus’ spacious heart –in so many of the stories he told that we retell … of God’s rejoicing like the shepherd who lost a sheep and did everything in his power to find it and bring it safely home … that rejoicing comes from a spacious heart. We see that spacious and undefended heart in the way Jesus touched the untouchable ones, ate with the outcasts, and prioritized God’s law of love over the contortions of the powerful Empire of human making. We see it when he continues to love Judas even knowing Judas would betray him. We see it from our vantage point in the crowd at the crucifixion, when his eyes sweep the over the multitude and we are caught in his loving gaze as he says, “Father, forgive them … for they know not what they do.” Have you ever seen a more spacious and undefended heart than that?
So back to Kathleen Norris’s question, which I think leads us to Fr. Greg’s answer:
“How is it possible,” she asks, “to bridge the gap between our sorry reality and glad, grateful recognition of the Incarnation as the mainstay of our faith?”
She answers her own question:
“We might begin by acknowledging that if we have neglected the spiritual call of Advent for yet another year, and have allowed ourselves to become thoroughly frazzled by December 24, all is not lost. We are, in fact, in very good shape for Christmas. It is precisely because we are weary, and poor in spirit, that God can touch us with hope. This is not an easy truth. It means we must accept our common lot, and take up our share of the cross. It means that we do not gloss over the evils we confront every day, both within ourselves and without. Our sacrifices may be great. But as the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, once said, it is only the poor and hungry, those who know they need someone to come on their behalf, who can [truly] celebrate Christmas.” [Kathleen Norris, “Christmas Eve Vigil,”appeared in “Goodness and Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas,” Michael Leach, James Keane, and Doris Goodnough, eds; Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY. 2015]
This is the Good News proclaimed by the shining throng of angels: when the powerful of the earth had made a real mess of things, God slipped in and joined humanity. God was born into the world in poverty, with an unwed teenaged mother, an overwhelmed father for whom none of this was part of the plan … and God became “Emmanuel” ~ whom we know as Jesus. Emmanuel: God-with-us. God came to the people who needed God the most – the downcast, the outcast, the impoverished, the foreigners – and they laid the baby in a manger. A feeding trough. Did you notice that? The Bread of Life … in the place where cattle ate. And through him, all the world is invited to eat and be blessed. Through him, those binding bands on our hearts are released, and we are able to move into spaciousness.
Yes, I am weary, but I’m glad that I remembered last night that I needed to spend some time celebrating the coming of Jesus Emmanuel. I needed to remember that, even in the midst of my fatigue, God is here.
God is here because God is everywhere where there is suffering and soul-weariness, where there are people in need of food, shelter, healing, and compassion. God is here to heal wounded hearts not by sealing off the painful parts … not by constricting and covering, but by showing us the way to that spaciousness that we see in Jesus. God is here to encourage – to give heart! –to the peace-makers and justice warriors, to call the hard-hearted back to gentleness and hope.
I have long loved what Thomas Merton wrote about why God chose Incarnation:
“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.” (Thomas Merton, “The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room” in Raids on the Unspeakable)
I didn’t have it in me to finish writing this in the afterglow of the sweet church service I attended last night. I was wrestling with the fact that the sentimental and cozy stories the wider culture tells about Christmas don’t fit my mood of lament, anger, and grief at so much of what we see on the news. Today, it’s coming to me more clearly: in our hurting and troubled world, the reason Christmas still matters to me is because it’s one of those rare moments when we acknowledge that our collective brokenness can be healed by welcoming Love ~ vulnerable infant Love who needs to be fed, rocked, and bathed, born on the outer fringes of propriety. Our hearts can be made well by welcoming Love powerful enough to alter the heavens ~ and allowing ourselves to be transformed by it, uninvited though it is.
It takes courage to welcome that kind of shimmering, piercing, demanding Love, the kind that breaks in uninvited and turns things upside down. It requires us to acknowledge the mess we’ve made of things: the sins we’ve committed or ignored, the injustices we’ve perpetuated and benefitted from, the dehumanization and environmental degradation we’ve tolerated and even become blind to.
And so … a prayer:
May God bless us with the courage to live from hearts that are spacious and undefended. May God keep us open to the power and mystery of that seed of Love that is planted in our spirits, which is a Love that will never die. And may the ways in which we are changed by that Love ripple outward, until the weary world rejoices.
May it be so. Amen.
Merry Christmas!
love,