Christmas Eve: Meditating on the Mystery of Incarnation

A simple Christmas Eve. The joy of a Christmas Eve service. Listening to Amy Grant and Sting and classical selections. Taking time to post on social media. Quiet tomorrow, a gathering of vaccinated/boosted friends day after Christmas. Reading, a Hallmark movie or two, no news for the next 48 hours (big thing for someone who watches news too much), and journaling, spiritual reading, meditation, and some goofing off. Missing Kitty Emma who left in September, but peaceful and feel her presence every once in awhile. A couple of quotes, a photo, and my warmest wishes and prayers that no matter what is happening with you this Christmas, you will be aware of the simple blessings of breath, life, and love. And a bit of chocolate or some Christmas cookies to make your mouth merry.

“The highest service may be prepared for and done in the humblest surroundings. In silence, in waiting, in obscure, unnoticed offices, in years of uneventful, unrecorded duties, the Son of God grew and waxed strong.”

— Inscription in the Chapel of Stanford University

When you celebrate Christmas, think about the importance God places on your life, even if you don’t feel that who you are or what you do make much difference in a busy world. The Incarnation tells us that we are special and unique and that God wants to dwell in our hearts. In God’s eyes, there is no place too humble, no corner of the world that is not worthy to dwell in. He comes as a child to our hearts, not demanding or conquering. He comes as a baby to hold in our arms. It is not whether or not He is here with us. It is whether or not we decide to welcome Him into our lives.

“The gospel of love, creativity, and hope come together in the announcement: “For unto us a child is born.” All forms of love ripen and prove themselves genuine by their fruitfulness in giving birth to something.”

— Sam Keen

The Christian church has historically insisted on Christ as fully God and fully man. In a very special way the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, his physical incarnation in time and space, is a sign to tell us who God is and how He relates to the world He created. I have meditated on this rich concept, turning it over and over in my mind like a many-faceted diamond is turned over and over in the hand, catching the light from one angle after another. The Incarnation tells me that our lives are important, affirming the Genesis “It is good” once again. It tells me that the body is not something to be ashamed of but to be honored. Place is important. We are all important as individuals and also as part of a greater whole. No place is too small, no person unimportant. Creation and God’s presence in us offers a pattern of being that is so complex, beautiful, and wonderful that we can only understand a fraction of it.

Christ came to a young couple who were not important in any scheme of the ruling elite of their day. He wasn’t a far off diety to be worshipped with fear and trembling in some golden temple. He was not an oriental potentate who ruled like a despot, demanding tribute and grinding us under the conqueror’s boot heel. He was not a merchant prince, buying and selling our souls for a quick profit. He was just a tiny baby, born of a humble family, coming to join us in a troubled and chaotic world.

“For mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew,
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
The God is dwelling too.”

— William Blake

There was no political power, financial power, or religious power that had any interest or knowledge in the birth. Herod, that wily old fox of a king, only wanted to stamp out any possible threat to his throne, so his response to the wise men’s news was one of violence. The temple priests had no interest and made no journey to Bethlehem. No, the only ones who came and worshipped were a few outsiders, wise men from another country, and a few scruffy shepherds. 

Why would God hang out with a bunch of shepherds in Bethlehem when He could appear in glory in Jerusalem’s Temple just over the hill? Why would God come to a powerless family that has to travel to Bethlehem because Caesar wants to make sure he gets his full quota of taxes from a conquered people, instead of having the good sense to be born in a palace as a son of the ruling class, where at least He could have some political leverage? All through the New Testament, this God in Christ surprises us with who he chooses to hang around with—sinners, tax collectors, and women of low repute. Do we get the hint that God likes us, even when our names don’t appear on the social register? Do we understand that God says we are important, even though the world might write us off as total losers?

“The Incarnation, which is for popular Christianity synonymous with the historical birth and earthly life of Christ, is for the mystic not only this but also a perpetual Cosmic and personal process. It is an everlasting bringing forth, in the universe and also in the individual and ascending soul, of the divine and perfect Life, the pure character of God.”

— Evelyn Underhill

The baby Jesus sleeps in a manger in Bethlehem, a seemingly ordinary child. The story says that God came to earth as a baby, grew up just like all children grow up, and became an adult. According to the Gospels, Jesus was not Superman hiding his superpowers behind a Clark Kent mask, but one of us. Fully human and yet also mysteriously fully God. 

Whether you regard it as a primitive myth, literal fact, or mystical truth, the Incarnation is the mystery at the center of Christmas. Scholars and theologians may debate doctrines and theories, but for me the Incarnation of Christ is a mystery to meditate on, a mystical truth that offers meaning for the life I live today.

“Because of creation and even more because of incarnation, there is nothing profane for those who know how to see.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Wishing you the best of the season, and that you will know you are a person of eternal value and worth, loved by God.

And a special gift from the Stereo Angels, Rosemary Cathcart, Larry Faragalli and the Heavenly Band. Christmas Eve at CSLN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSluPGp9_mE

Wishing you a wonderful Christmas and Happy New Year

The Rowdy Santas and I are partying and celebrating the holiday in high style. Here are a few choice thoughts on the season that celebrates the hope of peace on earth, good will toward all.

Merry Christmas! 

It is in the old Christmas carols, hymns, and traditions—those which date from the Middle Ages—that we find not only what makes Christmas poetic and soothing and stately, but first and foremost what makes Christmas exciting. The exciting quality of Christmas rests on an ancient and admitted paradox. It rests upon the paradox that the power and center of the whole universe may be found in some seemingly small matter, that the stars in their courses may move like a moving wheel around the neglected outhouse of an inn.
G.K. Chesterton

Christmas begins with anticipation. The child in all of us yearns for the beautiful gifts this season brings. Remember when you were a child, waiting for Christmas morning when all the glories of wrapped presents, filled stockings, lighted trees, and family feasts would be revealed? Often, when we become adults, we lose that childlike expectancy. Christmas sometimes seems more a chore to get through than a pleasure to savor. But the joyous simplicities of the season can still weave their magic, if we rediscover the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

Renew your sense of anticipation. Acknowledge the yearning of your heart through the symbols of Advent, where the church awaits the coming Redeemer. Feel the joy of Christmas morning, when the Gift is given and God has come to his people. And in Epiphany, honor the sacredness of life, as wise men and women through the ages have learned to do. Let a sense of anticipation renew your heart in this festive winter celebration. 

Celebrate the abundance of Christmas by counting the blessings you have now, and anticipating that the goodness you choose to experience today is a sign of the goodness you will experience tomorrow. Take the time to savor the delights of this season—and you will rediscover the joys of anticipation.

(from Christmas Abundance by Candy Paull)

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to rise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more.
Henry Ward Beecher

The Paradox of Christmas

The things we do at Christmas are touched with a certain extravagance…
Robert Collyer

Christmas is like life: too religious for the secularist and too secular for the religious. Christmas as it has been celebrated through the centuries has always swung between legalism and license, celebration and contemplation, social acceptance and rejection by church or state. Christmas seems to be too big and too complex for those who like to have their days neatly boxed, labeled, and pigeonholed. This holiday is too wild and untamed, never neatly fitting into anyone’s paradigm. 

For instance, the founder of Christmas begins life in a manger, crying like a baby. What respectable Almighty, all-powerful diety would countenance such a basic beginning? Yet the Bible says that this baby born to poor parents in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire is God himself come to earth in human flesh. There is great discomfort with the incarnation and the virgin birth and secularists cry, “Impossible! Myth, superstition, religious fanaticism.” Angels coming to shepherds, a star leading wise men from another country, dreams and visions and prophecies and miracles—it all sounds a little strange to those who live in a more utilitarian time. Medieval theologians debated how many angels could dance on a pin, modern secularists won’t even admit that angels might exist. Ancient prophecies and the claim that this Child is their fulfillment sound like fantasies in a world that has decided that prophets are out of date and miracles can all be explained away. Christmas is a difficult time for those who want easy explanations.

If you want to work for the kingdom of God, and to bring it, and enter into it, there is just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter into it as children, or not at all.
John Ruskin

Let us enjoy the paradox of a holiday that is both sacred and secular, Christian and pagan, worshipful and commercial. Let us choose to celebrate with mature faith and childlike hearts. Let us learn to see sanctity in the commonplace, delight in the details, and open our hearts to embrace the contradictions. Let us keep room in our hearts for both God and mankind, heaven and earth.

I choose to celebrate the sacred holiday and incorporate the riches of almost two thousand years of thought, theology, liturgy, and ceremony in my life. I also choose to make Christmas joyous by reveling in ancient traditions, folk customs, carols and songs, and lovely nonsense that may or may not have roots in pagan beliefs. I can sing Oh Holy Night with as much joy as I can dance to the Jingle Bell Rock. I will also make time for quietness to meditate on the meaning of Christmas, to treasure memories of Christmas past, and to pray for future Christmas hopes. 

The greatest gift that can come to anyone is to share in the infinite act by which God’s love is poured out upon all men.
Thomas Merton

I choose to be a child again at the sight of a lighted Christmas tree. I also choose to be a sophisticated adult, dressed up for a wonderful party. I’ll shop in malls and worship in church. I’ll spend money on a sinfully delicious chocolate truffle and write a check for my favorite charity. Christmas is a festival of light celebrated during the darkest part of the year. It’s an orgy of spending in a commercialized environment and an opportunity to listen to wonderful choirs singing about the love of God for mankind which is without price. It’s a family reunion, good fellowship time and the time when I feel most lonely in a crowd. Secular saints like Santa Claus and angels singing glory hallelujah in a starry night are both images I can live with. And  I will especially remember the paradox of God come as a child to earth to lift us up to heaven’s heights. I intend to revel in the paradox of Christmas, in all its glory and messiness. Care to join me?

Oh rich and various man! Thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night, and the unfathomable galaxy in thy brain, the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, the power of love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.  Praise ye the Lord.
Psalm 150:6 (KJV) 

 
Asked to declare the new beverage, coffee, unholy, Pope Clement III sampled it and declared instead: “This Satan’s drink is so delicious, it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”