12/21 Friday Column

My favorite Christmas song is O Holy Night. i got to hear pieces of it being rehearsed for our Christmas eve lessons and carols service. I heard it after the horrors of last Friday, so the words, “ the weary world rejoices” jumped out at me this year. We get weary after working hard for a long time with little tangible result. It’s a combination of being physically and emotionally spent.
Christmas is a time of balm and restoration for the weary. Our two daughters came to visit this week, so we had an early Christmas set of celebrations. Our new son-in-law came as well, so I got to learn to be more open for the holidays. Our younger daughter reminded me that I had better prepare a stocking for him as well as the girls, and he was most helpful in telling of some likes and dislikes, as I dislike having people feel pressured , and I like to get them presents that they may well appreciate and enjoy.

Of course expectations of Christmas perfection often collide with reality. While they were out watching the Hobbit, I made dinner and had two grease fires due to the goose and a crack in my roasting pan.I had more smoke going on than  teenagers covering up weed with incense in their room. Families have an innate capacity of pressing buttons, so visits are often fraught with tension and hurt feelings. Attic gremlins turn lights into constricted  balls of wire. In bad economic times, we may share Clark Griswold’s disappointment that a hoped for christmas bonus is the apple butter of the month club.Christmas dinner tastes a bit bitter when we look at the empty places around the table.We may even wear a hideous Christmas sweater to commemorate the addled aunt who gave it years ago.Over the years we have been careful to add some traditions in our household. We honor our different ethnic traditions; we have foods that have a religious significance; the girls get a book and a T-shirt in their stocking.Christmas music fills the house, now often from their ipods. We usually read some Christmas picture books, and I recited one on the way to Effingham in the windstorm that hit yesterday afternoon.  

The Holy Family has been frozen in our minds in Christmas cards, creches, and carols. Our families rarely approach that image of calm and peace.If we take the Incarnation seriously, Jesus was born into a regular family, with all of the stresses, strains, joys, and laughter of any family.As Emmanuel, God with us,Jesus does represent the divine “veiled in flesh.” At the same time, the Incarnation is being enmeshed with what we go through in life. it is not God in an elaborate masquerade for the holiday.Living with us, living a human life, Jesus can both sympathize and empathize with us.

Another carol buzzing about in my mind is O Little Town. Luke’s story says that there was no room in the inn. They were then forced to use a feeding trough for a cradle. The lyrics of the carol ask us to be living mangers, our lives the Nativity scene. Christmas is all about the birth of the new. To what extent do we provide hospitality for the Christmas spirit, the presence of the divine inside of us. The Grinches of Fox news look to create a problem every Christmas with various greetings of the season. Rather, the point should be the degree to which we learn and open hospitality to the presence of God in our own spirits and in our social spaces.This Christmas, my prayer would be for us to see ourselves and each other as mangers for the “ Christ to be born in us today...to abide with us.”