Family with squirrels in their roof. Call in the Pentecostals, they come back. Call the Baptists, they come back. Call the Catholics, they baptize them catholic and now they only see them at Christmas and Easter.
Christmas marks the birth of Jesus, the true beginning of his life. However, within Jesus we focus not just on beginning as a starting point, but origin. The Origin, that from which things eminate from which they are pushed. There is an intention behind. We hear the long list of Jesus’ ancestors. Not a perfect list, many falls and sinners and brokenness. In Jesus we see that the human story is drawn into God and God into the human story. We don’t have to limit our narrative to only the good things we have ever done. God from the origin of time has a will for us and that will is to bring Jesus to birth in us. In Jesus it is the fullness of God given in a human person. Jesus gave to our human hearts the capacity to love God and to not end in evil, if we will it. Through all the twists and turns one thing shines in it and its God’s love. God has a plan and is present at all moments. All times and all things can be the fullness of time, the appointed time.
No matter what we are or who, the race of the children of God can be survive no matter what our pasts or mistakes, Jesus can be born in all. So many times I have seen God’s grace work and step in when it seemed all human work was finished.
However, we can’t simply limit this feast to such a simple image, a non committal reality. One of the great things we are meant to be lead to is to awe and wonder at this mystery. Around this time of year they speak of things being magical; it’s a secular view of the spiritual where there is no source, no origin again to promote or show it. We have the reality of a God behind the mysteries of our world and the great mystery of Christmas. However, God still chooses to keep some of the greatest mysteries hidden. Why? To inspire awe and wonder, a sense of admiration and appreciation of something outside of us and greater than us yet still before us.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
Do we allow ourselves to fall in adoration before this small baby? Do we stare in awe and wonder before the mystery before us and allow ourselves to not try to understand or claim as our own, but just to be before it.