Christmas in Covid-time

 It is Christmas morning. Christmas in Covid-time.

I am aware that I have tried to slog out this strange season in the way that comes naturally to me, head-down, keeping emotions in check, waiting things out, hoping for the best but expecting less.

I suppose it's a kind of controlled numbness, designed to keep the edges from fraying, or to keep them from fraying over-much. Because fray they will.

But now it's Christmas, which ought to break into the numbness, stir up hope, restore a sense of . . . what? Mission?

I think that Joseph, the husband of Mary, might have been feeling a little numb himself. Mary, the woman to whom he was engaged to be married, was pregnant, and the baby certainly wasn't his. The Gospel According to Matthew tells us that Joseph "resolved to divorce her quietly."

He was a decent man, a merciful man. He was trying to spare Mary the shame and dishonor that would normally come upon a single woman in such circumstances. 

Everything on hold. Everything up in the air. 

But then . . . a fearfully powerful being, filled with light, a messenger from God, intervened. It was only a dream, perhaps. But this is what the being said:

"Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save the people from their sins."

To Mary, also, this same messenger, whose name was Gabriel, appeared. I suppose it nearly scared the girl to death! But the being said:

"Greetings, oh favored one, the Lord is with you! . . . And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

And not only Joseph and Mary, but also, a few shepherds in the fields on the night of the child's birth. They too must have used numbness as a kind of survival-strategy. It couldn't have been easy work. And prospects for advancement, nil. And the night, cold. There were no vacations, no sick-leave. Never a thought for getting an education, or building up a little nest egg, or moving to a new town, changing careers, starting over. There were only the sheep, and the stars, and perhaps a little fire to keep the cold at bay. 

But then, "the glory of the Lord shone all around." These boys were all most certainly awake, this was no dream. You and I can only guess what the "glory of the Lord" must have been like, but those boys were "filled with great fear," Luke tells us. And then the being, the messenger, spoke:

"Fear not, for behold, I bring you good new of great joy, that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord."

So for now, for this one night, there would be no more slogging through, keeping your head down, trying not to feel too much. Instead, there would be these boys running through the streets of Bethlehem, looking for a baby in a manger.

I don't know how to wrap this little Christmas meditation up. I don't have any profound advice for dealing with whatever you're dealing with. I'm not promising you mountaintop experiences or happiness every day. But angels showed up, and they were fearful, and they filled the sky, and they were celebrating! For they too had been waiting for this night. 

It happened. The child was born, grew in wisdom and stature, and well, I suppose you know the story. But it begins with a majestic promise of God fulfilled in a supernatural way, with His messengers bringing the news to an amazed young couple engaged to be married, and a few exhausted shepherds out in the fields.

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. . . ." [Isaiah 9:2]

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Read also: Jesus is the Light of the Lockdown 

The Big Wait

The waiting is always the hardest part.

It is the season of waiting on the Christian calendar. Advent. Even for non-believers who celebrate a more culture-current Christmas, this is a time of waiting for the big day. A day into which people pour a lot of effort, hoping to make that one day a glorious respite, an oasis of joy interrupting the day-after-day routine.

And then, this year, we are all waiting for the vaccine, waiting for lockdowns to end, waiting for a new president, waiting for a chance to visit family, waiting for faces to blossom into view again on the streets, at the grocery store, on buses. 

I don't recall another time when the entire nation seemed to be coping with a bad case of delayed gratification, from the commander-in-chief on down. 

Some of us aren't handling it well. Some of us aren't really used to delayed gratification, the president being a case in point. He has been getting what he wants for most of his adult life, and even when things didn't work out for him in the past, he was always able to move the goal posts and come away with a score after all (or at least appear to).

That's not happening this time, and according to numerous reports it's making him crazy (for examples, this and this). They say that he's distancing himself from his more rational and cautious advisors, surrounding himself instead with the crazy ones. What this means is that every prominent Republican, whether senators, congresspersons, or staffers, will have to make the choice: which group do you want to belong to? The Rationals or the Crazies?

According to virtually everybody, Trump's orchestrated plan to contest the Congressional ratification of the Electoral College results, which is set to take place on January 6, is doomed to fail. But that, of course, is missing the point. Success and failure for Donald Trump have always been largely a matter of appearances. "Appearances" is what January 6 is all about.

One of the reasons I think that Trump is going to run for president again, either he or a hand-picked successor, is that he seems to be setting things up in such a way that in the end he will have subjected every Republican to a kind of loyalty test. He will know by the vote on January 6 who is really for him, a loyal minion, and who is not. In other words, he's once again separating the Rationals and the Crazies.

And speaking of the church calendar, January 6 is also Epiphany, which is the 12th day of Christmas and the day associated with the visit of the Magi, bringing their gifts to the Christ child. All eyes will be on Congress that day, but we would be wise to turn and look to Bethlehem as well. In that place, at as specific moment in time, the day-after-day routine was rent asunder by the coming of a child. 

You don't have to go big, and you don't have to go home.

"Go big or go home" is the quintessential motto of our times. Everything has to be bigger, louder, faster. Everything has to be covered with more bling, more grandiosity, more hype. Everything has to be mega, everything has to be sexy, everything has to be "life-changing." As for home, well, "going home" means you're out of the game. Home is where you're sent for being inadequate to win the big prize.

Whatever happened to quiet? Whatever happened to slow? Whatever happened to the beauty of the ordinary? Whatever happened to plain and simple? Whatever happened to tranquility?

Hear now the Christmas meditations of Cardinal John Henry Newman:

THERE are two principal lessons which we are taught on the great Festival which we this day celebrate, lowliness and joy. This surely is a day, of all others, in which is set before us the heavenly excellence and the acceptableness in God’s sight of that state which most men have, or may have, allotted to them, humble or private life, and cheerfulness in it. If we consult the writings of historians, philosophers, and poets of this world, we shall be led to think great men happy; we shall be led to fix our minds and hearts upon high or conspicuous stations, strange adventures, powerful talents to cope with them, memorable struggles, and great destinies. We shall consider that the highest course of life is the mere pursuit, not the enjoyment of good.

But when we think of this day’s Festival, and what we commemorate upon it, a new and very different scene opens upon us. First, we are reminded that though this life must ever be a life of toil and effort, yet that, properly speaking, we have not to seek our highest good. It is found, it is brought near us, in the descent of the Son of God from His Father’s bosom to this world. It is stored up among us on earth. No longer need men of ardent minds weary themselves in the pursuit of what they fancy may be chief goods; no longer have they to wander about and encounter peril in quest of that unknown blessedness to which their hearts naturally aspire, as they did in heathen times. The text speaks to them and to all, “Unto you,” it says, “is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”

It's Christmas morning as I write this. I noticed while watching football on TV yesterday that there's some sort of "reality" show out there that features competition for the most grandiose Christmas decorations. Who can deck their house with more lights, synced to holiday music, able to be seen from space, etc. That, in a nutshell, is what Christmas in America seems to have become.

I think you'll find that as our culture drifts further and further from its Christiandom moorings, its celebration of some sort of Secularized Christmas will become more and more tricked up with gaudy display, all designed to present you with one and only one choice: that is, the choice between the myth of salvation by acquisition, or the perceived humiliation of not having all that your neighbors have. To signal to the world that you're in the game, you might want to add that 20-feet high blow-up Rudolph to your front yard seasonal display.

But of course, nothing could be more unChristmas than all that. [I could go on my usual rant against commercialism here, and how it is ultimately dehumanizing us all, but I'll try to keep that in check.]  It's as if we were all born into some giant fun house at the carnival, and don't even realize that out beyond the colored lights and the amped-up music there remains the real world. Or at the least the possibility of the real. But who even cares anymore?

Christmas is about humility. It is to shepherds that the angels come--mere boys--not to kings or corporate CEOs. And if you want to understand humility, just look at Mary, the mother of Jesus. You'll find her story in the first chapter of the Gospel according to Luke. Or look to Jesus. The first chapter of the Gospel according to John might help here, or even Paul's tribute to Jesus, at the start of the 2nd chapter of his Letter to the Philippians.

Let me put it to you this way: the world does not want you to be at peace. So it will do all it can to keep you from hearing the gentle rap at your door when the Prince of Peace comes calling. This culture of go-getting, of brashness and self-promotion, of keeping up with the neighbors and putting on a good show, is killing us. It's frying our spiritual nerve endings, numbing our senses, keeping us trapped in the funhouse. But off in the night there shines a star, and down below, forced to shelter in a stable, a young maiden is giving birth to a child. That child will rattle the foundations of empire by going to a Cross. Praise Him!

A Great Light

Jonathan Pennington's book, The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, is really engaging. I can't wait to pick it up each evening. Pennington is helping me "adjust my focus" when it comes to the Sermon.

If you'd like to hear Pennington himself discuss the book, this podcast is for you. And this one. Oh, and this one too.

Needless to say, I'm kind of stuck on the Sermon. My Bible-reading modus operandi lately has been to focus primarily on the four Gospels (I said "primarily," not "exclusively"). As for the Sermon, I just can't seem to get past it. In one of those podcasts above Pennington suggests that one good practice to help you understand the Sermon better is to memorize it. He admits he hasn't got it all down just yet, but much of it. Maybe I'll try that.

The Sermon as a whole is, among many other things, a call to radical selflessness or humility. I keep thinking, as I read this, that Jesus is out to convince people of the ultimate beauty of humility, and that in humility is foundational to holiness.

As such, the Sermon acts as a corrective, a kind of re-orientation of our hearts, turning us away from our normal concerns, calling us to something better and yet something daunting and apparently counter-logical. That which is central to God is not normally central to us.

Christmas can act as the same kind of corrective. So to finish, let's hear from Isaiah:

But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.

2 The people who walked in darkness
    have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
    on them has light shone.
3 You have multiplied the nation;
    you have increased its joy;
they rejoice before you
    as with joy at the harvest,
    as they are glad when they divide the spoil.
4 For the yoke of his burden,
    and the staff for his shoulder,
    the rod of his oppressor,
    you have broken as on the day of Midian.
5 For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult
    and every garment rolled in blood
    will be burned as fuel for the fire.
6 For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon[d] his shoulder,
    and his name shall be called[e]
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7 Of the increase of his government and of peace
    there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
    to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
    from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

Meditation at the end of another Christmas

I woke up at 4:00 this morning. All my life I’ve been waking up early on Christmas. As a boy, it was because I couldn’t start Christmas Day soon enough. My brother and sister and I would wake up very early, to find Christmas stockings hanging from the bedsteads, chock full of candy and chocolates (plus, always, an orange). We were very disciplined, we kids, about not eating all the candy at once, even before our Mom got up. We’d spread it out on the bed, admiring the sheer volume of sweets that had come our way. Sometimes we’d make trades among ourselves. And we were (or at least I was) convinced that it all came from Santa Claus.

There’s no stocking full of candy for me on Christmas anymore. I’m not even particularly interested in candy, as a matter of fact. Nor did I lie awake last night listening for the sound of Santa’s reindeer on our rooftop. Yes, as a child I believed all that Santa stuff, hook line and sinker. Though long after I stopped believing it, I still tended to lie awake on that annual night before Christmas, listening to the night sounds: perhaps a train in the distance, or the sound of the wind in the trees, or just the creaking sound a house makes sometimes (my Mom used to say the house was “settling”), and feeling somehow a strange sense of wonder and longing, just like I did as a child.

So it has always been a restless listening kind of sleep for me, that one night every year. The very fact that my body seems to retain the memory of that one night in 365 cycle, even after all these years, testifies I think to the power of the belief I once had in all that magical side of Christmas. A faith strong enough to keep you up at night, and listening for hoofbeats on the rooftop! The reason it didn’t bother me that we didn’t have a fireplace, by the way, and therefore no chimney by which Santa could get into our house, was because I knew that Santa was magical. He wouldn’t be stymied by lack of a chimney. Santa could do things. Santa was not like the rest of us, blocked by walls and locked doors and narrow chimneys (or no chimney at all), or even bound by gravity.

All that magical stuff was storytelling to surround some nugget of important truth, which had to do with such difficult to embody things as love, charity, peace. Even as a small boy I vaguely understood this much. It wasn’t all about the presents you got so much as a day, one day, to be unwary, unrestricted, in our joyfulness. One day. You wanted it to go on longer, of course, but it never did. Magic is always that way. There are limits to our access. It may be spectacular, but it’s always brief. The angels filling the sky with hosannas didn’t last all night, nor did it ever recur again. The briefer it is, the more special. The more, well, magical.

We could rid our skies of all heavenly choirs, I suppose, banish them to the dustbin of childish belief systems now usefully replaced by the politics and trade. But no matter how much the day-to-day, the rat race as it used to be called, the world that is too much with us, as Wordsworth famously said, no matter how much all that seems to blear our capacity for wonder, along comes Christmas. Christmas, as bleared and smeared a good thing as ever there was, yet despite all that, there was I, lying awake at four in the morning, remembering hoofbeats on the roof.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, the wonder is still there, waiting to be stirred, awakened. But it will not be fairy tales that do the trick. It will be, I think, the real. And the my mind wanders back to the stable in Bethlehem. The babe in the manger. God becoming man.

Magical thinking again, I’m sure many would say. Whatever. I’m not here to convince the naysayers otherwise. In taking on flesh, in humbling himself that way, Jesus took on something debilitating. In entering our world, he gave up access to the intense reality of heaven in order to join with folks who feel blessed even to have one single moment of near restfulness, the cessation if only for some brief interval of endless stress, fear, loneliness, pain, etc. Jesus, my savior, was a flesh and blood living and dying man. Much more as well, but certainly not less.

So we would have a quiet Christmas this year. My wife and I, sharing a pleasant meal (lasagna!), and talking about our favorite Christmas carols. Outside it was sunny and warmish and blustery, making me think of an early March day. Jesus walked in all weathers, and had to bundle from cold at times, or suffer the extreme heat of Palestine at other times. Sometimes his feet hurt, I’m sure. Always he ached within with a spiritual ache to see his Father’s world renewed. He was going about Palestine, in fact, announcing that very possibility. He was opening eyes, opening hearts. His story has extremes of the magical in it, and extremes of the very unmagical . . . cruelty, squalor, sorrow. On the one hand it’s quite unbelievable (I mean, what is this about walking on water, healing people with a touch, feeding thousands with a few crusts of bread), and on the other hand it’s sadly believable. We have all known traitorous friends, after all, or bullying mockers. They appear in the Jesus story as well.

What am I getting at? I don’t even know for sure myself. But all of history hinges on those events in and around the ancient city of Jerusalem, two thousand years ago. Something began there that cannot be stopped or diverted. A new thing, an inevitable revolution. It has nothing to do with elves, or grinches, or talking snowmen, or reindeer, or a fat man in a red suit. Yet all those fairy tales are not exactly off the mark either. They’re trying to get at something we have all wished for, even when, especially when, we were children. That which we long for, oh please make it real!

But only the very author of the real can make something real that isn’t. Like peace, for example. Real peace. Lasting, settled, and perfect peace. It will not be fantasy figures that bring that to pass. It will be the most real man who ever lived, making real what had only ever been dreamed of, longed for, and that the best of our storytellers have tried to capture in stories and poems and songs. A world where real peace was possible! Think of it! We have never come close on our own. Except, sometimes, lying awake on a special night, listening, wondering. We need, we have always needed, the author of peace (the very Prince of Peace) to make peace possible by entering  into the story of which he himself is the author. Peace itself, walking around in this world, talking to people, touching them, changing their lives.

There’s a lot more that can be said, and must be said, about this man. That will be for other times. But for now, to end, I want to go back to the prophet Isaiah, who lived nearly 800 years before Jesus. He said the very remarkable things. He forecast the way God would unfold his story in the world. To end with, here’s one of his forecasts. It’s worth repeating on this day especially.

To us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 9:6–7)