Come to Be

What I want to write about is the day after Christmas. I feel like the day after Christmas has always plagued me with a sense of disappointment and disillusionment that fairly boots all the joy of the Christmas season clear out the door. As a kid (and, let’s face it, as an adult too) I can remember constantly feeling, on that most dread day, that Christmas had not been enough. There weren’t enough presents, not enough merriment, there was just not enough time for all the cookie-baking, carol singing, present wrapping, and everything else that was supposed to make this “the most wonderful time of the year.” Every year, it is easy to feel like I didn’t get enough Christmas.

I guess this is not a surprising state of affairs for a culture in which every experience is touted as a pinnacle, a higher peak than the last. But I think what is surprising to me is that I often get the same sense spiritually. I think this has been the first year that I have plunged into the church year and found what a leap into darkness this first season is. Advent, after all, is proclaimed as a coming light to people currently walking in darkness. But this season which begins in darkness is supposed to grow ever brighter until suddenly, blindingly, Christ, the self-proclaimed light of the world, enters the picture in the form of a vulnerable God, a weak baby that puts to shame all my high-minded expectations of myself.

This is how it was preached to me this Christmas Eve at a large, Texan, Methodist church. The preacher was telling a story about how he and his brother used to go every year to visit his Grandmother’s house, and, most particularly his Grandmother’s swimming pool. It was just a cement hole in the backyard that had filled, over the years, with rain water and leaves and branches and all manner of scummy, slimy things that lurked in murky waters. The point of the games was to play near the water, without actually falling in, which would obviously result in death. So, as you might expect from a story like this, one day this boy had fallen into the pool and was thrashing around, expecting doom any moment when the college kid who lived next door saw what was happening and jumped the intervening fence to come and rescue him, pull him out, clap him on the back a couple times and absently ask, are you okay? before striding back over the fence.

You know the metaphor, if you’ve grown up around churches. I can’t tell you how many times I heard variations on the same story. I was in peril and Jesus dragged me out by the scruff of my neck and slapped me on the shore to dry off. Hooray. The light has come into the darkness and blinded all those whose pupils did not dilate quickly enough and left them dazed, seeing fuzzy patterns on the undersides of their eyelids. No wonder the day after Christmas looks so bleak. We expected a downdraft of glitter on the breeze, the strumming of harps that would indicate that the Great Miracle where Everything becomes Different had finally, finally come. But no, this year is just as bleak as the last.

But what I assert is that Christmas is not like the sudden appearance of someone coming to pull you out of a swimming pool. I much prefer Dante’s immortal lines:

“In the middle of the road of my life
I awoke in the dark wood
where the true way was wholly lost”

I acknowledge the darkness of the woods, and the lostness of my condition. I acknowledge the fragility and weakness that comes with my humanity, the ease with which the very essence of my life can be undone, and the wickedness within me that I have come to know through the terrifying intimacy of a long acquaintance. It is very dark, in this wood, in this world, but my experience has taught me, at least as far as my own story is concerned, that God’s way of salvation is not to pluck us out of the darkness, out of the confusion, and set us on a high hilltop from which we can never be moved. It seems to me more like when Christmas happens (and never forget, Christmas can happen at any time of the year) suddenly—zap!—someone is there in the darkness with you.

I also acknowledge mystery, my dears, and so this may be all I can say. I do not know the ways of God, the shapes he makes as he moves through the darkness of a dark wood. Is she there to comfort, to shield? Is he there to guide? Will she take you down an ever darker road, the road of perils, for reasons unknown? Will he travel close at your side or on a distant but parallel path so that you can just barely follow his adjacent movements through the trees? I don’t know how to answer these questions and at this point I am not ever all that sure of the validity of the question. When does the one being led really understand the leadership of the one showing the way? If I knew the terrain, I would not have come to find myself so lost.

Well, then. The one thing I know, the one truth that is very large if we allow it to be, is the truth of presence. God, who was once only very far away has come very close; God has come to be. With us. So perhaps on the day after Christmas it seems as if nothing has changed because on the first brush, this change seems like such a small one. But my hope is that it is a small change like changing the angle of trajectory is a small change. It’s only in traveling the course that any real difference can be discerned.

I could not believe in a God who pulls me out of all my problems, dusts me off, and sends me on my way, because I’ve never seen that happen. But perhaps I could place my hope in a God who zaps himself into my darkness, who leads me in the way mysterious, destination unknown, but who is, at the end of the day, there.

I could, perhaps, believe in the God who has come to be.

Peace for the New Year,
S.