Perhaps the challenge of the Christmas season is whether we can hear familiar stories and songs with wonder, not the yawn of “déjà vu.” Can we allow the stories we’ve heard a thousand times—of a journey to Bethlehem, a stable, angels, shepherds and magi, to resonate at a deeper level this year? Can we attend with care to whatever God wants to birth in us during this season? As Eugene Ionesco warns, “over-explanation separates us from astonishment.” Perhaps the rest of the year can be cut-and-dried, but this is the season for mystery to flourish and awe to flower.
It helps to read Caryll Houselander’s The Reed of God, which points out how ordinary the Christmas story is. God doesn’t ask Mary to enter a cloister or become a heroic missionary to cannibals. Her life carries on much as it might’ve before Gabriel’s visit. In fact, “God did mean it to be the ordinary thing” so Christ can be born “in every human being’s life and not, as a rule through extraordinary things.” Most of the Advent figures are quiet, crossing the stage without fanfare, no swelling choirs. Hannah, for instance, carries a child into the temple. She’s not a priest nor bishop, simply a woman who could’ve easily gone unnoticed. So too, Mary and Elizabeth have a conversation on the back porch, not even in the temple. But how these women change the course of human history!
The quiet simplicity contrasts with the way of the zealot: loud, attention-seeking and forcing everyone into the same mold. The Christmas message is that we give hearts and hands to God, each unique life bearing Christ into the world. Whether we’re paying bills, mopping floors, buying groceries or washing cars, we are new faces of God. And the God of surprises grins and twirls and pirouettes in all the places we’d least expect…
Kathy Coffey 