On Christmas (2.0).

I tried.....

So I had (what I thought was) a brilliant post all swirling around in my mind and I started writing it early (two days ago) because we have a Christmas Eve-Eve dinner with dear friends tomorrow night (when I usually write), and Christmas Eve (Tuesday night, when I usually edit) will be full of taking the bird to our friends’ house to be cared for while we go away, and getting ready for Christmas lunch at the Community Centre, and roasting a turkey because the other person who was originally going to do it no longer can, and taking delivery of a mountain of salads, and Christmas Eve church, and then our annual ‘Meats and Fruits’ gathering (funny story) with extended family, and then it’s The Day, and then we get on a plane.

But what has happened is that whenever I sit down to write (and even now someone is insisting I try an iced tea that has just been brewed, holding it between my actual face and my lap top screen) my husband wants the kitchen table for writing his sermon (his study is hot), or my middle son walks in the door from a morning outing and I want to hear all about it because he is home for so brief a time, or I want to play a board game because there’s a rare hour where the whole family is at home, or I’m baking another fruit cake, or doing a load of washing, or reading ‘Olive Kitteridge’ (excellent book, read it), or it’s time for another mince pie, or the eldest is relaying another current affair, or the cricket is on, or I’m wrapping gifts, or I’ve popped out for a couple of bits… I mean, it’s Christmas.

And I really wanted to write about the contrast between the temple Solomon built which was completed in 957BC and my sister-in-law’s back yard (and now there is a chorus of raucous boy laughter at the kitchen table where I am currently writing in absolute defiance and stubbornness) (and now a deep ‘Hark the Herald…’ is being boomed across the room) where we held our Carols Service last week, because both contain/ed worship and both have pomegranates (the former had them prolifically sculpted and embroidered everywhere, and the latter has an actual real life tree) and that blew my mind because apart from that there is no similarity at all between the spaces in which the gathered faithful expressed their worship to the same God and it struck me as incredible that in all the complexity and proliferation of everything in the world in the last three thousand years there should be a little reminder of the infinite and eternal and constant nature of the Deity who was and is the centre of both as we sang our hearts out last week.

Has anyone read ‘A Room of One’s Own’? Because I don’t have one and I really want one which brings me to the point I wanted to make in the first place (two days ago): the baby in the feeding trough, in a borrowed room, whose birthday it is that we celebrate with all this palaver, is the meeting point and the crux (literally) of all of history (now the middle and youngest are belting out their latest favourite indie song while the middle one thrashes a six-string with impressive vigour). That’s it. He is the common thread which ties together and unifies an ancient temple and a modern-day suburban back yard, and the people who gathered in each. He didn’t have his own room, either. Ever. Well, maybe for a little while as a child, but I’ll wager he would’ve had to share it with his subsequent brothers and sisters (and now it’s ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’ by The Smiths - they’ve gone to the lounge room and I’m still at the kitchen table with the fruit cakes, victorious).

The baby in the feeding trough was born in the middle of a chaotic world of displacement, tyranny, and suffering. To compare the existence He was born into with the hectic season of excess we’ve created for ourselves to commemorate his birth seems utterly facile, and the profoundest minimisation, and yet I will (boys have just left for the beach and husband is watering the garden - I might yet get this done) because at the root of both is human frailty. Both in grasping for power and in grasping for pleasure we are too often given over to the pursuit of more than is good for us, and we do not seem to be very good at measuring our needs and acting with according restraint. We choose the wrong measuring sticks (comparison, envy, greed, self-centredness, pride), calibrate wrongly, and get all out of kilter.

This baby, if we will allow him, will put it all to rights. He will see our excess, our tripping over ourselves, our frailty, and our need, and He will offer a better way. He will offer himself, in the midst of the chaos we have created for ourselves and at the mercy of which we have thrown ourselves, and say “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

And so as I look at the clock and realise dinner might be late, I marvel again at the disarming wonder of the baby in the feeding trough. He is vulnerable and far from home, his parents are barely grown themselves, he is surrounded by travellers, and his birth has been heralded by angels as they revealed the news to shepherds, the lowliest class of that society. And I think about his daring to come at all, his deigning to come, his design in coming, and I am reminded of a beloved quote from A.W. Tozer:

“I cannot get away from the wonder of these words, ‘He came.’ The story of pity and mercy and redeeming love are all here in two words: ‘He came.’ All the pity that God is capable of feeling, all the mercy that He is capable of showing and all the redeeming grace that He could pour out of His heart are at least suggested here in two simple words: ‘He came.’ All the hopes and longings and aspirations and dreams of immortality that lie in the human breast had their fulfilment in those two words.”

And a little further on:

“Gather together in one place all the great philosophy of every culture from the beginning of time and none of it remotely approaches the wonder and profundity of the words ‘He came.’”

(Boys home, bathroom full of sand.)

Now it’s after dinner and I’m editing and I’ve shut myself in the bedroom (front door slams, boys are home from the supermarket with snacks) so I can get this finished. This is not the post I set out to write but it’s the post I’ve written, in snatched moments amid the chaos of my own making. While I had wanted to explore the symbolism of pomegranates and the miracle of that tree in that back yard and the wonder of change and continuity, what has been produced instead is a recognition that still today, despite progress and development, the baby in the feeding trough shines as a beacon of wonder and love, and can cut through any chaos we care to create. He is humble and kind. Dear Reader, I do hope you pause for a look.