It's Christmas Day here in Minnesota . . . the coldest Christmas Day since 1996, in fact!
Yet despite the cold I know much warmth in my life . . . in the form of love and friendship. Indeed, although I miss spending this special time of year with my family and friends in Australia, I feel very fortunate to have many wonderful friends, and a special someone, here in the U.S. with whom I'm able to celebrate all that the Christmas season signifies.
I share this evening a few images of some of the celebrations I've been part of, starting with my Winter Solstice Eve party of December 20 and continuing through my Solstice/Christmas gathering of December 22, Christmas Eve, and today, Christmas Day. These images are accompanied by my favorite reflections on the meaning and significance of Christmas.
I also take this opportunity to wish all my readers a very happy Christmas and all the best for 2018.
The eternal Christ Mystery began with the Big Bang where God decided to materialize as the universe. Henceforth, the material and the spiritual have always co-existed, just as Genesis 1:1-2 seems to be saying. Although this Christ existed long before Jesus, and is coterminous with creation itself, Christians seem to think Christ is Jesus' last name. What Jesus allows us to imagine – because we see it in him – is that the divine and the human are forever one. God did not just take on one human nature, although that is where we could first risk imagining it in the body of Jesus. God took on all human nature and said "yes" to it forever! In varying degrees and with infinite qualities, God took on everything physical, material, and natural as himself. That is the full meaning of the Incarnation. To allow such a momentous truth, to fully believe it, to enjoy it in practical ways, to suffer it with and for others – this is what it means to be a Christian! Nothing less will do now. Nothing less will save the world.
Into this world, this demented inn,
in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all,
Christ has come uninvited.
But because He cannot be at home in it,
because he is out of place in it,
His place is with those others,
for whom there is no room,
His place is with those who do not belong,
who are rejected by power
because they are regarded as weak,
those who are discredited,
who are denied status of persons,
who are tortured, bombed and exterminated,
with those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in the world.
He is mysteriously present in those
for whom there seems to be nothing
but the world at its worst.
. . . It is in these that He hides Himself,
for whom there is no room.
– Thomas Merton
Excerpted from "The Time of the End is the Time of No Room"
in Raids on the Unspeakable (1966)
Excerpted from "The Time of the End is the Time of No Room"
in Raids on the Unspeakable (1966)
Above: A Winter Solstice Eve gathering – Wednesday, December 20, 2017. From left: Jeffrey, Pete, Omar, my boyfriend Brent, me, and Jim.
Solstice means "sun stands still," as if the warmth and radiance of life itself hangs in the balance at critical points in the course of planetary existence. When the world becomes darker, the inner light of the soul becomes more important. The light we discover in our own depths is a speck of the original star, a spark of life that connects us to each other and to the Soul of the World.
Pictured above is my dear friend Kathleen, sharing her beautiful rendition of the traditional Irish Christmas carol known as The Wexford Carol.
Right: With my boyfriend Brent.
Above: My friend John, helping get the fire going! It was the first time I'd used the fireplace since moving into the house I'm now in (from the house next door!) last summer.
Above: With my friends Omar and Kathleen – December 22, 2017.
Left: Omar, John, and Brent.
Right: Kathleen and Joan. You may recall that my friend Joan accompanied me on a visit back to Australia in 2015.
The holidays are a time of spiritual preparation, if we allow them to be. We’re preparing for the birth of our possible selves, the event with which we have been psychologically pregnant all our lives. And the labor doesn’t happen in our fancy places; there is never “room in the inn,” or room in the intellect, for the birth of our authentic selves. That happens in the manger of our most humble places, with lots of angels, i.e. thoughts of God, all around.
Something happens in that quiet place, where we’re simply alone and listening to nothing but our hearts. It’s not loneliness, that aloneness. It’s rather the solitude of the soul, where we are grounded more deeply in our own internal depths. Then, having connected more deeply to God, we’re able to connect more deeply with each other. Our connection to the divine unlocks our connection to the universe.
According to the mystical tradition, Christ is born into the world through each of us. As we open our hearts, he is born into the world. As we choose to forgive, he is born into the world. As we rise to the occasion, he is born into the world. As we make our hearts true conduits for love, and our minds true conduits for higher thoughts, then absolutely a divine birth takes place. Who we’re capable of being emerges into the world, and weaknesses of the former self begin to fade. Thus are the spiritual mysteries of the universe, the constant process of dying to who we used to be as we actualize our divine potential.
. . . [T]his is the season when we consider the possibility that we could achieve a higher state of consciousness, not just sometimes but all the time. We consider that there has been one – and the mystical tradition says there have also been others – who so embodied his own divine spark that he is now as an elder brother to us, assigned the task of helping the rest of us do the same. [He] doesn’t have anything we don’t have; he simply doesn’t have anything else. He is in a state that is still potential in the rest of us. The image of Jesus has been so perverted, so twisted by institutions claiming to represent him. As it’s stated in [the book] The Course of Miracles, “Some bitter idols have been made of him who came only to be brother to the world.” But beyond the mythmaking, doctrine and dogma, he is a magnificent spiritual force. And one doesn’t have to be Christian to appreciate that fact, or to fall on our knees with praise and thanks at the realization of its meaning. Jesus gives to Christmas its spiritual intensity, hidden behind the ego’s lure into all the wild and cacophonous sounds of the season. Beyond the nativity scenes, beyond the doctrinal hoopla, lies one important thing: the hope that we might yet become, while still on this earth, who we truly are.
Then we, and the entire world, will know peace.
On the evening of Saturday, December 23, my good friends John and Noelle invited Brent and I to be part of their family's annual Christmas tree decorating ritual.
Brent (above) and John (below) helping little Amelia decorate the tree.
Left: Noelle and John's daughter Alicia and her husband Scott (little Amelia's aunt and uncle).
Above: Uncle Scott and Amelia decorating the tree.
Above and below: John and Scott putting the Christmas Angel atop the tree – December 23, 2017.
As a Quaker who believes that “there is that of God in everyone,” I know I’m called to share in the risk of incarnation. Amid the world’s dangers, I’m asked to embody my values and beliefs, my identity and integrity, to allow good words to take flesh in me. Constrained by fear, I often fall short – yet I still aspire to incarnate words of life, however imperfectly.
Christmas is a reminder that I’m invited to be born again and again in the shape of my God-given self, born in all the vulnerability of the Christmas story. It’s a story that’s hard to retrieve in a culture that commercializes this holy day nearly to death, and in churches more drawn to triumphalism and ecclesiastical bling than to the riskiness of the real thing. But the story’s simple meaning is clear to “beginner’s mind,” a mind I long to reclaim at age seventy-five.
An infant in a manger is as vulnerable as we get. What an infant needs is not theological debate but nurturing. The same is true of all the good words seeded in our souls that cry out to become embodied in this broken world. If these vulnerable but powerful parts of ourselves are to find the courage to take on flesh – to suffer yet survive and thrive, transforming our lives along with the life of the world – they need the shelter of unconditional love.
For those of us who celebrate Christmas, the best gift we can others — whatever their faith or philosophy may be – is a simple question asked with heartfelt intent: What good words wait to be born in us, and how can we love one another in ways that midwife their incarnation?
Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds.
Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.
Let us be aware of the source of being,
common to us all and to all living things.
Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion,
let us fill our hearts with our own compassion –
towards ourselves and towards all living beings.
Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be
the cause of suffering to each other.
With humility, with awareness of the existence of life,
and of the sufferings that are going on around us,
let us practice the establishment of peace
in our hearts and on earth.
At Christmas, time deepens. The Celtic imagination knew that time is eternity in disguise. They embraced the day as a sacred space. Christmas reminds us to glory in the simplicity and wonder of one day; it unveils the extraordinary that our hurried lives conceal and neglect.
We have been given such immense possibilities. We desperately need to make clearances in our entangled lives to let our souls breathe. We must take care of ourselves and especially of our suffering brothers and sisters.
The Christmas story is about learning how to be human, about kneeling before a newborn infant who is helpless, vulnerable, despised and poor. It is about inverting the world’s values. It is about understanding that the religious life – and this life can be lived with or without a religious creed – calls on us to protect and nurture the least among us, those demonized and rejected.
. . . The story of Christmas – like the story of the crucifixion, in which Jesus is abandoned by his disciples, attacked by the mob, condemned to death by the state, placed on death row and executed – is not written for the oppressors. It is written for the oppressed. And what is quaint and picturesque to those who live in privilege is visceral and empowering to those the world condemns.
Jesus was not a Roman citizen. He lived under Roman occupation. The Romans were white. Jesus was a person of color. And the Romans, who peddled their own version of white supremacy, nailed people of color to crosses almost as often as we finish them off with lethal injections, gun them down in the streets or lock them up in cages. The Romans killed Jesus as an insurrectionist, a revolutionary. They feared the radicalism of the Christian Gospel. And they were right to fear it. The Roman state saw Jesus the way the American state saw Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Then, like now, prophets were killed.
The radicalism of the Christian Gospel would be muted, distorted and denied by the institutional church once it came to power in the third century. It would be perverted by court theologians, church leaders and, in the 20th century, fascists. It would be mangled by the heretics in the Christian right to sanctify the worst aspects of American imperialism and capitalism. The Bible unequivocally condemns the powerful. It is not a self-help manual to become rich. It does not bless America or any other nation. It was written for the powerless, for those the theologian James Cone calls the crucified of the earth. It was written to give a voice to, and affirm the dignity of, those being crushed by malignant power and empire.
Pictured above from left: Tykia, John, George, Ian, Matt, Zach, Kimaria, Joan, Ben, Kelly, and Avery.
Christmas is where Christianity begins, and, as Søren Kierkegaard observes, it is rife with the strange and unexpected. Optimally, then, it should serve Christians as a time to mine tradition and practice not for their most tired applications, but for those that are unexpected and those that lead us in our pursuit of the unexpected.
There is, after all, something revolutionary in Christianity – a tendency to upend, reverse, and radically transform. In Mary’s Magnificat, the song of praise she offers at her meeting with her cousin Elizabeth, she proclaims, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant [. . .] He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” This list of upsets issues from the mouth of a peasant girl who has been promoted to an almost unimaginable status. That the radical reversals of Christmas are enumerated to us by a young woman of no particular social standing is itself an incredible bit of turnabout.
The revolutionary character of Christianity is usually washed out and mostly confined to specific political moments when it’s useful to refer to it. But this selectivity, too, should be upended. Christianity is at all times concerned with the poorest, the most vulnerable, the most oppressed; it is permanently interested in reversing this order, in aiming at and accomplishing the unexpected. Christmas, the moment when time is invaded by eternity, is the moment when the reversal of all oppression becomes not possible but necessary. The unlikeliest upsets of order become, in the moment of Christmas, the beginning of Christianity itself, and remain essential to its character.
There is no Christianity, therefore, that is not revolutionary. It is possible to construe Christmas as another one of those soothingly cozy Christian celebrations, but it is more accurate to construe it as a call to revolution. From this moment on, nothing of the old order can be left intact: Christ has come to uplift the poor and bruised, and his example is Christianity’s command.
– Elizabeth Stoker-Bruenig
Excerpted from "An Unexpected Revolution"
Democratic Socialists of America
December 24, 2014
Excerpted from "An Unexpected Revolution"
Democratic Socialists of America
December 24, 2014
Above: My friend Phil (with Gordie) – Christmas Day 2017.
Right: Noelle and Ben.
Christ's birth reminds us of the eternally new beginnings God offers to humanity. The grand irony is that we do not have to travel far to discover the Light that animated the Magi's quest. We have only to embrace our highest Selves, and realize humanity and divinity have never been separated. This is the cosmic truth heralded by Jesus of Nazareth's physical manifestation – we are all divine expressions of humanity; capable of being vessels full of grace, truth, love, joy, and peace.
May we allow the Incarnation to illumine our minds, and awaken to the reality of the marvelous presence of God in all things.
Christmas can help us readjust, help us see the Divine more transparently in life, in places where we would least expect. A barn, for example, a baby. The Incarnation we celebrate at Christmas is a call, our belief in it a commitment, to seek awareness of the Divine free of the impediments of culture, class or even catechism. That process calls for a degree of openness most of us rarely embrace or even know as possible. Yet I have a feeling the Divine is so imminent, so within the essence of things, that it is only a matter of learned blindness that keeps us from seeing. It is not something natural to us to be so dense. We can do better. We can break through.
– Angie O'Gorman
Excerpted from "The Divine is Greater Than Our Dogmas"
National Catholic Reporter
December 23, 2011
Excerpted from "The Divine is Greater Than Our Dogmas"
National Catholic Reporter
December 23, 2011
When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people,
to make music in the heart.
– Howard Thurman
from the book, Black Fire: African American Quakers
on Spirituality and Human Rights (2011)
from the book, Black Fire: African American Quakers
on Spirituality and Human Rights (2011)
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Christmas 2016: Reflections and Celebrations
• Christmas 2015: Reflections and Celebrations
• Christmas 2014: Reflections and Celebrations
• Celebrating the Coming of the Sun and the Son
• Christmastide Approaches
• No Room for Them
• The Christmas Tree as Icon, Inviting Us to Contemplate the "One Holy Circle" of Both Dark and Light
• Quote of the Day – December 1, 2014
• Something to Cherish (2012)
• A Christmas Message of Hope . . . from Uganda (2011)
• Quote of the Day – December 26, 2010
• Christmas in Australia (2010)
• John Dear on Celebrating the Birth of the Nonviolent Jesus
• A Bush Christmas (2009)
• A Story of Searching and Discovery
• The Christmas Truce of 1914
• Clarity and Hope: A Christmas Reflection (2007)
• An Australian Christmas (2006)
• A Christmas Reflection by James Carroll
Images: Michael J. Bayly and friends.
