Every year at Christmas, I turn into an emotional wreck. The impetus for that amped-up distress stays with my through my birthday, is supplanted by a different trauma in February, and finally breaks by Saint Patrick's Day. As I have aged, it has become clearer and clearer to me where this derives from.
I was raised as a Christian. My background was not Nazarene or Pentecostal, though those were the names on the buildings we went to, and we didn't go for the philosophical diatribe between Peter and Paul in the Epistles. What drove that upbringing was not any man in a robe or vestment or freshly pressed suit behind a pulpit - it was the faith of my mother.
My mother was not brought up in this tradition. She chose it. She studied it. She passed a fair amount (perhaps more than she realizes) of that well-reasoned approach to faith on to me. The churches we attended, at least early on, took the same approach. There was no infallible human leader. There was an all-knowing, all-loving God, who had left us instructions to life that were nothing if not as complicated as life itself, that could be questioned and plumbed and an exact, correct, righteous answer reached for every ethical quandary we would ever have in our lives. This, however, meant sitting with a fair amount of tension. This meant reconciling the God of Galatians with the God of Leviticus - and this was a thing you had to do as a Christian, because there can only be the one God. Even the over-simplified division I've heard of the Old Testament as God the Father and the New as God the Son does violence to the truly monotheistic heart of the Faith and the teachings of Christ and the Prophets.
I digress - but only a little. The purpose of the study of the Bible, the reason we would gather in the back of the tabernacle for advanced classes with Sister Esther at Whited Bible Camp, was this deep-seated belief in unity and wholeness. God could not be divided, neither could his Word, therefore, the failing is not in the text but in our inability to reconcile it, so back to the text we go, to question, to reason, to debate, to pray, and to seek to understand in a way that is consistent with the core fundamental teachings of the Faith.
Well and good, but we do this with any philosophy, and Christianity is not a philosophy. What sets Faith apart is the irrationality at the very heart of it. It is the mustard seed from which all else springs, without which nothing else moves. For Christianity, obviously, that thing is Christ Himself.
This is the part where my Humanist, Secularist, and Atheist friends generally decry all their understandings of the Faith. They denounce the need of a God to "make you" behave. They detest the notion of some supernatural rewards system where the good go to heaven and the bad to hell. They attack the accuracy or lack thereof of the telling of the orthodoxy itself. It's a free country, they're entitled to do so, but I have to ask for the space to make the apology for the Faith. These things are not that which sprouts from the story of the Christ Child. All the other trappings that have grown up around it, the condemnation, the moral herding of man, the celestial granting of privilege, all of that comes later. None of it sits at this privileged, core, primary position.
What does sit there is love for its own sake. Love without condition or reservation. Love that need not see the fruits of its labor now, but that seeks desperately with its each pace and breath to move the hearts of man closer to one another. It is a divine love that calls us all together for the sake of being one, and nothing more. Much the way we must reconcile our readings of the Bible into a unitary text, so too must we reconcile our readings of one another into a unitary fellowship. Unlike with so much of the complex Biblical teaching, on this matter, we are called to merely do two things - love and believe. This is the core irrationality at the heart of true Christianity.
We believe that all things are possible through Christ. We believe there is neither male nor female, Greek nor Jew, slave nor free - all are one in Christ. We believe we do not follow Paul or Apollos or Cephus, but Christ. We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. But the one great unspoken, in all of our creeds, from Corinthians to the Masai, is that we continue to believe all this when there is no sign of it in the world. To hold a Faith that teaches that we can all be made whole, be made one, through this irrational boundless love is to outright defy the modern experience.
I am well acquainted with that defiance. I have every reason in the world to be bitter. I have suffered my share of slings and arrows. There is no logical thing that stands between me and my life experience and being a law-and-order die-hard neoconservative arguing for self-defense and self-sufficiency and social Darwinism. The coldly rational approach to putting and end to stories like mine is to destroy and lay waste to things and people that cause them. But that which moves me as a Christian is not rational. It is an irrational belief that the world is a better place, that there is less suffering, if we judge a little less and love a little more, even if my life is snuffed out. There is a divine love that loves us each individually and together collectively, that calls us to find a way to it. Christmas Day is the observation of that love becoming a real thing in the world, whose life was snuffed out, who yet triumphed over death, hell and the grave, who still calls us to love individually and collectively, to sit with the tension that divides us in the belief that through love we can be united.
So yes, Christmas is the gifts, is the lights, is being with friends and family and all of that. It is the observances both secular and religious. But moreover, it is a reminder that Christian love - real, boundless, unreserved and unashamed Christian love - can be made a real thing in the world. It is a chance to follow in Mary's example, and treasure this in our hearts. In times like these, beset as we are on all sides by a reality that would seem intent on disproving that, it is as important to cling to that faith as it is difficult.
Merry Christmas. May we find the way to live and love in God's glorious light.
