Christmas is many things. For some, it is a celebration of family and friends. For others, it is a time of loneliness. For some, it brings back cherished memories. For others, it recalls painful history. Culturally, it can carry a great deal of weight of expectation that for some is met or exceeded and for others can simply not be reached. For most of my life, I felt the lead up to Christmas as pure stress, which only broke on Christmas Eve night when it came home that what was done was done and what was not was not. For me, Christmas has always arrived late in the night on Christmas Eve when all became still and quiet, and the world seemed to breathe with the possibility of the miraculous.
Spiritually, Christmas is really the story of an in-breaking, an illumination that dawns upon the world and our consciousness to disrupt the normal flow of things. Such an in-breaking, such a disruption creates the possibility of changing our perspective, changing our way of being in the world, of becoming someone new.
The in-breaking of the Christ into the world in the person of Jesus represents a sea change in our habitual way of being human. For me, the essence of that change is not found in the image of the baby Jesus but in what that baby becomes in adulthood. It is crystallized in what is really the fundamental teaching of that adult Jesus, what we have come to call the Beatitudes. Found most familiarly in Matthew’s Gospel, the Beatitudes are the blessing pronouncements of Jesus:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the Sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. (Matthew 5:3-11)
They are sayings in which Jesus declares as blessed various states of being that the world tends not to value, but which almost all its spiritual traditions have called central to human flourishing: humility, thirst for wisdom and right relationship, mourning, mercy, clarity of heart, peacemaking. We can debate what exactly some of these qualities that Jesus names are (not my task for today, however). But we can certainly see in the Beatitudes that Jesus is pointing us toward a way of being in the world that is perhaps best described as gentleness and mindfulness. The Beatitudes are essentially an invitation to step out of the world’s value system in order to embrace something deeper. To do so nourishes our humanity but can alienate us from the way the world tends to work.
I suspect that deep inside most of us there is a longing for this gentle way of being that Jesus describes. Who among us does not long for mercy, for peace, for openness of heart and spirit in ourselves and in others — even if we do so secretly, or without a sense of hope that we can actually live this way?
And I think this is the magic, if you will, of Christmas. The contemplation of the birth of the baby Jesus helps us to contemplate hope and possibility that the teaching of that baby as an adult can somehow still lead us toward the light. Babies represent a new beginning, a clean human slate that holds all the possibility of becoming.
May Christmas bring hope back to you this year. Hope for the world, hope for yourself. No matter how messy our human slates have become over our years of living, Christmas can remind us that it is always possible to begin again, to write our story anew, to live in the world more gently, more mindfully, more kindly.
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