emmanuel | frederick buechner & madeleine l'engle
It is not just the spirit of giving abroad in the land with a white beard and reindeer.
It is not just the most famous birthday of them all
and not just the annual reaffirmation of Peace on Earth that it is often reduced to so that people of many faiths or no faith can exchange Christmas cards without a qualm.
On the contrary, if you do not hear in the message of Christmas something that must strike some as blasphemy and others as sheer fantasy, the chances are you have not heard the message for what it is.
Emmanuel is the message in a nutshell.
Emmanuel, which is Hebrew for "God with us."
That's where the problem lies.
God is "the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity," says the prophet Isaiah.
When a person looks up at the stars and ponders that which either goes on forever or ends at some unthinkably remote point beyond which there is Nothing; when we pray out of our deepest need to a God whom we can know only through faith; when we confront the enigmas of our own life and the inevitability of our own death, all we can do is hold our tongues or say with Job, "Behold, I am of small account. I lay my hand on my mouth...."
The essential message of Christmas is Emmanuel.
Emmanuel, God with us.
The claim that Christianity makes for Christmas is that at a particular time and place "the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity" came to be with us himself. When Quirinius was governor of Syria, in a town called Bethlehem, a child was born who, beyond the power of anyone to account for, was the high and lofty One made low and helpless. The One whom none can look upon and live is delivered in a stable under the soft, indifferent gaze of cattle. The Father of all mercies puts himself at our mercy. Year after year the ancient tale of what happened is told-- raw, preposterous, holy-- and year after year the world in some measure stops to listen.
What one of us can understand a love so great that we would willingly limit our unlimitedness, put the flesh of mortality over our immortality, accept all the pain and grief of humanity, submit to betrayal by that humanity, be killed by it, and die a total failure on a common cross between two thieves?
This is where the problem lies. Not in secular bacchanalias, not in Santa Clauses with cotton beards, loudspeakers blatting out Christmas carols the day after Thanksgiving, not in shops full of people pushing and shouting and swearing at each other as they struggle to buy overpriced Christmas presents.
No, it's not the secular world which presents me with problems about Christmas, it's God.
Cribb'd, cabined, and confined within the contours of a human infant.
The infinite defined by the finite?
The Creator of all life thirsty and abandoned?
Most of the time the fact that this fact is impossible doesn't bother me. I live by the impossible. Like the White Queen, I find it a good discipline to practice believing in as many as seven impossible things every morning before breakfast. How dull the world would be if we limited ourselves to the possible. The only God who seems to me to be worth believing in is impossible for mortal man to understand.
But we rebel against the impossible.
I sense a wish in some professional religion-mongers to make God possible, to make him comprehensible to the naked intellect, domesticate him so that he's easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible god is no more than an idol. I don't want that kind of God.
"Ice splits starwise," Sir Thomas Browne wrote. A tap of the pick at the right point, and fissures shoot out in all directions, and the solid block falls in two at the star.
The child is born, and history itself falls in two at the star.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
A dream as old as time.
If it is true, it is the chief of all truths.
If it is not true, it is of all truths the one that people would most have be true if they could make it so.
Maybe it is that longing to have it be true that is at the bottom even of the whole vast Christmas industry--
the tons of cards and presents and fancy food,
the plastic figures kneeling on the floodlit lawns of poorly attended churches.
The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is a worldly language.
Emmanuel.
Certainly the grounds on which to dismiss it are not hard to find.
Christmas is commercialism.
It is a pain in the neck.
It is sentimentality.
It is wishful thinking.
The shepherds.
The star.
The three wise men.
Make-believe.
Yet it is never as easy to get rid of as all this makes it sound. To dismiss Christmas is for most of us to dismiss part of ourselves. It is to dismiss one of the most fragile yet enduring visions of our own childhood and of the child that continues to exist in all of us. The sense of mystery and wonderment. The sense that on this one day each year two plus two adds up not to four but to a million.
More than anything else perhaps, to dismiss this particular birth would be to dismiss the quality of life that it has given birth to in an astonishing variety of people over an astonishing period of time.
There have been medieval peasants and eighteenth-century aristocrats, nineteenth-century spinsters and twentieth-century dropouts. There have been wise ones and simple ones, sophisticated ones and crude ones, respectable ones and disreputable ones.
The man behind the meat counter.
The woman who scrubs the floors at Kitsilano Secondary.
The high-school math teacher who explains fractions to the bewildered child.
They need not be mystics or saints or even unusually religious in any formal, institutional sense. But somewhere along the line something deep in them split starwise and they became not simply followers of Christ but bearers of his life. A birth of grace and truth took place within them scarcely less miraculous in its way than the one the Magi traveled all those miles to kneel before.
What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us.
Emmanuel.
Emmanuel.
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