For some, Christmas is for the children, a feast where we let their delight and freshness challenge our cynicism. For others, it’s the opposite: we insist rather that Christmas is an adult feast, something kids don’t ultimately understand, something that celebrates the greatest intellectual mystery of all time, God taking on flesh to bring justice to the earth.
And so some of us send Christmas greetings urging delight, celebration, gifts, lights, and joyous song, while some of us send more stark greetings that say: “May the peace of Christ disturb you!” What is Christmas?
Christmas is about all of these things, and more. Like a diamond turning in the sun, it gives off many sparkles. Christmas is about the monumental challenge to reform our lives, our adult lives, and become women and men of justice; but it is also about a baby being born, innocent and powerless in the straw, whose vulnerability is God’s invitation and judgment. It is too, as Karl Rahner once said, God giving us permission to be happy. Thus, Christmas is a both something to be delighted in and a peace that should disturb us, something for children and for adults.
Christmas is about much deeper things than Santa, and the birth of Jesus is not just some delightful fairy tale meant to warm the heart. We measure time by this event. Christmas is about God being born physically and historically into this world and, among many other things, we have some stunning lessons to learn from the manner in which this happened.
As virtually all of our iconography around Christmas makes clear, God is born, not as some superstar whose earthly power, beauty, and muscle dwarf us. No. God is born as helpless, vulnerable, thoroughly under-whelming baby who looks out at us quietly even as we look back at him and he judges us in that way that vulnerability judges false strength, forever, transparency judges lies, generosity judges selfishness, innocence judges over-sophistication, and a baby, gently and helplessly and disarmingly, calls forth what’s best in us.
Christmas is meant to bring us back to the crib so that our hearts can feel that freshness that wants to make us start living over again. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “An Invitation Inside of Christmas” December 2022]
