Practicing Christmas

pondering the wonder of the incarnation in the midst of struggle

Ironically, for most of the years I’ve been writing on the internet, I have written about hating Christmas, not because I hated it, but because saying that I hated it was the language I used to express how overwhelmed I felt during the Christmas season as family members would demand wish lists. Christmas meant failing to meet expectations, and I wanted to return to the true meaning of Christmas - Jesus in the manger.

In subsequent years, as I wrote, I read a variety of writers, which introduced me to the liturgical practice of Advent. Advent helped me shift my focus from being overwhelmed and stressed to returning to the hope in the stories of the Bible. Advent helped me find Jesus from the beginning to the end of the biblical narrative.

Despite saying I hated Christmas, in reality, the Christmas story is one of my favorite stories simply because it invites me to ponder the incarnation. In the evangelical tradition I grew up in, most of the focus on Jesus was on the resurrection rather than the incarnation. It wasn’t that the incarnation was not important, but it felt as if there were some sort of tally marks next to the presentations of Jesus, with resurrection and evangelism winning over the incarnation. I imagine that they are all equal, but the resurrection cannot happen without the incarnation coming first.

I’m going through the Ignatian exercises this year, so I’ve experienced the Christmas story differently. I can’t say everyone doing the exercises has had the same experiences. As I’ve done the exercises, I’ve been Mary holding baby Jesus, receiving the gaze of love from our Lord with so much trust in his eyes, and I’ve experienced deep intimacy with Christ in profound ways - even while I struggled to maintain a regular rhythm of doing so. The exercises have opened me to experience Jesus even more, so much so that on Christmas morning, I awoke to the feeling of holding Jesus’s hands. I credit the exercises with opening me more to widening my imagination with God.

As I write, it is the third day of Christmas, and hopefully, this will be published on the fourth day of Christmas. Of the twelve days, Christmas is actually the first day of Christmas, and while I don’t know what it really means to celebrate the twelve days, I ponder the incarnation and God coming to be with me. I am drawn to that with-ness found in Emmanual and the shepherd of Psalm 23. I hold onto the fact that Christmas isn’t yet over. It’s only beginning through Christmastide into epiphany, liturgical terms I’m still learning. I need Christmas this year. I can’t remember a year that I didn’t. Though I keep hearing people say, “It just doesn’t feel like Christmas this year,” Christmas is radically more than a feeling, radically more than a spirit of joy and good tidings, though it is that too. Christmas is deeply God with me.

As a spiritual director, I ask questions and help people see and experience God. Our sessions ponder God’s with-ness through life’s ordinary and difficult aspects. As a writer, I’m often tempted to work out the hard things in my life by writing them out. While this is not necessarily wrong and can be very formational both to writer and reader, I’ve learned that writing (publicly anyhow) in the messy middle is not often the best way of working out the difficult parts of my life. I, too, need a spiritual director. It’s a paradox and a failsafe — spiritual directors must depend on God.

As I have matured, I have found a great and deepening intimacy with God. I’m found, I’m home, I’m beloved, and these things are who I am as a result of walking with God. There is a depth, a lightness, and a joy in walking with God that in certain parts of my life I never thought I would get to. I spent a long time wallowing in self pity and immaturity. I’m hard on myself, so there’s that too.

All of these things, the belovedness, the joy, the lightness, the hope, and more are the things I hope for my directees and people I meet with to know and abide in. But as I’ve matured, I am also invited to experience deeper and greater suffering.¹ The things I once took for granted are falling apart. To use a gross analogy, sometimes wounds create sores, and sores have pockets of puss, and sometimes, to heal and truly get better, things get worse first. There is a balm in Gilead and a physician savior to bind the wounds. Though it’s painful and hard, and I suffer through the festering goopy mess of it, I trust him as my healing salve, even and especially when I feel uncertain about what to do or where to go. He’s still there - guiding me and holding me.

Even though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.²

You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies.³ It’s not so much that I get to eat at the feasting table, and my enemies don’t, which I’ll soon expound on.

First, theologians speculate that Psalm 23 was written in the latter part of David’s life. Some say that it was written at least when he was king. I can only imagine David writing this as a shepherd boy. Maybe I am naive, but I don’t think the concepts are too advanced for a simple shepherd boy to understand. I think David was a shepherd who took care of his sheep. He loved them, cared for them, and protected them. He was aware of the critters who wanted to kill his sheep, and yet, he prepared a table for them, and in the way that he prepared a table for his sheep, he saw the Lord do the same for him.

The shepherd boy didn’t have to fear the deep waters in the valleys nor the great beasts who could kill both him and the sheep. He depended on God to save him and guide him through those difficult and hard places. As he shepherded, I believe he came to know and experience a deep and profound love of God and realized that the care he gave his sheep was only a fraction of the love he received from God. It was during these hidden moments that I believe he developed a heart after God’s own heart. I see David reciting this psalm often as a boy to remind himself of who he was and who God is as he cared for sheep.

When we see Jesus as the shepherd, the paradigm of the enemies over there watching me as I eat shifts. He feasts and eats with the enemies and even asks us to love them. The same shepherd always invited my enemies to the table, too, and he makes us all safe as he does so. Enemies don’t always accept the reconciliatory offer of the fullness of eating at the table. Sometimes, they remain enemies, but surprisingly, sometimes, they become friends and even more so, sometimes lovers.

Before Jesus is a shepherd, he was a baby being praised by shepherds visited by angels. He was God, but he was yet a babe, who needed tending to when he needed to eat or drink. He needed diaper changes. He and his parents needed to flee from his enemies, until he became a man who would face and love his enemies and still invite them to the table.

I need Christmas this year to remind me of these things - of loving when it is hard, of blessing instead of cursing⁴, of knowing there’s something greater at work in the middle of hard things. This is how I am practicing Christmas.

Some helpful questions and tools to practice Christmas:

• Where in your life do you need Christmas?

• Where are you experiencing joy and light? How can you offer these in gratitude to God?

• Where in your life do you feel the pain? How can you look to Christ as the healing balm?

• Will you accept the invitation to love your enemies? How can you best do this today?

1. “I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his suffering, and go all the way with him to death itself.” Phil 3:10 (The MSG)

2. Psalm 23:4

3. Psalm 23:5

4. James 3:10 / Ephesians 4:29-32