Not Missing "the Glorious Impossible"

Want to hear a funny Christmas story? When PTL was in its heyday, at Christmas they decorated every single thing that did not move with lights and garland and, of course, sexy Christmas carols sung in the background. Jim and Tammy Faye were interviewing a man who had just gotten back from the Holy Land. And they asked him how the trip was. He said, “Well, I enjoyed my trip but let me tell one thing, that Bethlehem don’t hold a candle to this place!”

Funny how our age cannot possibly imagine a Bethlehem without strobe lights, gorgeous costumes, a whole battalion of angels and a hundred voice choir singing the “Hallelujah Chorus.” When did we take a wrong turn and forget that Christmas is not an orgy of giving and getting (to each other) and outdoing our neighbors in the decoration department and gritting our teeth the closer we get to the day because we are utterly exhausted.

Don’t get me wrong—I love our tree and decorations and all the cards that come from all over, and having the old empty house full of joy and laughter yet again. But in our frenzy I hope that we don’t miss the main thing. We have so embellished the story that poor Jesus (not to speak of Joseph and Mary) have gotten smothered under the modern heresy we now call Christmas. Most folk I know are starved for a touch of wonder. Some moment when we grow quiet on the inside and begin to see and feel something powerful that we don’t feel very often. I’m not talking about sentimentality—I am talking about the kind of primal experience those old scruffy shepherds must have felt as they stood open-mouthed peering down at the baby born in a manger.

Find some moment this Christmas—church or home—with music or pondering the old story: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world was to be taxed…”Maybe if we discover again as if for the first time a touch of wonder--maybe we might be able to plow through the chemo and the grief and the presents and the hoopla and a war that seem to have no end and so many, many people out of work.

I like the way the splendid writer Wendell Berry puts it in his novel, Hannah Coulter:

“No big happiness came to me yet, but little happinesses did come, and they came from ordinary pleasures in ordinary things; the baby, sunlight, breezes, animals and birds, daily work, rest when I was tired, food, strands of fog in the hollows early in the morning, butterflies, flowers, The flowers didn’t have to be dahlias and roses either, but just the weeds blooming in the fields, the daisies and the yarrow. I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.”

I guess this is my prayer for you and me and the whole world. A glimpse of what Madeleine L’Engle called “the glorious impossible.”