Christmas contemplation

From Bennan Manning (see previous post for p.1)

…The contemplative at Christmas, living one day at a time in a state of preparedness (in fact, homesickness) for the fullness of the Kingdom, listens intently as Paul tells the Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!”

On an icy winter’s night two weeks before Christmas I was at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. All flights had been cancelled due to fog and freezing rain. The airport terminal was in bedlam. Thousands of people were clustered at the ticket counters demanding a projected departure time; others were wrapped in stoic silence. Children were crying, the public address system was blaring and the defeated were bellying up to the bar. I was tense and apprehensive. I had to get to Texas to start a retreat the next day. How could the Gospel be preached in Dallas if the weather wouldn’t shape up in Chicago?

Directly across from the plastic chair in which I was slumped sat a middle aged black woman with a child cradled in her arms. She was laughing. The world was collapsing, thousands were stranded, O’Hare was a shrieking snake pit and she was laughing! Irritated but also intrigued, I said to her,

“Ma’am, every other person here tonight is rattled and miserable. Would you mind telling me why you’re so happy?”

“Sho,” she said. “Christmas is coming and dat baby Jesus – He make me laugh.”

I repeated it to myself , Dat baby Jesus – He make me laugh!

Hmm! Am I getting too serious about life? Have I let my sense of childlike wonder fade? Am I so caught up in preaching, teaching, writing and travelling that I no longer hear the sound of rain on the roof? How long since I stopped making snowballs and flying kites? Am I growing uncomfortable with Jesus telling me to model my life after the birds and the flowers? Am I irritated with people, like this woman, who don’t seem to realise how serious life really is? Has getting serious about life meant becoming sad about life? Is living just another word for endurance?

Years ago I learnt that the name Isaac means laughter. When old Sarah was told she would soon be pregnant, she laughed in disbelief. But God had the last laugh. A son was born to them in their old age, and the mirthless human laugh of despair turned into the Father’s laughter of love. “They named their son ‘Laughter’ for he was a sign of the triumph of God’s levity over man’s gravity,” writes John Shea.

Jesus is God’s final laughter. Laughter is the celebration of incongruity, dissonance, lack of harmony. Nothing could be more incongruous in Hebrew tradition than a virgin having a baby. Christmas is a reminder that we need the laughter of God to prevent us from taking the world too seriously… The Christian law of levity says that whatever falls into the earth will rise again. God’s laughter is his loving act of salvation begun in Bethlehem, and Christian laughter is the echo of God’s joy within us.

Christmas is the awesome mystery of the messianic Son of God in diapers. For the contemplative at Christmas it is “glad tidings of great joy” that fills his heart with the laughter of the Father. I suspect that this is what my friend Carey Landry had in mind when he wrote that reverent and rollicking song, “And the Father Will Dance as on a Day of Joy.”

As Advent draws to a close, go to the Father and ask Him, “Abba, why are you dancing?” See him point to the manger and hear him say, “Christmas is coming and dat baby Jesus – He make me laugh!”

…My brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus, if you have been struck by the grace of Christmas, if the Lord in his mercy has given you the courage to accept acceptance, if you are convicted that Christmas is the decisive breakthrough of the passionate love of God in Jesus, if you trust that God is faithful to his promises, that he will finish what he began, that amazing grace is at work right now, that you have only checked into the hotel of earth overnight and you are en route to the heavenly Jerusalem, then in the immortal words of John Powell, “Please notify your face!”

On the other hand, if you have not been struck by the grace of Christmas, ask for it and it will be given.