Spiritual Reflection
God Comes Anyway
By the Rev. Canon Allisyn Thomas
I loved the Christmas season as a child. I loved the decorations, the smells, the music and the special Christmas services which told the story of Jesus coming into the world in beautifully moving ways. Now each year as Christmas draws near, I try and remember those feelings so as not to get overwhelmed and desensitized to the wonder of Christmas during the frenzied pace of the holiday season, which now seems to last at least three months.
This sentiment is hardly unique to me. Nowadays many of us have to work at celebrating Christmas, at being Christmas; marking and giving thanks for the inbreaking of God into the world through Jesus, and living as incarnational people. Advent, the Church season that precedes Christmas, is supposed to help us do that by asking that we slow down and begin a period of waiting, waiting for God to come to us again full of light and hope. And yet keeping a quiet, holy Advent often feels like something else to fail at. How can we be quiet and holy when we have to trudge to the mall and grocery store, wrap and deliver presents, go to more parties in one month than we go to the rest of the year, and oh-by-the-way, go to church as well? We yearn for God but feel like we cannot be still long enough to hear God speaking to us.
Perhaps one of best and most simple ways we can prepare for Christmas is to allow ourselves to hold still, if even for a moment, and feel that yearning, experience our desire for God, knowing that God yearns for us as well.
For when we do allow ourselves to follow this simple exercise, to hold still and allow ourselves to feel, as opposed to “doing,” we come to see that the great miracle of Christmas is that God comes whether we are ready or not, even if we do not “prepare” as we believe we should. Frederick Buechner puts it beautifully, “Christmas itself is by grace. It could have never survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could have never happened otherwise.” Christmas is a gift freely given so that we might not only be touched by God, but touch God as well.
Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark, A Doubter’s Dictionary (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), p. 30.
