Merry Christmas! The Sunday message today is a collaborative project of The Virtual Chapel community. I made a post in the group inviting people to share a little piece of writing. In the Facebook post, I introduced the following topic:
“Christmas is an interesting season. It is a deeply spiritual time, when people come together to celebrate the beauty of light during the darkest days of the year. It is also a busy time with lots of shopping, travelling, and drinking. How do you balance the secular and spiritual aspects of the season? Do you see them as distinct from one another?”
I took everyone’s responses and edited them together into the following reflection. We had such a great number of responses that I was not able to include everything which people shared. While the article speaks with a single voice, it is actually the voices of the nineteen people from around the world who participated all mixed together. Everything in what follows is written by people other than myself and my voice can only be found in the way I have edited all the comments together into a single piece.
Merry Christmas to you and yours, may your heart be humble as a stable and may the light of Christ be born within it. Amen
Two years ago, as mass ended at my tiny church in the woods, we stepped out in the dark and watched the first snow of the year begin to fall. How can anyone miss the peace and stillness of it? The prophets of old declared this coming, a child who loves us into wholeness. All creation pauses on this holy night, acknowledging the miraculous moment when we came to life, and singing this song of praise:
Evolving patterns
Secular and spiritual
Intertwine our lives
Intertwine our lives
God within everything
Lighting up the dark
Lighting up the dark
Christmas stars lead hopefully
Everyone welcome
Everyone welcome
We journey with open hearts
Towards peacefulness
I’m not sure my thoughts qualify, as I’m on the very outside edge of Christianity, as someone with a dual heritage who has opted to choose my Jewish side, albeit in a humanistic, non-religious way. I also feel quite uncomfortable and conflicted with many aspects of Christmas. I’m just finishing up Hanukkah this evening, and the two festivals have a very different feel.
I’m also cognisant of the fact that, had the Maccabees not been successful against the Hasmonean Greeks, there could never have been a Jewish boy born in Bethlehem. I’m also painfully cognisant of the fact that what followed for my people was 2,000 years of persecution, misunderstanding, misrepresentation and hatred, essentially.
We do still celebrate the holiday as a culturally interfaith family, but the tension is felt, not least of all due to the current conflict. Growing up, Christmas was fairly secular for me, even though my parents were religious. We never went to church, and the only religious bits of Christmas I was exposed to were from the school nativity plays. So I think I primarily associated Christmas with feasting, family, music, television and presents!
I try to carry on those family traditions, but without so much family anymore, which I suppose encourages me to consider the spiritual aspects a little bit more. Do I believe? What do I believe? Is there an afterlife? Who is Messiah? Will Messiah come? If Jesus were truly Messiah, why?! – so much why!? Christmas, for me, is all bound up with pain, and grief, and loss, and longing, and hope. May hope, and joy, and peace, Shalom, for all peoples, ultimately win.
How do we quilt together our days of now and yore? Planning and praying. Mixing, measuring and meditation. Remembering and reimagining. Hoping and honoring. Crying and celebrating. Waiting and wishing. Crying and caroling. What a wonderful, joyous, devastating discordant time of year. So at odds with, and at the same time, in tune with the time of the birth of Jesus. There is no secular and no spiritual. It is both, as it has always been in this age and in ages past.
”This will be the sign for you. You shall see a baby, wrapped in a blanket, lying in a feeding trough,” said the angel to the Shepherds. Ordinarily, one would not expect to find a baby in a feeding trough. One would not look for a Messiah in a feeding trough. Yet, that is precisely how the Shepherds were to recognise the Messiah. Christmas is a reminder that we find God precisely in moments, persons and places that we don’t expect to see Her. Whenever our biases and prejudices are broken through, whenever we allow our expectations of perfection to be challenged and upturned, it is always Christmas.
Everything I do is based on the hope and expectation of Advent. Gathering with friends and family, buying gifts, whether for dear ones or for children and families in need – everything I do is based in the joy of God with us. It is not just lighting our wreath or doing a special devotion. I feel the creativity, generosity, hospitality, celebration, and relationship which are key to the less religious aspects of Christmas are actually spiritual values. I think that’s the real invitation, to see divine love in the ordinary and awaken to the realization that we are the incarnation of Christ’s love in the world.
Christmas is the birthday of Jesus! We celebrate it and in doing so we can touch the light inside, with the love we feel for family and friends. I really don’t separate the Christmas season into spiritual and secular. Even in the chaos of shopping, it gives us time to reflect more on what we have, giving what we can to those less fortunate and in those quiet times when we look at our trees, the night is still, we spend time feeling the gift of Jesus’s birth.
How do I balance the sacred and secular aspects of the holiday season? Since the pandemic began, an observer looking from outside might say that my celebration appears far more “secular” than “spiritual.” I have avoided large indoor gatherings because of the health risks, so I’d say the most spiritual thing I do today is listen on Christmas morning, while I’m preparing our celebratory meal, to “The Festival of Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge”.
Yet, what I have come to realise is that Christmas is all about the blending of the sacred and secular. In the words of Richard Rohr, everything belongs. The crux of the matter is this – ”The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us” (John 1:14). What this means is that in Christ, the Logos, manifesting on earth in the baby Jesus, the distinction between sacred and secular doesn’t exist. It was always a human invention, never God’s intention.
Later, when Jesus explains that there is no such thing as unclean food, Mark emphasizes the point by adding “In saying this, He declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19). So cooking the Christmas lunch is as pleasing to God as me listening to the carol service. This is my reason for celebrating Christmas; it is the Feast of the Incarnation; flesh matters; skin is good. The shopping I do and the Advent preparations of meditation and reflection are equally pleasing to the God who loves my body, my soul, my spirit. So go eat, drink, worship, be merry and enjoy God in all of it as much as God enjoys you for who you are.
I’ve been drawn this year to the stillness of Advent, waiting for the birth of new life at the turning of the year. Wanting to stay quiet, in the darkness, then to burst into celebration and light for Christmastide. The world seems to want to do it the other way around – it’s all glitter and lights and parties throughout December, even earlier if possible. Songs and festivities aplenty, then Christmas dawns and hangovers kick-in! Forced family time indoors as the joy of unwrapping unwanted gifts diminishes and you become immobilised through excess food and drink you really didn’t need as grandpa farts and snores on the sofa!
Then it’s all go again, at 5am to beat the queues, as the ‘Boxing Day Sales’ herald an opportunity to go and spend again. Hoorah! I’m all up for family and fun and gift giving and celebration and eating and drinking and generally making a song and dance of it all for sure! “Hail the solstice dawn, the child of light is born”! What’s not to celebrate? For me, though, and maybe for the first time, it’ll be in rhyme with the season. “Still, still, still, may all the earth be still….” until the glorious dawn.
The observation of seasonal cycles is one that is innate within our humanity, when winter’s cold, gnawing darkness begins to subside, giving rise to the promise of spring’s light, warmth, and ensuing harvest. It’s a beautiful, ancient cyclic ritual to honor the hardship of winter within the gifts of future harvest. We are instinctively biophilic; we are drawn to the cycles of nature.
In Australia Xmas happens in the height of summer so themes of darkness and light are harder to hold onto. It is also the end of the school/academic year so there are tons of ‘end of year’ parties and celebrations. In the midst of all of that I find it harder to hold onto this great mystery of the incarnation. But even so, the sense of family, gathering, and celebration are palpable and important. Do these things themselves point to the great reconciling power of the Christ child?
When I go out and participate in the festivities of Christmas, I look for that Christ light in everybody else and am awed by the radiance. I root myself deeply into the narrow strip between the secular and the sacred. Maintaining my center and balance, I offer myself to be a channel for the holy one to winnow down to the people, praying their hearts might crack open – even just a smidge will be enough – to the eternal, to the almighty. I pray that even the tiniest speck of the holy will plant itself in their now-open hearts and take deep root there.
I gaze into the light every day; it is never completely dark, no matter where I go. If I make merry or slumber, it’s always there!
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