Perhaps this is why, to this day, the tree of this season is such an affection for me. Among many things, it is emblematic of something innocent. Something touched me way back then and continues to represent something holy I desire even now.
Pricks of light in the darkness — hinting at (if not fully anticipating) a kind of light that reveals that all will be well. We need to know this....
There’s really nothing necessarily pretty about the first Christmas. We have Joseph breaking the law, knowing what he should do with a seemingly “adulterous woman,” but he doesn’t divorce Mary as the Law clearly tells him to do, even though he has no direct way of knowing that the baby was conceived by the Holy Spirit [Matthew 1:18–24]. It can certainly lead us to wonder why so much of Christianity became so legalistic when we have at its very beginning a man who breaks the law to protect the dignity of the woman he loves. Then we clearly have a couple that is homeless and soon to be refugees or immigrants in their flight to Egypt shortly after Jesus’ birth [Matthew 2:13–15].
So where is this God revealing God’s self? Certainly not in the “safe” world, but at the edge, at the bottom, among those people and places where we don’t want to find God, where we don’t look for God, where we don’t expect God. The way we’ve shaped Christianity, one would think it was all about being nice and middle class and “normal” and under the law. In the Gospels, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are none of those things, so they might just be telling us we should be looking elsewhere for our status and dignity. Maybe the reason that our knowledge of God is so limited is because we’ve been looking for God in places we consider nice and pretty. Instead, God chooses the ordinary and messy.
What is our story as Christians? God being totally vulnerable, totally poor, a little child. If we’re honest, this is not a fitting image for God. It’s telling us right away that God is not who we think God is! Sadly, most people’s image of God is jolly Santa, making a list and checking it twice, finding out who’s naughty or nice. It’s certainly not this humble, helpless baby who has come to love us in ways that we’re not ready to be loved.
What this feast tells us is that reality, at its deepest foundation, is good, even “very good.” The divine is hidden quietly inside the human. The holy is hidden in the physical and the material. Therefore, we have every reason to live in hope and trust and confidence.
-- Richard Rohr
