I’ve been thinking about Christmas, and about my friend Alan.
When I was a little boy I found a faith in Jesus that I cling to still. Christmas meant Nativity scenes in every public square, The Santa Claus Lane Parade down Hollywood Boulevard on Thanksgiving weekend, and endless holiday renditions of Handel’s Messiah: “For unto us a child is born/ Unto us a son is given.” In the decades since, the bumps and dents of a changing life have liberated me from rituals and orthodoxies that once bound me but eventually became empty for me.
Then there was this: our family spent Thanksgiving weekend in 1999 with our 24-year-old son before he returned to the African village in which he served as a Peace Corps volunteer. He died there in a stupid traffic accident on January 7th, 2000. So between these two holidays a bass note of grief continually plays for me and has muted any of the Ho-Ho-Ho and Joy to the World the season once held.
Because of all of this, I no longer attach my faith to the manger’s baby nor to the descriptions of his death and resurrection to which the church long ago attached beliefs and rituals that no longer persuade me. Rather, I attach myself to the man the baby grew up to be, a brazen prophet who spent a year disrupting conventional wisdom and confronting what were called the principalities and powers, those religious and secular leaders who gouged the poor, marginalized the ill, the odd and the irreligious, and used violence against him to instill and perpetuate their version of law and order.
Against these forces, Jesus of Nazareth spent himself comforting, healing, arousing the poor to rebellion, and challenging those principalities and powers at every turn. They killed him, of course, as they do most prophets in any era.
But what they could not erase, and what I now anchor my soul to, are those stories by and about him, and his character that emerge from these stories. He rises out of parables and miracle accounts, aphorisms and confrontations as a person of original brilliance: his story-telling, his relational genius with wide varieties of people, his unprecedented descriptions of a gracious, life-affirming God.
He had exceptional courage that allowed him to tell the truth even when his life was at stake. And he was driven by a compassion that led him to unexpectedly wrap his arms around every kind of person. His luminous intelligence, courage and compassion now guide me toward what I strive to be as a person and what I hope to witness to in advancing his mission of turning the human race into the human family.
None of which is of any comfort or significance to Alan. Though he, like Jesus, is a Jew, the Christmas story has never included him. He’s left out of what still captivates me and what dominates the holiday culture around him.
He grew up spending Christmas mornings riding his bike through vacant streets while his Christian friends opened presents and listened to carols and celebrated Jesus’ birth. In midlife he still remembers the isolation, still remembers the feeling of being other, a stranger in his neighborhood full of manger scenes and Christmas lights. To this day, he hates walking through malls and hearing piped in carols that only remind him of being by himself on those chilly December mornings.
Because we’ve shared our stories with one another, and because we love and trust one another, I’m trying to understand his Christmas story even as I once again celebrate my own.
What is it like on Christmas if, like Alan, the Jesus story is not part of your story? What if your story is about Hanukkah, or the Quran’s accounts of Jesus and Mary, or Black America’s celebration of Kwanza? What if you have no faith, or are defiantly hostile to any of these faith stories? Or what if you’re a Christian who just doesn’t care any more about Jesus’ Christmas story because it seems so worn out and irrelevant as you struggle through what seems like perpetual darkness? What is it like to be left out of a story that is so important to so many people around you?
My knees are too sore to ride my bike through the neighborhood, but I feel like I want to take a long stroll through my mind and explore what this season might mean to people who have their own story to tell. Maybe I’ll learn to understand them better, and maybe I’ll find bits and pieces of their story that add depth and liveliness to mine.
That's just what I've been thinking. I'd love to hear how you are reflecting on Christmas this year.
Blessings,
– Rick