A Christmas of Depth
A short note
Christmas has always been a time charged with luminosity for me - whether in the colds of the northern hemisphere or in the heat of the southern. A time of year we (hopefully) slow down, (hopefully) value family and neighbour, (hopefully) commune with each other and (hopefully) celebrate the profound mystery of the birth of Christ in our varied ways. I also acknowledge the fact that this can be a difficult time for some, so I do not have romantic allusions about this holiday period. Life is not a Hallmark movie for most.
But it is for exactly this reason that I think Christmas has a transformative depth that is often left uncontemplated. I oftentimes feel certain elements of the Christmas season has become overly saccharine (yes, even some Christmas carols!) and the birth of Christ is some sort of kiddie’s birthday party we have to attend to get it over and done with, not to mention the commerciality that the season has imbibed. I even heard the other day that “Christmas is for kids” - no, it’s for adults too, for humanity.
The claims of God becoming flesh and ushering in a new kind of life we can participate in, is quite the extravagant claim, yet this season is not just a birthday party for the babe from Bethlehem. If this claim is true, the incarnation can be seen as an anchor of reality, uniting not only heaven (meaning) and earth (matter), but also philosophy and theology. As Cameron Dixon describes,
“In the Incarnation, the narrative world and the objective world meet and become one. In Christ, myth is made fact. Heaven and Earth touch. The spiritual world is married to the material world. Contained within the story of the Incarnation is the essence of all myths, all fairy-stories. Christ as the Master Pattern, the Logos, gathers all things, all stories, all myths, into Himself”
“Christianity is neither a gnostic rejection of the material world not a materialist rejection of the spiritual world but rather, an incarnational union of the seen and the unseen - a sacramental reality.”
With this in mind, below are some suggested golden nuggets for your Christmas contemplation. A Christmas of incarnational depth to all!
Christianity as the Master Narrative: Tolkien, Lewis & the Phenomenology of History
Heaven and Earth (English article or French podcast)
Nativity, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, and Adoration of the Magi, Ethiopia, 18th C.