The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. A dream as old as time. If it is true, it is the chief of all truths. If it is not true, it is of all truths the one that people would most have be true if they could make it so.                           -Frederick Buechner

In our house each year we’ve kept our Christmas tree up until Epiphany, which is January 6^th. It’s technically the finale of the Christmas season and it celebrates the moment the three wise men visited Jesus thus revealing Christ to the world as Savior and King. On January 7^th everything will go back to normal at the Gronholz house, but for the time being I’m continuing to ponder anew the meaning of Christmas. Now that the presents have been unwrapped and we’ve had our New Year’s celebrations, I think the time is ripe to process what we all just did. Why is Christmas important and does it make any difference? Is it really as special and significant as the movies, songs, and church services seem to say it is?

The above quote is taken from one of my favorite passages about the significance of Christmas. I find it to be extremely provocative. If the word becoming flesh isn’t true, “it is of all truths the one that people would most have be true if they could make it so”. That’s quite a thing to say. I think I would tend to agree, but when I read that line it sometimes makes me feel like I’m a wishful thinker. It makes me feel like I’m staking my life on a fairy tale. There are times, however, that I’ve felt like there is some profound theological point in between the lines of this statement. “It is of all truths the one that people would most have be true if they could make it so”. Isn’t this another version of Pascal’s “a God shaped vacuum”? I think it says that we have this deep and haunting longing for someone to rescue us from our evil tendencies and from the seemingly arbitrary and violent nature of our world. Even as I type I can’t help but get choked up knowing that I can’t say for certain if I’ve simply embraced Jesus out of desperation. I honestly don’t know what I would do without Jesus and the message of Christmas. I would be hopeless and I would be consumed my cynicism and despair. That’s just a fact. But I think I ultimately live in a space where I feel comfortable acknowledging that I need Christmas to be true and therefore it is. I cringe at how unsophisticated that sounds, but I honestly don’t have much else to offer. Just as hunger pangs move me to find food, I feel like my need for a savior has lead me to Jesus. My need for the Christmas story to be a literal reality and the yearly celebrating of the Christmas story fit like two puzzle pieces. Every year my restless heart has taken comfort in this beautiful story of God entering into human history and rescuing His creation.

I have to admit, though, that the older I’ve gotten the trickier it’s been for me to receive Christmas in new and fresh ways. It can seem stale at times. I love experiencing it through my kids, but personally Christmas has lost some of its luster because there are so many annoying adult questions and thoughts filling my brain that get in the way. David Bazan captures these emotions beautifully and tragically in his own take on God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. In the song he paints a picture of waking up on Christmas morning and gathering around a nativity scene with his family.

 Now my wife and children dream of gifts beneath the tree

While I place in the manger the baby Jesus figurine

Sipping Christmas whiskey wondering if I still believe…

In the performance he sings these lines with a scratchy almost timid voice that is loaded with despair. You can’t help but feel what he felt in that moment. He’s not just puzzling about Christmas and the manger scene. He’s wondering about his whole existence and whether it has meaning or not. Anybody that’s slightly familiar with Bazan’s career knows that eventually he more or less abandoned his Christian faith and this song was sort of the beginning of the end for him. It’s heart breaking really and I can relate to a certain extent. The older I’ve gotten the more I wonder what Christianity is all about and if I actually believe it.

Some people would call this emotion lament. When I was in my mid to late 20’s I think that my moments of lament felt like they might ruin me, until I realized that lament is a crucial element in the Christian tradition and can actually stimulate faith. It makes sense when you really think about it. For any relationship to work there needs to be honesty and transparency. Even though it’s extremely difficult to be honest and transparent in a marriage relationship or a friendship I don’t think anybody would argue that it doesn’t have the potential to make a relationship deeper and more rich. I’ve come to understand that bringing our deepest feelings of loss, insecurity, pain, frustration, and doubt to God can often be our most profound moments of intimacy with God. It would be unfair and inauthentic to think otherwise. This world is a broken world and scripture takes that seriously. God takes that seriously. Nobody is pretending in the Bible. Jesus certainly isn’t. He took the horrors of this world seriously and, in the gospels, he demonstrates a versatile range of emotions that we would all be wise to emulate. The Christian songwriter/ theologian Michael Card says that “Jesus understood that lament was the only true response of faith to the brokenness and fallenness of the world. It provides the only trustworthy bridge to God across the deep seismic quaking of our lives.” Lament provides the only trustworthy bridge to God. Apparently lament is important if I’m interested in connecting with God. That’s why I need people like David Bazan and others who can get me in touch with parts of myself that I don’t attend to. I spend too much time in life numbing myself from my doubts and fears with busyness, media, and people that I need somebody to draw out my lament. And then I need to bring that lament to God so that we can experience it together.

This practice has lead me to some valuable moments with God over the years and by the end of this Christmas season I’m feeling particularly hopeful and optimistic. I felt like I started this season almost wanting to tame Christmas. I wanted to wrestle it down and dissect it and really get at why it’s so important and special. It’s so hard to sift through my own fun and sentimental memories of Christmas as a kid and what it actually is. There was a passage that I stumbled upon as I was looking through some old saved writings on my computer that talked about Christmas. It was a from a piece by Dietrich Bonhoeffer called God is in the Manger: Reflections on Christmas and Advent. I found it to be stunning and it set the tone for the rest of the festivities. Here it is. Get ready to have your mind blown:

Without the holy night, there is no theology. “God is revealed in flesh,” the God-human Jesus Christ—that is the holy mystery that theology came into being to protect and preserve. How we fail to understand when we think that the task of theology is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason! Its sole office is to preserve the miracle as miracle, to comprehend, defend, and glorify God’s mystery precisely as mystery. … . If Christmas time cannot ignite within us again something like a love for holy theology, so that we—captured and compelled by the wonder of the manger of the Son of God—must reverently reflect on the mysteries of God, then it must be that the glow of the divine mysteries has also been extinguished in our heart and has died out.

I savored those words when I read them. I found the emphasis on mystery so overwhelmingly reassuring. Mystery is the other side of the coin of doubt. They exist in the same space. Certainty is the opposite of mystery. There is beauty and wonder at the heart of the Christmas story. It’s supposed to baffle us and even scandalize us. We’re not meant to get it. We’re meant to receive it with awe and with deep appreciation for it’s mysterious nature.

This helps me understand the meaning and significance of Christmas as an adult. In a way it’s just as thrilling as all the various traditions I experienced as a kid around Christmas time. Throughout my life I have experienced a mysterious love that makes me believe that there is a divine and transcendent source to that love. Christmas is a time to let ourselves be swept up in the magic of the story of an omnipotent God who condescended to his creation and took on the form of a helpless little baby. The presence of Jesus in our midst gives us fleeting glimpses of where Love comes from and what it looks like. We can certainly dissect the story. We can come at it with skepticism about whether or not any of it happened or if it’s true. I’ve done that and I’ll probably do it again. I’m just saying that embracing the mystery of the whole thing, I think, is a way to tweak skepticism just slightly so that doubt becomes a blessing instead of a burden.

J.R.R Tolkein called the mystery of the Incarnation the eucatastrophe of the human story. Eucatastrophe literally means “good-catastrophe” and it’s meant to define a moment in which characters in a story are rescued from a perceivably inevitable doom. The Incarnation is God rescuing creation from its corruption and impending peril. This meta-narrative has reverberated throughout history and has attained a consistent ubiquity in literature, poems, movies, and music and I think there is something in us, whether we know it or not, that is being drawn back to the Christmas story when we experience shadows of it. There is something in the story that seems to ring true. Tolkein said that the good turn in a story gives us a “piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through”. When we let this gleam come through we are standing on the precipice of belief and this is where what Frederick Buechner was talking starts to resonate. If the Christmas story is true “it is the chief of all truths. If it is not true, it is of all truths the one that people would most have be true if they could make it so”. There is something that feels so good and right and true in the Christmas story that I personally feel enchanted by the possibility that it actually did happen.

This Christmas season has largely been about me embracing anew the mysteries of God the season invites us to reflect on. I am finding a deep sense of hope and comfort knowing that God can handle my doubt and questions and that he even invites them. But I’ve also been discovering the gift of wonder and being caught up in something bigger than myself. The meaning of Christmas is, as Arcade Fire put so well, “between the click of the light and the start of the dream”. It’s beyond what humans can fully comprehend, but that’s what makes it a God story. Part of the meaning and significance of Christmas is its potential to get us into a genuine state of something close to true worship. Christmas is miraculous, unfathomable, and mystifying…and each year we put the baby Jesus figurine in the manger and wait with the shepherds and the angels for God to show us that it’s true.

Here is a link two videos for your viewing pleasure. The first is David Bazan singing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and the second (just in case you didn’t watch it this season) is Linus reciting the Christmas story. Enjoy- and one last time- Merry Christmas!