Last week I wrote about how portraits of the Holy Family, while beautiful, especially on Christmas cards, can help us place them on a pedestal. While worshiping God and honoring our Holy Mother and Saint Joseph is important, I worry that when we place anyone on a pedestal we often immortalize them as impossible to imitate. As a lover of art and amateur writer, it is often hard for me to realize it, though I take strange comfort in knowing that maybe there is a novel or play in me, when I realize that even Shakespeare had to learn how to spell. Maybe I can be a father and husband faced with seemingly impossible odds when I think of Saint Joseph as a sinner who got back up and did the right thing. I guess what I’m saying is that our Christmas Story should remain a thriller, a poem and a shocker, not a fairy tale. This Christmas Story is tough stuff!
My future sister-in-law is pregnant (please pray for her and her unborn daughter!) and as we, like in Advent, wait to meet the newest member of the family, I think of how radical it is that life, a precious, unique, beautiful, fragile life, is inside her growing, a miracle that truly astonishes me. If we think about that for a moment—that God loves us so much, cares about us so much, is so deeply fascinated by us—that he took this fragile form in a teenage girl is a shocking story. Amongst the glitter and traffic, among the receipts and the donations, let us think about how God loves us so much, he was powerful enough to become a powerless baby. It must give us pause, and startle us to begin again. Our Christmas Story is a love story, between God and the human soul.
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot