So This Is Christmas

I have been struggling to find the meaning in Christmas for me this year.

Partially because all of the songs sounded cheesy in a way they never had before, and I found it hard to embrace the happy. 

But, that's okay.

I think the original story of Jesus' birth was filled with suffering.

Homeless. Sleeping in scratchy hay. Pregnant out of wedlock in a time when you could be stoned for such things.

The story might be one of miracles, but it is also one of terrible discomfort. Ask any woman who has been nine months pregnant how long she could have managed to ride on a donkey in the desert. And I don't think anyone ever wants to birth a child in a stable. The smell of manure. The lack of running water or comforts. The cold.

And uncertainty!

Can you imagine saying to your betrothed "hey I'm preggers, and I know you know it's not yours, but have faith! Trust me!"

I think it's easy to believe that was a time of greater faith or spirituality. Of course Joseph had to be down.

But really? It probably wasn't. That's just a convenient story to tell ourselves now so we don't have to confront our own struggles with faithlessness.

If I said to a man I'd never slept with that God made me pregnant? Frankly, I'd expect him to call me a liar. Perhaps in the nicest way possible. But a liar, still. If he didn't institutionalize me.

I think a lot of that gets lost somewhere in between the frankincense and myrrh and angels and big stars and wise men and hindsight. The Christmas miracle, in terms of the actual lived experience, was almost certainly a little bit tragic too. I suspect you all would have donated to a gofundme campaign for Mary if such a thing were possible. "Woman lacks housing, about to give birth, only has horse stable as option. Father unknown. Please donate."

Uhm, yeah.

This year, that has seemed important to me.

Not just because there is a homeless boy living in the crawl space below my house. Not just because on any given day, I don't know if I'll walk in to my mother sobbing for her lost child. But because, when I listen to the people around me, suffering is no stranger to anyone.

Last year, when I was really bad, almost no one told me anything sad or bad... I suppose because everyone thought I had enough on my plate. But this Christmas trip, almost everyone I've seen and hugged and listened to has had heartbreaking news of some sort to process. A family member who could have been saved by a more competent doctor. The realization of a love lost too soon, just as it's too late to recover her. Trying to make a new life after more than sixty years of marriage.

Each family I've encountered has been touched by grief somehow.

I found myself listening, over and over. I found myself awkwardly unsure of what to say or how to say it and uncertain if I was making things better or worse. But still, determined to at least be present.

Christmas is about love and family and joy and coming together.

But also, I think it's about the hardship we overcome on the way to our greatness. I think it's about the really tough decisions we make. I think it's about how we go against the grain of society to do what we have faith in. Even if we could literally or figuratively be stoned to death for it.

When I think of Christmas in that way, it doesn't make me want to feel sorry for myself that my family barely got a tree up and only managed ten ornaments. Instead, it makes me feel braver. It makes me feel like other people have come before me and have stood at incredibly painful and difficult cross roads, and those cross roads were only a part of the pathway onto something greater. You don't have to be Christian to appreciate the struggle of those people in that time and to see what an enormous impact their story has had on the world.

We can all come from a place of nothingness and grief and difficulty, and yet still, become so amazingly and profoundly ourselves.

So I still can't listen to the music right now without thinking it's a little bit cheesy. But I can reflect on how hard it must have been for Mary and for Joseph and for Jesus, hard in really mindblowing ways, and I can feel a sense of hoping to live up to even half of how radical they were for their time. They would be radical among us, even now.

I have had a hard time finding heroes. In the church and elsewhere. But, when I start with the Christmas story, even just as a story of a birth, I can begin to imagine that there are brave and inspiring souls around me. Most of the things Christmas used to be about for me: advent calendars with chocolate, hot cocoa, waiting for santa to come, egg nog and jokes, most of those things aren't meaningful in the way they once were. And not just because I'm older.

Christmas is sadder for me now.

But also, maybe Christmas is a reminder of the courage we each have within us to start brave new lives that grow from the core of our faith and our beliefs. New lives that begin and end with who we are on the most fundamental level, rather than who we are as we struggle to fit in and do what we're supposed to and not make too much trouble.

Jesus was a trouble maker. Mary was a radical. Joseph was a rock.

Maybe we could make Christmas about that?

Namaste.