Getting ready for Christmas this year, many have found themselves needing to find the courage and resilience to keep going, to come to a place of gratitude and joy. I came across an old story on the internet a few days ago, from the American author Grace Paley, recounting how her elderly bedridden father shared with her a word of how to persevere when growing old, and his main advice was this: “when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.... Talk softly (to it)... You can whisper also, Remember, remember.â€
The gentle advice seems to speak today to more than the elderly. On these cold wintry mornings when the sun rises late, sets early, and the wind blows, many people wake up each morning to significant challenges: some to head to work in health care facilities where everyone is stretched thin and wearied by a pandemic that has come at us all in relentless waves; some waken to fears of another year on the land when the rain doesn’t fall but the economy does; some to wounds from the past which do not heal easily; others to burdens that weigh us down, including isolation and loneliness; and many wake each day to strained relations in the midst of polarizing forces bent on pushing us apart instead of holding us together.
The experiences of suffering, of injustice, of relentless burdens, can lead us to dark places of the spirit, to deep discouragement, where hope is hard to come by. Christmas carols that sing of fun and good cheer might seem a far reach. But from a faith perspective, this season also offers a word that can meet us in the places of deep struggle.
The Incarnation, the birth of Jesus, is not about God taking us out of the world of human brokenness and suffering, but about God coming into that world. God, who has authored a world of incomprehensible vastness, and planted us within it, does not remain infinitely distant, but rather, comes eternally near.
A few days ago, some family members of mine arrived by plane from out of province. We had seen each other frequently by video calls, but my nine year old great nephew in joyful enthusiasm uttered what we all felt on the way home from the airport, when he said “now we are seeing each other en chair et en os†- that is, in flesh and bone. That’s a very good entry point for what we are celebrating here. In the poetic words of one spiritual writer (Nathan Mitchell), “when the Word took flesh,†God “encamp(ed) among our hearbeats as body, blood, breath, bone, and bread.â€
Jesus’ birth, the Incarnation, is God’s profound embrace of the human condition. Nothing that we experience as human beings is alien to God, because God has come among us, walked with us, and experienced what it is, at is depths, to be human. And in Jesus’ living, dying and rising, we see God bringing healing to this wounded world not from without, but by being there with us in it. Our broken world is a paschal world, being transformed and redeemed by God from within.
Think of it this way: in Jesus, God has taken the heart of the world into his hands, and there, speaks tenderly to us, whispering to our hearts, remember, remember. I am walking with you. I will be with you always, yes, to the end of time. So the next time you awaken to a world that feels heavy and overwhelming, to burdens that feel like they can crush you, see if it might help to think of this, and to hear the Christ child speak to you gentle words of perseverance. You are not in this alone. For a light has shone into our darkness, a light the darkness cannot put out (Jn. 1:5).