I know, Christmas is over, but only by a few days, so I am going to indulge in one last trip back. I already said I would celebrate Christmas all year long if I coul get away with it. One reason is the spirit of giving. If I was very wealthy, I would spend time each day giving it away. Yeah, I would take care of my family, but I love giving and seeing people having what they never thought they could have or, even better, what they never thought they deserved.
The second reason is that childlike wonder that is Christmas. The lights, the trees, the joy, the gifts, and most of all the mystery of it all. And that is what struck me today, I am often a prisoner of my education, my intellect, and age. I spend each day as a professor having teachable moments. I am good at it, highly analytical, a seeker and purveyor of knowledge. And that is the problem for this old mystic, laying all of those gifts aside and just reveling in the mystery. See, that’s why I really love Christmas, it’s the time of the year I get to go back to childlike wonder, to an innocence long since stripped from me from years of hearing the deepest pain and hurt and fear of every client I have ever served.
I love being a big kid, I truly do and it is part of my “messiness” and hopefully what endears me to those who love me. Isn’t that what Christ called us to? To childhood, in the midst of being all grown up? I was brought up short today by something Philip Toynbee wrote:
“the presence of those holy mysteries which surround us all…….
mysteries [that] are not problems to be solved but realities to be contemplated”
And, for me, that is the problem, escaping my training, my profession, and my grown up mind that must be about figuring things out, working and solving the problem. I am called to be part of the mystery, not to solve it. Isn’t that faith? The “essence of things hoped for, the substance of things not seen”? That is why I love Christmas, I don’t have to figure it out. Do I know Jesus wasn’t born in December? Yes. That the magi weren’t really there at his birth? Yes. That there was no little drummer boy playing for him? Oh, yes! But, you see, that’s what makes it magical, I can know those things and ignore them.
I believe the same is true for our faith, especially as a contemplative, as a mystic. We can study the scriptures, read books, be good learned people, but at the end of the day, it remains a mystery: that the Creator of All loves me, wants to have a deep relationship with me, and I don’t have to do one thing to get that, it simply IS. So, I think I shall get a cup of coffee, be Abba’s Child, perhaps giggle, perhaps shed a tear, but I will not try to figure out why I am loved, I shall just be loved.
TMM