Staking our time on the word of angels

Every Christmas, the cycle of liturgical time brings us back to celebrate the rebirth of innocence into a world guilty as sin. The world may look hopeless — a baby in a feeding trough hardly seems cause for celebration — but we suspend our disbelief for the time being. We listen to the angels, and sing for joy — strange, wonderful songs of hope, at once lullabies for the sleeping child and reveilles to raise the dead. Christ our Saviour is born!

I hope the angels know what they’re talking about. Let’s face it: we’re staking our lives on what they say. And isn’t it somehow easier for them to proclaim salvation than for us to receive it?

The angels live in the cyclical time of the liturgy, that sacred time of myth and ritual, where the Christ child is born anew each year, full of possibility.

It’s not like that for us. Sure, celebrated well, and faithfully, the liturgy justifies our hope, gives depth to our souls. And some of us, at least, would like to live in sacred time and so, like the angels, be ever in touch with the eternal.

That’s monasticism’s appeal. But this cyclical time, this sacred time, is not the time of our ordinary lives, not even if we be monks or nuns.

Linear time is the time of our lives. We grow up. We grow old. We try to live as best we can. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail. But we never get to turn back the clock.

The seemingly boundless possibilities of our youth make way for the actualities of the choices we make. The consequences of our good decisions follow us, but so, inevitably, do the regrettable ones. None of us can escape our special burden of stupid mistakes and lost opportunities, shameful deeds and jealous resentments.
And then there are the things that happen to us, regardless of what we would choose: marvellous surprises, terrible grief. Sometimes it seems like time’s arrow is set to haul us through one thicket after another until we’re snagged and broken.

Then how should we receive the angels’ proclamation? Is it any wonder that often we shrink from their so-called good news?

It’s easy for them to celebrate the rebirth of innocence in the birth of the Christ child. For us, though, who do not live in time with the cycles of sacred time, Christmas is a time of judgment just as much as of celebration.

The very appearance of Christ reproaches us for our inability to live unburdened. The infant Jesus already embodies the ruling of the man he will become: “You must be born anew” (John 3:1-21).

Is it any wonder that our celebration of Christmas sometimes deteriorates into a desperate celebration of the infantile? Unable to come to Christ as Christ comes to us, we are tempted instead to pretend innocence. Instead of a sincere grasp of what we really are, we cling to what we wish were so.

Then is it any wonder that there is so much cynicism in our culture on matters of faith?

None of this is any wonder. The wonder is that, nevertheless, the Christ child keeps coming back, entrusting himself to our care in spite of our sorry stories.

For the good news of Christmas is not gratification, but grace.

In the midst of the profanity of human history, claimed the great student of religions, Mircea Eliade, religion gives structure to the human struggle to be near the holy. In our religions, said Eliade, we stage an eternal return of the sacred which, despite the onward flow of time, will not be swept away.

Even if we only ever get a passing glimpse of holiness as the year wheels by, then we are sustained. True worship is a fruit of this meeting of sacred and secular time.

Not that the angels could understand this. They can tell us that a saviour is born. But they cannot know what it means to us. The tension between the untouched innocence of the new-born infant and the hard-won lessons of our all-too-ordinary lives is something they cannot feel.

That tension is rather God’s gift, in Christ, to understand us.

Sacred time has its beauty and ease. But until its circle is broken upon the line of our lives, it has neither gravity nor grace.

So, as Christmas comes round again, we are invited to invite holiness to find its home among us, burdened as we are.

Phillips Brooks hymned this miracle well: “O holy child of Bethlehem/descend to us we pray; /Cast out our sin and enter in, /be born in us today.”
That we may pray likewise is the good news of Christmas.

Andrew Irvine teaches in the Friends World Program of Global Studies at Long Island University, USA. He is thrilled to be celebrating Christmas at home, in Australia, this year.