Christmas, as we all know, is a time for traditions. Even the most avant-garde among us probably have favorite Christmas recipes, favorite Christmas songs, and maybe even a favorite Christmas sweater. Most of us also have favorite Christmas stories, stories we know so well they become a part of us. There might be a movie you watch year after year, a beloved Christmas classic like It’s a Wonderful Life or even Die Hard. Your family might have an annual reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Most of us also have family stories about Christmas—sometimes sad or moving stories, but sometimes very funny ones, often involving a mishap in the kitchen or the mischief that happened at the children’s table one year. Experiencing and re-telling these same stories year after year helps us to connect to our own history, our own stories.
The Christmas story I tell most often comes from my childhood, from the Christmas I spent on the island of Pohnpei when I was seven years old. A few months earlier, my family had moved from Vacaville to this tiny, underdeveloped tropical island in the western Pacific. Pohnpei, or Ponape as we called it then, was so small I couldn’t find it on my family’s globe—it was just an unnamed speck floating in the vast blue of the Pacific Ocean.
As foreign as it was to my solidly suburban sensibilities, that island was an enchanted place to me. When I wasn’t running around with my brother, barefoot in the rainforest, eating wild guava and chasing geckos, I was sitting alone somewhere devouring the books that my grandparents shipped out to us in parcels that took weeks and weeks to arrive. It was a year of wonders, and Christmas Eve was the most wonder-filled night of them all.
Now the one thing that hadn’t changed much from my life in California was church. I grew up Roman Catholic and of course we attended mass every Sunday, whether we happened to be in Vacaville or the Trust Territories of Micronesia. Church was church. And while I don’t know exactly how or why it all worked out this way, somehow my mother had arranged for me to have a First Communion service and somehow it happened to be on Christmas Eve. It seems like it should have been a stumbling block that there weren’t enough other English-speaking children my age for there to be any kind of class for me to take—every Catholic child is supposed to receive instruction before their First Communion. All I can think is that my mom must have decided that she was not going to let a technicality stand between me and this important milestone.
So, I know I didn’t understand exactly what was going on, but it was definitely drilled into me that this was going to be a very special experience, probably the most important thing that had ever happened to me in my short life. Oh, and it had something to do with Jesus.
What I remember so vividly is walking into this huge, white-washed church, my first time being there after dark, and seeing it completely transformed with hanging greens and flowers and twinkling white lights everywhere. And my first thought was that someone had done this all for me! I could hardly believe it—the church had really gone all out in making My Special Day beautiful!
I still remember sitting in the pew, waiting with eager anticipation until it was my turn to go forward and receive the sacrament for the first time. I felt transported with joy. The whole night, the whole experience, the packed church, the voices lifted in song, all of it felt like the very biggest and best gift I had ever received.
Now, usually I tell this story for laughs. How silly of me, how self-centered, to think the decorations were all for my benefit, instead of realizing that, of course, the church looked like that because it was Christmas! But funny or not, that night was a turning point in my life. What was really important about it, the reason it had such an impact on me, was that acute sense of being loved, of being seen and known, and of being offered an enormous gift. In all my childish egotism, confusion, and perhaps misplaced delight, I landed entirely by accident on a profound truth: the presence of Jesus in our lives is a gift, the most precious and life-changing gift we can receive. Because Jesus is the most precious, most profound, and most explicit embodiment of the love of God that the world has ever known.
The feeling of being loved, unconditionally and forever—what else can we ask for, at Christmas or at any time? The poet Christina Rosetti said it with exquisite simplicity and precision: “Love came down at Christmas.”
Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine,
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and Angels gave the sign.
Love was born at Christmas. Love was born in a stable, in a human body, in a person who would grow into the fullness of humanity, who would suffer and grieve and laugh and delight just like all of us. Love became flesh and lived among us.
Perhaps it feels naïve, given the world we live in today, to look back and tell a story about something that happened to me when I was a little girl, or even to look back and tell stories about a child who was born in a stable and who went on to change the course of history. But our faith teaches us that there is nothing naïve about telling stories, just as there is nothing naïve about love. It is only our desire to be safe, not to be deemed ridiculous or out of touch, that causes us to hide behind labels like “naïve” or idealistic.
The love that was born at Christmas can be called many things—foolish, vulnerable, tender, profligate. Perhaps it is all those things. And still, it is true, and necessary, and in its way the most powerful force for life and liberation that the world has ever seen.
During this past, unprecedented year, many of us have found the way of love, the way of Jesus, a difficult road to follow. Sometimes it has felt like we’ve been stumbling around in the dark instead of walking a straight and narrow path.
But if we look at the story of that first Christmas, the Christmas when love was born, we’ll see that very often the dark is where good things happen. It was probably pretty dark in that stable. It was dark when the angels appeared to those shepherds out on the hillside. It was dark outside when I walked into that softly glowing church and met Jesus for the first time. It is after dark that we tell the best stories, sing the loveliest songs, and whisper the sweetest words of love.
Some day, everything we have been through this year will be just a story, a story of loss and longing and grief, but also a story of courage and self-sacrifice, a story of faithful witness, of community growth, of creativity and innovation. We will all be part of that story, of one another’s stories. And when we come out on the other side of all this, we will still be able to tell the stories of our faith, and to see with greater clarity how our stories are part of that one great story—the story of God’s longing to be with us, to be one with us, to pitch his tent and dwell among us, sharing in all that it means to be human. Amen.
