The Christmas season can go wildly wrong. It can degenerate
into mindless consumerism and an excess of food and drink. Instead of supporting
relationships, it can be a time when relationships are under too much pressure
and too many demands. We may pray for our relationships to survive Christmas
more than we pray for Christmas to renew our relationships. As one cynic
remarks, Christmas is the
unsuccessful attempt to love all your family at the same time.
But the Christmas season can also go stunningly right. It can bring us back to the hidden truth about ourselves. We are more than the state of our physical health and social standing. We are beloved children wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. We are sustained by God’s own being and called to body forth this transcendent love into the world. Our true names are salt of the earth and light of the world. This identity situates us in a relational flow between the Divine Source, our neighbors, the earth, and the universe. We can become conscious of this flow and defy anything that ignores or obstructs it. But this defiance should not be restricted to one month of the year. Christmas defiance is meant to unfold into a defiant life. As Karl Rahner remarked, it will be a “Christmas that lasts forever.”
This defiant life, like a defiant Christmas, is neither negative nor angry. It is built on the simple recognition that our spiritual identity is the deepest truth about us and it needs to be integrated into our mental and social lives. Our mental and social lives are often out-of-sync with our love relationship with God. Therefore, we should not bow to the mental habits and social arrangements that alienate us from ourselves and one another. Although alienation tries to convince us it is the inevitable way of human existence, it should be defied. This unyielding “no” should be balanced by an equally unyielding “yes.” We should bring forward our love relationship with God as the pressure to bring into communion all that is alienated. Our birthright, revealed in the birth of Christ, is to be mediators of Divine Love as it transforms us and the world we live in.
Entrenched Alienation
However, this mission of transformation is not a romantic undertaking. It is strenuous activity accompanied by analytic and strategic thinking and acting. A great labor is involved. In the face of great labor we are always tempted to fall into a default mode and accept the present interpersonal and social arrangements as unchangeable. In an intransigent world, defiance can collapse into capitulation. Going along becomes more realistic than pushing back. The inner energy of defiance seems no match for the lethargy of the world.
This sense of how entrenched the ways of alienation are shakes our confidence. We suspect we are not up to the task. We do not have the knowledge and skills to inform interpersonal and social situations with the spiritual qualities we value. Our efforts are insufficient and ineffective. Sometimes what we do even increases alienation rather than alleviates it. The truth is we can dream more than we can execute, and this dream capacity can work against us. We become resigned to a mental and social life we know is not our true home.
Into this stalled consciousness comes John the Baptist. He is the guardian of Christmas defiance. His insistent message awakens us from sleep:”Repent!” But repentance is not taken in the conventional sense as a message for sinners. Rather repentance is the natural redoing of thought and action that must accompany the efforts of serious people to cooperate with divine creativity. It is what defiant people have to embrace in order to be effective. Whoever tries to embody transcendent love in finite forms will need to try again and again and again. We are experiments in incarnation, and the experiments are never over. John the Baptist is often portrayed as shouting. But his message is really a whisper into the deepest recesses of our soul: “Don’t lose heart.”
Have Strength
A number of years ago, I received a teaching that is closely connected with not losing heart in the defiant life. I was giving a workshop on storytelling, and at the break a Native American woman in traditional dress approached me.
“You talk a lot about power, but you don’t mean power,” she said.
“I don’t?”
“No,” she replied, and her tone let me know I was about to be taught. “Power is like a fire. It flares up and burns out.”
Then she stepped back, put her arm out, and steadily drew it horizontally across my line of vision. My eyes followed the firm, slow motion of her hand and arm.
“You mean strength,” she said slowly. Then she smiled.
She was right. I did mean strength. The stories I told were celebrating a steady strength, an inner rootedness and resolve that could push back at what was happening. They were tales of defiant people, persevering until life changed for the better.
The energy of a defiant life is a persevering strength. This strength is not given once and for all. It needs to be renewed, revitalized, brought back from smoldering ashes into vigorous flame. This is the spiritual role of Christmas. When we know what Christmas is meant to do, we can help Christmas do it. We can embrace the season in such a way that it is not a harried time that depletes us but an invitation into a consciousness that sustains us. The food and drink in our mouths, the sights in our eyes, the music and words in our ears, the smells in our nostrils, and the textures open to our touch seek to bring us into a peace that is an endless source of fight. When the season is working well and we are cooperating with it, it renews our soul.
So we can expect to enter December battered by the intransigent world and frustrated by our own lackluster efforts. But we can also expect to find — and every time is the first time — a light shining in the darkness, a greenness refusing to give in to barrenness, and a love that persistently outlasts rejection.
This article is extracted from Starlight by John Shea (ACTA Publications, 2006).
John Shea is a theologian, author and storyteller, who lectures on storytelling in world religion, faith-based healthcare, and the spirituality at work movement.