“The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light”
My eyes need adjusting. The light here is quantitatively different that what I have seen all day. Certainly I have seen glimmers- the smile on the face of the woman selling ornaments at the craft market on Union Square. My family’s laughter as they tell stories on each other as we’ve gathered around the dinner table this week. The twinkle in the eyes of a boy, no more than six, the youngest member of an 8 piece band of trumpeters playing “Hark the Herald” for the Salvation Army in front of the Food Emporium on 14th St.
But here- the luminous presence of God- is not different from what I have seen, but certainly more intense, weightier and- more surprising. I am being invited into something more than the kiss of God’s light on ordinary, but still wonderful, human events. I am being invited into God’s intimate grandeur: not the grandeur that would strike me dead with its blinding, white hot holiness, but with a grandeur that draws me in, sinner that I am, into a holy light clothed in humanity: angels singing in the sky, the rush of the shepherds- to what?
Certainly not a myth- a flight of fancy- not an allegory on the goodness within all of us, not a metaphor for humanity’s search for divinity: but a real stable filled with the smell and warm of animals warding off the desert cold of a winter night- not in a land far, far away, but in an historic verifiable time in Israel- living under the brutal occupation of Caesar Augustus who claimed, blasphemously to be divinity incarnate.
God in my world.
In an illuminating book written by Marilynne Robinson entitled “What Literature Owes the Bible” written up in this weekend’s NY Times Review of Books, the author writes that the Bible’s gift to the world’s literature is, in part, a “literary realism” because “ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance.” Instead of writing about “demigods, kings and heroes,” the Bible Is “looking as directly as it can at people as they are.” This is precisely the author's intent in writing this story. A the beginning of the Gospel, the author writes that he has “undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses.”
SO- what we are invited to see, according to the author, is a series of real events where extraordinary, even supernatural things happen under the direction of a Deity that is personally involved in the course of human history.
Here philosophical speculations about the nature of humanity and divinity are both invited to yield to a Baby in a Manger.
Majesty in a feeding trough.
God with us: the relationship between humanity and divinity completely redefined.
Evelyn Underhill writes, “we have got to begin not by an arrogant other-worldliness, but by a humble recognition that human things can be holy, very full of God”- meaning you, ordinary you, can be made very full of God.
Divinity in Poverty. Only Light willing to dwell in the lowliest of states can deign to twinkle in the eyes of a boy trumpeter or grace the smile of shopkeeper at the craft market in Union Square.
Only Divinity who has dwelt poverty can feed our starving hearts, only light shining into our darkness can dispel that very personal darkness dwelling in our hearts and minds
.
The question is: will you yield?
Are you starved enough to ask for this feeding? Have you dwelt in your own darkness long enough so that you now are longing for God’s light?
Have you noticed the glimmers of His presence- calling you to be “made very full of God?”
Again Evelyn Underhill writes, “ The unlimited life who is Love right through- so loved the world as to desire to give the deepest secrets of His heart to this small, fugitive, imperfect creation- to us. THAT SEEMS IMMENSE!”
She writes, “human nature is like a stable inhabited by the ox of passion and the ass of prejudice; animals which take up a lot of room and make quite a lot of noise. And sometimes Christians seem far nearer to those animals than to Christ.”
But it is precisely here, between these two animals where Jesus Christ is laid in a manger.
God knows our hearts. God is not far off. God is here in our world. Will you draw near to the stable? Will you kneel before the manger?
If you ask, God will adjust your eyes to to the beauty and the majesty of His light.
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