Spiritual Guidance:

In a “Family Circus” comic, little Billy watches Dad put up Christmas decorations and says, “Christmas lights up the world, doesn’t it, Daddy?” Of course Christmas does! Yet, as an early saint said, “It is easy to think Christmas and it is possible to believe Christmas, but it is a challenge to act Christmas.”

At Christmas we get what we most want and need: The one from whom we have come and to whom we are returning loving us so much as to come among us as one of us — Jesus, the human life of God. We receive direction on how to become Godly people: Gathered at Bethlehem’s manger, we are poised between love’s completion or frustration, between love’s triumph or tragedy. We know the unknowable; we affirm the unthinkable; and we proclaim with saints that the impossible has become Truth. God’s enfleshment in Jesus is love’s risk. It is God’s vulnerability, God’s fullness made empty, God’s richness made poor, God’s “otherness” become flesh and blood for us and for our well-being. The power of response to risk love is in our hands.

A modern saint wrote, “When we say, ‘It is Christmas,’ we mean that God has spoken into the world his last, his deepest, his most beautiful word in the incarnate Word, a word that can no longer be revoked because it is God’s definitive deed, because it is God himself in the world. And this word means, ‘I love you... you, the world and humankind.’ And God has spoken this word by being himself born as a creature.”

If we focus only on the birth of Jesus as a sweet story we enjoy remembering, we will miss out on what can happen at Christmas. The God who comes to be with us can take the deepest, darkest, hidden parts of ourselves and make us new! This doesn’t take more from us than we have to give: a smile, a kind word, a helping hand. When we serve others, Christmas does light up the world.

PETER D. HAYNES is the Very Rev’d Canon, Rector/Senior Pastor of Saint Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church in Corona del Mar.