Sitting with the Sacred

What stands out to me in the different components of the Christmas story is that God touches different lives in different ways at different times. The Magi find God by being observant and by investigating further into an unusual astronomical occurrence. The shepherds encounter God through a group of God’s messengers, and the shepherds themselves are in a group when messengers of heaven greet them. Mary, however, is alone when she is greeted by a single angel, and Elizabeth finds God in the curiosity and concern of a relative, and Joseph encounters God as an unexpected challenge before he gets his own reassurance in a dream.

My first reaction as I read each of these stories is that as much as I’d like to think I’d go as far to work with God as these people did, I can’t imagine myself doing what they did. Would I risk being ostracized? If my past choices are any indication, no. Would I choose to make a long journey on a donkey, or a camel, or on foot? Nope. God didn’t make me capable of using any of the previous modes of transportation.

 Then I remember a couple of things.

The events I just mentioned aren’t presented the way I’d present them.

1. If the characters’ emotions are described at all, they are mentioned using, at most, one adjective, and one adverb, such as “greatly troubled” (New American Bible Revised Edition, Lk. 29).  In other words, Scripture translations use a phrase that doesn’t make me feel what the characters in the scene might have felt.
2. The scenes recount very little of any conflict or obstacles the protagonists likely encountered after God entered their lives in unique ways. Some later New Testament narratives aren’t as selective in their focus, but the infancy narratives are. I suppose the point of Scripture is to focus on what God does and how we should respond. That’s all well and good. I’m glad that God makes a series of announcements in the infancy narratives and that the receivers, though initially freaked out by what they experience, do what God tells them to do and they find what they’re promised they will.

But I’d like to know: What gossip got repeated about Mary when the news spread that she was pregnant but couldn’t have lawfully consummated her marriage to Joseph? Mary and Joseph had to have been whispered about. Surely the couple uttered a few sighs and shed a few tears before and during the journey to Bethlehem. I’d like to hear about these. If I did, I think I could more easily trust that I could follow their examples.

And the shepherds — did they feel gross after standing in the pasture for hours? To what would they have compared the throbbing of their feet before they ever even went in search of the stable? Did they question whether they were all sharing an exhaustion-fueled hallucination before they set off on their journey? How long did their trek take? And what about the quest of the Magi? If the Scriptures gave me more details about the hardships involved in these journeys, I’d feel a teensy bit better about my own journey to closer union with God taking as many twists and turns as it does.

Despite what the accounts don’t tell me, I’m comforted by the thought these human characters in God’s story encountered God in sights and sounds that must be impossible to describe adequately. The incomparable beauty of these sights and sounds must have helped these seekers along their often-harrowing journeys.  The fact that they eventually found what Heaven’s messengers had promised had to helped, too. So did the fact that they encountered God, not only later in some indescribable afterlife, but also into their present lives, in ways that they could see, and hear, and touch, in huge, indescribable ways —messages from angels or from the solar system — and in the small, ordinary ones —a visit from a loved one and a visit to a baby boy whose parents who had little.

I don’t know what it’s like to meet God face-to-face at the end of a difficult journey, but I do know — come to think of it — that I’m on a journey. My journey isn’t exactly the same as anyone else’s because I’m not exactly the same as anyone else. To make this journey is the reason I exist, regardless of how much I resist parts of it. It’s a journey to the gifts of hope, peace, love, and the gift of relationships that share in these gifts, gifts I’ll find as long as I seek them. And I do seek them. And I’m not alone as I do. For even though I sometimes forget — God is already with me — in the big moments and the small ones. I just need to invite the Spirit to help me remember this.

                                                 Work cited

The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.