Hope of Wonder: Christmas 2013

A Reflection for Christmas Day 2013

All Saints’, Southern Shores

Thomas Wilson

Isaiah 62:6-12        Luke 2:8-20

Hope of Wonder

On this Christmas Morning we hear the Gospel lesson of Mary, Joseph, Jesus and the shepherds, where Mary takes all these things in her heart and ponders them. Let us follow her example and take all this into our hearts and see if we can see with the eyes of each person here in this tableau.

What does Jesus see? I remember when I saw my grandchildren for the first time and their eyes grew wide as they tried to take it all in, but it is wonder and beyond taking in. How wonderful it would be if we could hold on to that sense of wonder. I am reminded of William Butler Yeats and this poem, Among School Children, where he, in his sixties, walks through a classroom and wonders about the children and how:

… the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

I think Jesus saw all things through the eyes of wonder all of his life. He did not dismiss people into categories but saw in each person the presence of the Divine, as he himself was fully human and fully Divine. This is the secret of life - when we know that every stranger we see is full of mystery, every person we think we know has greater dimensions, everyone we love is full of surprise as we go deeper in relationship. To see all the earth as a precious gift is to walk on holy ground and make all things sacred. This is a Holiday when we focus on the things we received this day. Maybe we can really make it a Holy Day when we can see all that we have overlooked and see those things again with the eyes of wonder and thanksgiving.

I see myself reflected in the old Shepherd who comes to worship the Christ child. Part of me wants to say “I have seen it all before.” After all, I go through this every year and, to use Yeats’ phrase in the same poem, I have “sixty and more winters on [my] head.” Yet can I step away from the pose of knowing it all and enter into the hope that I am still trying to go deeper in the meaning of this event? Even if I had “sixty and more winters” still to go, would I ever understand the depth of mystery of how God loves me – and you - so much that God comes under our roofs and lives with us.

I see Mary looking at me, wondering if her son will turn out like me, this old shepherd. Again back to Yeats’ poem, and in stanza 5 he writes:

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

Does Mary have dreams about her son and does she wonder about how he will turn out? The world can be an unfriendly place and every parent wants to protect their children from all the things that go bump in the night. Every pain and injury inflicted on my child by others I feel and wonder why I was not able to keep it from happening. Yet even in the blessing of birth there is pain; so it is in every day of life there will be opportunities to encounter the shadow and grow through it. We pray that each assault to our child’s psyche will heal and that they will be stronger for it. Here is Mary and her son is born in a stable, far from home, and laid in a manger, in an occupied country run by a tyrant. The cards seem stacked against him, and yet there is hope.

Finally there is Joseph, the one who is absolutely clueless, and yet he shows up and does the decent things, taking on burdens that are not his. Why does he do it? He does it because, clueless or not, he knows how to love and, if Woody Allen is correct and “80% of success in life is showing up”, then Joseph is a success because he shows up.

The message I get from my meditation on the Christmas tableau is to show up, love fiercely, protect the vulnerable, and look in wonder at all things.

May you Bless and be blessed this day and every day.