Feature Article

Paradox in a manger

It is all too easy to be seduced by the season. But Christmas is not about passive peace. It causes a restlessness, a disturbance to our complacency

A Native American warrior was rushing through the forest. He saw a fallen egg on the grass and placed it in the first nest he came across. He had placed an eagle's egg in a prairie hen's nest. One day when the hatched chickens were busy doing what a prairie-bird family does best - hopping, pecking, squawking - a magnificent eagle swooped across the sky. The young eagle was filled with a sudden, aching longing.

Immediately reprimanded by the mother hen for time-wasting and day-dreaming, the growing eagle-in-disguise dutifully continued to scratch the dry earth. But, the story goes, no matter what suspicion, ridicule or indoctrination the prairie chicken continued to endure from that day on, she could never forget that moment when her heart in hiding stirred for another bird.

As we stand around the crib something stirs inside us too. We look at the baby who will soon enjoy and endure the delights and vicissitudes of being truly human, who will later writhe in a darkness from which a great light will shine. We look at the baby and stir to an echo of heaven in ourselves.

The small child is a sign of contradiction; paradox in a manger. To be God and to be human, to be beyond and to be within, to be the future and the not yet. There is conflict, tension and pain in this graced glimpse of possibility. Like Jesus did, we carry a holy disturbance within us from birth to death.

The sleepy infant holds the fullness of divine love in its finite presence and infinite promise. We kneel near the baby and an awareness of our own undreamt-of destiny awakens in us. We sense a beckoning horizon as yet invisible and uncertain. We are like people trying to remember the dream from which we have just awoken.

"Peace on earth," we sing, but a strange disturbance bothers our hearts. "All is calm, all is bright," we faithfully carol, while a restlessness continues to grow within us. The perennial "tidings of great joy" are tempered by Simeon's shadow hovering close by. "Do you think I have come to bring peace on earth?" asked Jesus. "No, I tell you. I have come to bring fire."

The angels of Christmas herald in both tranquil order and troubled disorder: order in the vision of a God that has become human, of a divine dream that is happening in the land, but disorder in the blindness that blocks that dream and vision. Christmas is no passive peace. It is costly grace. God became human so that humans could become divine. This is both astonishing and upsetting. Christmas is about roots and wings. We hold within us the sublime summit, the infinite horizon to which we aspire, yet our feet of clay are rooted in the heaviness of a fallen humanity.

These echoes from another place bring a restlessness to our souls in the season of peace. This restlessness springs from the mystery of our ambiguous humanity. It is a kind of haunting by the spirits of the heavens for which we are fashioned, a perennial waking dream reminding us of the presence of a God who is always beckoning us to new summits and horizons. Referring to what he calls "hauntings" by things beyond us, Morris West wrote: "I am sure that it is in this domain of our daily dreaming that the Holy Spirit establishes his own communion with us. This is how the gift is given; the sudden illumination, the opening of the heart to the risk of love."

The Christmas stories and hymns are told and sung to remind us of who we are and of who we are called to be. They are as much about us as they are about God. And we need to hear them. Otherwise we forget. Original sin obscures our inner vision and graced aspiration. It is blind to possibility. It knows nothing of summits and horizons. It travels on yesterday's flat tracks of hopeless inevitability. And yet, even though full of fear, there is always, at our core, some small stirring towards the light. There has to be. "And the day came", wrote Anaïs Nin, " when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

Christmas disturbs adults with profound dilemmas for the soul. How do we resolve that tension between the real and the really real, that call from another place to be answered in this place? Are we open to sacrificing what we are, for what we may become? These quiet questions, all too easily stifled in the frantic lists of Christmas expectation, still carry, for the open soul, a disturbing persistence.

And all the time it is true to say that without that restless spirit, that unsatisfied longing, our desire for God would die. It is yet another dimension of the paradox of faith. The space must be kept empty. Why? Because it is the space for wonder, for possibility, for reaching beyond our grasp; it is the silence without which, in a world of noise, we would never hear the small voice within us that calls out to the eagle-angel above. It is the dark space from which the memory and presence of another truth will slowly rise, like a morning star, to restore the light.

Without these half-felt feelings of emptiness, those whispers from the deep that stir an ache in our soul, a certain dynamic dimension would leave our lives. "God help any of us," wrote Ronald Rolheiser, "if we become so dulled or self-protective, that we are no longer soul-chained to worlds beyond us." What happens is our need for the security of what we can control outweighs the inner call of transcendence. There is no open threshold over which the Lord Jesus can come. Without that tension between emptiness and fulfilment there's no hope. Eventually we despair.

Few of us are strangers to that despair. But we still keep on trying to trust in this perennial promise of peace, in the creative absence between the "now" and the "not yet". In spite of war, injustice and all kinds of sin, can we believe, as we sing the "Gloria" with all our hearts this Christmas, that a blossoming of the individual soul, a transformation of our society and planet, is already happening; that this holding together of "the seen and the unseen", is secure within us?

While we are disturbed at the awesome challenge of our divine destiny, and so often despair at the prospect of either ourselves, or our world, ever getting there, the child, with the seeds of Easter already within him, is a perennial sacrament of both God's immediate vulnerability and eventual invincibility. And, mysteriously, both these mysteries are somehow held together in the present moment.

I like to think that Arthur Clough was waiting in a silent church, fighting his hopelessness, early on a wartime Christmas morning, when he wrote these lines of grace from "Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth":

And not by eastern windows only;
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!