This beautiful time of the year, we celebrate and ritualize lots of wonderful endings and new beginnings. Some hearts are comforted by the scripture story of the Nativity scene, the birth of a new baby to a man and woman accompanied by resting sheep, donkey and “lowly cattle” enveloped on a beautiful starry night. Jesus was born and the angels sang! Many hearts struggle to find the meaning of this story for us today amid the seemingly chaotic circumstances of the world.
I was listening again to an On Being interview of Krista Tippett with poet Mary Oliver:
Krista Tippett: “Putting words around God, or what God is, or who God is, or, I don’t know, heaven—it’s always insufficient.”
Mary Oliver: “It’s always insufficient, but the question and the wonder is not unsatisfying. It’s never totally satisfying, but it’s intriguing. And also what one does end up believing, even if it shifts, has an effect upon the life that you live, the life that you choose to live or try to live. So it’s an endless, unanswerable quest. I find it endlessly fascinating … That there is something that has to do with all of us that is more than all of us are.”
As a child growing up in a small rural community, our entire school gathered in the gym to sing our hearts out every Friday between Halloween and Christmas. We were rehearsing for our all-school Christmas program. The program ended each year with a resounding, sacred singing of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” The final verse:
O holy Child of Bethlehem
Descend to us, we pray
Cast out our sin and enter in
Be born to us today
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell
O come to us, abide with us
Our Lord Emmanuel
O come to us, abide with us
Our Lord Emmanuel
Astounded as a first-grader at my first Christmas program and every year after, I was moved to tears by such a deep sense of unity as every voice of every family—students, parents, grandparents, wed and widowed, young and old, filled the evening air with a deep desire for God to abide anew in us through the coming year. That unifying experience of the energy of that nativity each year at this time—ever expanding in shifting theology, community, spirituality—still sings me anew. Maybe this is what the nativity story is all about—to stretch us and remind us that we are part of one ever expansive universe abiding in God.
—Ann Jackson, PBVM, Prairiewoods spiritual services coordinator