[My] journey began on Christmas morning, 1988, in Ottawa in a small Anglo-Catholic church called St. Barnabas. It was my first encounter with what my high church friends call “smells and bells.” Throughout that Christmas service a translucent ribbon of incense lingered just above eye level. Its constant presence provided a gentle introduction to the physical elements of the Christmas service that I had not experienced before—the Eucharist, the processions, the sights, sounds, and, yes, smells.
It was a mystery to me at the time, but I left the church that Christmas morn with a sense that I had worshipped God with all my senses—with my whole being—for the first time in my life.
My journey into the heart of the church’s liturgical and spiritual theology continues, but in a strange way it keeps returning me, again and again, to Christmas day. For it is in this great feast—in the celebration of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh—that I can begin to see what an embodied faith might mean.
Like most adults, I have a difficult time relating to Christmas. Having lost the wonder of childhood I try to make up for it through our peculiarly modern mixture of materialism and sentimentality. For me, as for so many people (including millions of believers), Christmas has become a parody of itself.
The more I reflected on my experience at St. Barnabas the more I realized that my own temptation to sentimentalize Christmas involved turning away from the messiness of my disenchanted, adult life.
Christmas is, after all, the story of the Creator entering into his creation—a creation that has been marred by human sin and weakness. It is the story of a God who does not disdain this world, despite its frailty, ambiguities, and messiness. The God who became a helpless babe in a stable entered into our human anxieties and confusions and redeemed them.
Christmas is the feast of the Incarnation, which is the mystery of God with us in the flesh. When we cut through the sentiment and marketing to the spiritual riches of Christmas, we recover not only a sense of who God is, but also who we are as human beings.
Such a recovery cannot happen in a day. One of the things I have learned about the ancient Church is that it knew that real, lasting change comes about over time, which is why it set aside whole seasons for meditation and celebration of the great mysteries of faith.
And so the early Christians set Christmas in the larger context of the Advent season that precedes it and the Epiphany season that extends its meaning outward from Bethlehem to the whole world. To live through these seasons is to embark on a pilgrimage through time.
Christmas [calls] us to an embodied faith, one that finds redemption in the messiness of our lives and encounters the divine in the ordinary stuff of this world.
God with us. This is the meaning of the Incarnation. This is the meaning of Christmas.
~Adapted from Greg Pennoyer, “Preface,” GOD WITH US: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas, edited by Greg Pennoyer & Gregory Wolfe
