This is that season when we gather around a story … a story that has been turned into hundreds of songs … made into countless ornaments … inspired so many different artistic expressions … a story that has been decorated with so much glitter we can easy miss its light altogether ….
We have made a supernatural birth its miracle … “offspring of a virgin’s womb” (Hark the Herald Angels Sing) … an unnatural conception its hallmark “lo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb, very God, begotten, not created” (O Come All Ye Faithful) … we’ve turned this story into the story of a baby like no other … “a baby that awakes but no crying he makes” (Away in a Manger)… and we have projected into this story the most dangerous distortion of our spiritual tradition … the reverse of a curse … the cure for what ails humanity …and sung that joy for the world comes in a birth that lets “no more sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground; because he comes to make his blessing flow far as the curse is found” …
How we tell this story matters! And what we affirm in this season matters! It matters hugely to how we see ourselves, how we see each other and how we share the buried treasure of this storied season. Think of the words of that Mohawk elder … how things would be different if we approached one another expecting to see light in one another? Expecting to find light in one another’s stories …
This is the season to affirm the miraculous light that is born in every child … the sacred energy we each carry … the unique spark of the sacred that is deeply within all beings … It is the season to affirm the original love that makes us human … not some original flaw in need of redemption …
How can we look at the faces of these children born in our community this year and not see that each light that comes into the world carries the miracle of we have tended to reserve for just one birth … that each of us is a light for the world … “that the lamps are different but the Light is the same.” (Rumi) “one matter, one energy, one Light, endlessly emanating all things.” (Rumi)
In one of the stories that gives us this season, a young woman named Mary is visited by an angel named Gabriel who tells her that she has found favour with the divine and the sacred will emerge from her … how can we hear this story and fail to know that we ourselves are being addressed? That this is not about some angelic being and some peasant girl but this is a story about each of us … it is a story of our essence … a story that affirms who and what we are… how can we hear this story and fail to know that we are each a favoured one … and the sacred is born of each of us … regardless of our age, gender identity, ability … that we are bearers of sacredness … we are a light for the world.
How can we hear this story and fail to know that we are here to bring that kind of news to one another … to affirm to each other that we are sacred containers of that “one Light endlessly emanating all things?” (Rumi)
This archetypal story is singing itself everywhere in this season … in elevators, in our cars, in the mall, in our homes … and yet we can easily miss the miracle again … we can easily hear this story as a once upon a time tale about a young woman miraculously conceiving a divine child who would save the world and miss the story of our own purposefulness … that we are light born of light … light shining into the darkness … light seeking the love light in the eyes of others … whether our lives are long or short, loud or quiet, large or small, known by many or by just a few we are lamps shining a unique and vital light.
In her book, Where the Heart Waits, Sue Monk Kidd tells about her daughter being part of a Christmas pageant:
When my daughter was small she got the dubious part of the Bethlehem star in a Christmas play. After first rehearsal, she burst through the door with her costume, a five-pointed star lined in shiny gold tinsel designed to drape over her like a sandwich board. ‘What exactly will you be doing in the play?’ I asked. ‘I just stand there and shine,’ she told me.
In many cultures, humans intuited that we descended from the stars long before we learned that the stars are our ancestors and our bodies are formed by elements forged by the death of a star. A star’s radiance comes from the creative tension between gravity which pulls it toward collapsing in on itself and nuclear fusion which pushes it toward expanding into space. Like us, stars shine in their time as cauldrons of creativity and wombs of transformation. Death is the price they pay for their creativity. Eventually the tension between the tug of gravity and the push of fusion causes the star to explode and this supernova gives us all the elements essential for life on earth … oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen … the very star dust out of which we come … and like our ancestors, we, too, are born to shine.
And yet we are deeply afraid of our radiance. Although we think we are afraid of our shadow perhaps we are more afraid of our light. Maybe that’s why every character in the story that gives us this season has some messenger of light come to them in the dead of the night to tell them not to be afraid.
One of the hardest things to do in life is just to stand here and shine. We don’t have to be anything we are not. We don’t have to fix the economy, invent a life saving device, discover a new celestial body, solve climate change, we just have to shine … we just have to be brilliant with our own unique and particular light.
Every birth is a miracle forged in balls of gas burning billions of miles away. And each of us and everything that is shines with the radiance of a supernova. In this season when there is so much we can’t do … there is nothing to prevent us from “just standing there in our lives and shining” … there is nothing to prevent us from being Gabriel and safely affirming to another how we treasure the light they embody … the light that shines in them. Let’s consider the ways we can embody this story even amid all the limits of this particular season in which we celebrate it once again.
-Nancy Steeves
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