Here in Church, we make a habit of speaking in unusual ways. Take the collect, for example. The one for Christmas, which you can find on the third page of your service book, begins, “O God, you have caused this holy night to shine with the brightness of the true Light…” It is a lovely prayer, and it is a lot like most of the other prayers of the Church, which is to say that it is not at all the way we normally speak to one another.
The other day I saw someone’s attempt at translating an ordinary conversation into traditional prayer language. Imagine this from a family man sitting in his easy chair at home:
O my wife, flesh of my flesh, who did bear my seed, and is always a paragon of virtue, I humbly implore you to look with favor on my lowly estate; for I have no milk for my cookies. Therefore I ask, through the merits of our marriage bond and your kindness, to please get me some milk. Amen.
Or maybe we should consider a local example. Imagine this from a senior prefect to his headmaster:
O Father, who desires only the good and virtuous prospering of your school, and who has never ceased, when called upon, to answer the requests of the humble and grateful: Behold now, in your mercy, the success of the varsity golf team, and, though we are not worthy to appear at dinner without blazers, grant, by the love you bear for your students, the casual day that we so desire. Amen.
Because we obviously do not speak like this, there are those who would say that we ought to change the Church’s worship to be more like normal life. Make it more meaningful, more relevant. Though I can appreciate the motivations behind such thoughts, I find them misguided. And here’s why: Church isn’t about making strange things — God, angels, demons, good and evil — more ordinary or knowable. It is much more about making ordinary things more strange. Language. Sound. Smell. Eating. Bread. Wine. Water.
Take something very ordinary like human birth. It is hard to think of anything more normal. All of us, I suspect, have been born. Several other people here have given birth, which is a little more rare, but still within the range of normal human experience. But here we are treating this one particular birth as if it is something special.
Or, let’s be honest, take Christmas, which is so ordinary in our culture that it is almost synonymous with the word holiday. We have at this point been hearing Christmas music on the radio and in the stores for months. It is almost indistinguishably part of mainstream Western culture. And so it makes sense that we have a whole set of unusual customs to mark it in Church. We dress up the church in gold and red and white, we meet in the middle of the night, we sing special songs that we only sing once a year.
Despite all of these unusual things, it is still easy to zip right through it as if it’s business as usual. And that is because we know the message of Christmas. We know it from the dozens of great and inspiring Christmas movies proclaiming the values of loving your neighbor, the values of accepting yourself and your family, the wonders of love, the magic of kindness, etc. Just think of Will Ferrell’s now-classic movie Elf from 2003, where Santa’s sleigh runs on the energy of Christmas cheer. There, Christmas has been completely and finally transformed into a generic celebration of making the world a better and happier place. You don’t even really need Christmas to have Christmas anymore.
And so it may seem strange if we look at this story of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus and find something other than holiday cheer.
It makes sense, though. Births are not cheerful. They are wonderful. They are messy. But they’re not all jingle bells and eggnog. When each of my three children was born, I found myself weeping uncontrollably. I don’t really know why. I think it was a combination of relief and terror and love. Or perhaps, if I can cut to the chase, it was just joy.
The Austrian poet Rilke has a wonderful poem on the birth of Christ, addressed to Mary:
Were you expecting something greater?
What is greatness? He moves straight through
all measurements we know, dissolving them away.
Even the path of a star is not like that.
Behold: these kings standing here are great
and drag into your lap rare treasures
that each believes to be the greatest.
Perhaps you are astonished at their gifts.
But look into the blanket in your arms,
how He already surpasses all of them.
…
The gift He brings — as you will see — is joy.
“Joy” fills all the Christmas stories, from the annunciation to the nativity to the visitation of the magi. When the angels visit the shepherds, they proclaim, in the words of the older translation, “good tidings of great joy.”
And it becomes clear, very quickly, that this joy is not independent of sadness and pain. Not long after Jesus is born, Herod orders the death of all young children in Bethlehem — a massacre of the innocents. And not very many years later, when Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple, the aged Simeon tells Mary that “a sword will pierce your own heart also.”
For Mary, we know, sees the whole story soon enough. Not just the wood of the cradle but the wood of the cross.
How is it joy exactly, to see a son on the cross?
Rilke again: The gift He brings—as you will see—is joy.
As you will see. That’s key, maybe. It’s not just this immediate happiness — the kind of external cheerfulness that can power a magical sleigh. It’s not, as one couples therapist said recently in an interview, “a permanent state of enthusiasm.”
If that’s all Christmas is about — cheer, merriment, enthusiasm — it’s hard to see how it’s good news to all those people in the world struggling to meet their basic human needs; or to those who find themselves in this season missing those they have lost; or to those of us struggling with anxiety, or depression, or sickness, or family conflict, or just any of the ordinary things that can happen in human life.
True joy is something very strange, which is, once again, part of why the Church does so many strange things. It can come in laughter or in tears; it can come in silence. It can come in the midst of death; it can come in the resurrection; it can come in a quiet birth in the middle of the night. It is not a feeling, exactly. It is all feelings, all experiences, offered up to the God made flesh.
It is — in some transcendent analogous way, the unchanging “feeling” of the holy Trinity. For this is the great mystery and the wonder of Christmas — that the divine Son in the manger offers us his body, his life, today, and every day, so that he can be where we are, who we are, feel what we feel, know what we know — and all of it can be part of his joy, because he is love and joy.
His joy can be ours. We can eat it. We can drink it. We can become joy, not by modeling a particular set of emotions, but by following the person, Jesus Christ, who shows us joy, who shows us what it means to be human. And if we can set out to do that, however imperfectly, the light of Christmas will abide in us, and shine in us, and grow, however dark the night.
The Rev. Dr. Sam Keyes is professor of theology at John Paul the Great Catholic University, Escondido, Calif.
