Christmas 2012

Christmas Joy

I have a confession to make. Christmas is not my favorite holiday. I have learned this past year that a lot of my exhaustion, irritability, and anxiety are related to intolerances to wheat gluten and milk. So this can be the best Christmas for me in recent memory. All I have to do is avoid Christmas cookies, milk chocolate, gravy, stuffing, eggnog.... you get the idea. So yeah. Wish me luck with that.

I’m encouraged by the fact that the very first Christmas ever probably was not the Rockwellesque picture we usually think of: Mary who has gained not an ounce of baby weight, a new born who looks suspiciously like a 2 or 3 month old, a few surprisingly well groomed shepherds, proud Joseph standing a little farther away, everyone looking serenely at the new baby with their hands steepled in prayer.

Imagine having to take a 3-day journey on the back of a donkey in your last month of pregnancy. That is, 3 days if you can keep going steadily at a pretty good pace. But you can’t go that fast because you are so exhausted from the pregnancy that you need to stop more often, and for longer.  By the time you get to the big city you are one of the last to arrive, and consequently, there is nowhere to stay. And your labor is beginning. You are not ushered via wheelchair into a pastel painted delivery room and asked several times if you’re sure you don’t want the epidural. No. Out of compassion, a distant relative of your husband allows you access to his stable. Ever been in a stable where cows are kept? Yeah. Kinda smelly. Mary might have reasonably expected a midwife to attend her, but as far as we know, she gave birth far from home in the dark with only her husband to help. And being a carpenter instead of a farmer, he likely had never witnessed even the birth of a calf, let alone a human baby.

These were not Mary’s plans. She’d been looking forward to a pretty simple life: ordinary girl, married to a good hard working ordinary guy, eking out a living as best they could, and generally glad to do so. Enter the angel Gabriel. And now she has to tell her fiancee that she’s pregnant. He knows it’s not his, but understandably he has a hard time believing that it isn’t anyone else’s either.

This story is one of the Joyful mysteries of the Catholic rosary. And yes, it’s a joy for us, but the wonder of it is that Mary seems to have experienced it joyfully, too. Read Luke 1:46-55. The Magnificat. “My spirit rejoices!” she says. And in Luke 2 it says she treasured these memories in her heart. Treasured them.

How did she do that? How did she, an unmarried pregnant teenager, walk boldly and even joyfully into a world in which it was not unheard of for unmarried pregnant women to be stoned to death? In Mary’s time, the slur against her character, the shame of this, would follow any other woman through the rest of her life. But Mary’s response: “From this day,” she states, “all generations will call me blessed!”

I think the difference between how Mary responded to her circumstances and how I would have responded lies in trust. Like my daughter who woke before dawn one morning and found me in the kitchen wrestling with the chicken-and-egg question of how do you make coffee in the morning before you’ve had coffee in the morning. She whines and tugs at my sleeve until, exasperated, I turn to her and say “What? What do you need?” She takes my hand and points into the darkness of the living room where she’s hoping to watch Clifford on TV and says “I need a grownup so I won’t be scared!” 

Mary’s hand never left the hand of the Father. She trusted that, despite all evidence to the contrary, what He asked of her would turn out not just okay, but better than anything she could have thought of for herself. And so she gave up her own life in order to live the life the Father asked of her, and gave us this God-man who would in His own turn give up His own life. So that we too, can take the hand of the Father and walk into our own dark unknowns.

My wish for you this Christmas: That you will experience joy regardless of your circumstances. And that you will eat all the cookies and leave none for me.