Packing and Unpacking Christmas

Yesterday marked the official end of the Christmas Season on the Catholic Church’s calendar with the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord.  It is when the decorations come down and the Church transitions into ordinary time until Lent begins.  As I packed up the trappings of the holiday, I began to “unpack” the events of the Christmas Season.

I know many people believe that the focus of the Christmas holiday is the birth of Baby Jesus and to some extent I’ll go along with that.  Seeing the baby in the stable is a good image for children to gain an understanding of just how Jesus humbled himself by allowing himself to be born in such a modest way.  For us grown-ups though, I just think it stops there.  To coin a phrase of a dear friend of mine, “And so what?”  Aside from the warm fuzzy initial feelings most of us get when we see images of a newborn, what other responses should we have to the birth of the Christ child into the world?

I had an epiphany on Christmas Eve as I listened to the Gospel.  We’d had a potluck dinner before Mass and I was having a touch time settling myself.  Our priest is newly arrived from Africa, and paying close attention is required to understand his words.  Despite these challenges, the Spirit came through and I heard Luke’s story in a very different way.  I began to think of the story of the birth in the stable with quite a different perspective.

It’s only natural to place yourself in character in these stories, to empathize with the ready-to-pop expectant mother having spent hours on the back of a donkey, just waiting for a place to rest for a while or Joseph, the tired father, feeling the tremendous urgency to find a safe place for his wife to stay but what about the inn keeper?

We’ve all seen portrayals of the inn keeper in the movies, plays or on tv, often as a grumpy, frustrated or even kindly man doing his best to accommodate the couple but this year I took the idea of being the inn keeper in a different direction, looking at the story of the inn keeper as a parable.

During the Advent Season, our focus is to prepare for the coming of the child by reflecting on the barriers in our lives that distract and distance us from God.  By the time Christmas arrives, if we’ve done our job, we are ready; the nursery is complete, the crib up and there is plenty of room to welcome the child into our lives.  But, often we get so caught up in the details of our lives that we lose focus and when we welcome God into our lives, we don’t have the room we’d like to have, so we try to cram the baby into whatever spot we may have available, like a stable.  And let’s face it, even the cleanest stable isn’t a nice place to give birth to any baby let alone the son of God.

Taking the parable one step further, now that we have received the Christ child, what do we do next?  Take down the creche and pack it away to try again next year?  I don’t think so.

Instead, I believe our answer to the question, “And so what?”,  despite where the baby is received should be to nurture to adulthood the mission of the child; to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give hope to the despairing, shelter the homeless, comfort the sick and set the captives free. If we are Christians, our baptisms have charged us with these challenges.

This year I think I’ve at least intellectually put the pieces together.  My personal challenge for this year will be remember to not pack my Christmas epiphany away.  I’ll need to start now to clear away the clutter, a little bit at a time to make room for the babe before next Christmas.  Four weeks of Advent is just not enough time to prepare for the coming of a child!

Babies are born on this planet every micro-second.  Each is a child of God, created in God’s image