The Scope of Christmas
Christmastime is a time when, as you know, a great many people, myself included, spontaneously wander through our memories. We remember what it was like at Christmas when we were little. The memories of the frenetic unwrapping of presents, the surprise look on the face of the recipient of a gift, the bated-breath hope of receiving the toy you had hinted for to your parents.
Then it inevitably happened. For me, I must have been in high school at the time…one Christmas, when my three sisters and I, while browsing in the Hallmark store during the holiday shopping rush, we started brainstorming on how else to spend Christmas day. You see, as kids we got toys for Christmas. So naturally, we would spend a good part of Christmas day playing with them. But as teenagers, we had outgrown receiving toys…yet we wanted to recapture some of the excitement and spirit of what Christmas felt like when we were little. In the Hallmark store, we found a large thousand count jigsaw puzzle that we decided we would spend Christmas day putting together as a family. I still remember the puzzle; it was a cartoony depiction of the Seven Wonders of the World. Let’s see, there was Stonehenge, the Egyptian Sphinx, the Great Wall of China, the Colosseum in Rome, the Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Mayan Pyramids.
Believe it or not, I was not very good at putting the pieces together. I would get stuck on the particular image of a single puzzle piece rather than being able to step back and use the picture on the box to see where each piece fit in the grand scheme of things. Puzzle solving limitations aside, I have fond memories of the time we spent assembling our annual Christmas puzzle. It was the beginning of a tradition that our family would continue for some years thereafter.
Whatever your tradition, if you think about it, everything seemed bigger at Christmas as a child…because as a youngster, we see Christmas through the lens of a microscope. To a child, everything looks bigger than its actual size because children, when they see normal size images, they use their imagination to magnify the objects just like a scientist uses a microscope to enlarge objects invisible to the naked eye. That’s why some of our childhood memories of Christmas seem bigger in scope…because our imagination has augmented for us the wonder and awe of the Christmas season.
Now I don’t know about you, but Christmas nowadays is not the same as I remembered it from my childhood. The Christmas specials on TV—they don’t stir in me the same warm fuzzy feelings like they did when I was a kid. The anticipation of opening a present—the wonder and surprise is not there anymore. I can kind of already guess what’s inside just by looking at how a present’s wrapped. (I know, my puzzle-solving abilities have vastly improved since I was in high school.) Much of the anticipation that fills the world at Christmas is this sort of unconscious sense that we can go back or recreate what Christmas was like for us when we were little.
The problem is, as we advance in age, we start to see Christmas not through the lens of a microscope like a child does, but rather, adults see Christmas through the lens of a telescope. As adults, we can look back in time through many years of Christmases past, to our childhood memories, which can be vivid, yet, at the same time, can seem so far away because of the passage of time. An astronomer looks through a telescope at things that are big, like planets or a shooting star, but sees them as smaller than their actual size because of the distance in space that separate him from the objects he sees through the telescopic lens. And in the same way, adults have to travel the distance of time to see past experiences that are stored in our memory. So whereas children use their imagination to make their experiences bigger in scope, adults use their memory to bring into focus experiences of long ago. Our loved ones who cannot be with us this Christmas because we are separated from them by distance, like the courageous men and women of our armed forces who protect our freedom, they are made present to us this Christmas by our memory, when we remember them today though they are absent from the Christmas dinner table. And our loved ones who have gone before us in death, they live on in our memories and we are reunited with them when we remember them in prayer at this Eucharist celebration, where heaven and earth are united at the eternal banquet feast. Our memory is like a telescope that brings into focus people and experiences that are far away in distance or time.
But that still does not solve the puzzle of how, as we grow older, do we recapture the wonder and awe of Christmas. There is still one missing piece to the puzzle because there is yet another way to experience Christmas. Instead of looking around like a child does or looking back like an adult does, a spiritually mature soul also looks inward to experience Christmas. That is how those who were present at the birth of Our Lord celebrated the first Christmas. We see it in the nativity scene, whether here in the narthex of the church or displayed in your homes. They are all essentially the same. The figures of Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, even the barn animals, they are like pieces of a puzzle that, if you position them just right, they all are gazing at the baby Jesus. It is recapturing a scene, a snapshot of a memory of them welcoming the baby Jesus after his birth into the world…but more importantly, they were also receiving Him as he was conceived into their hearts. The Blessed Virgin, when she looked upon her baby boy, she must have desired to nurture his human body with her milk, but she also pondered the mystery that one day he would nurture our souls with his divine Body and Blood. St. Joseph, the foster father, looked down upon the son he had adopted, the same Son who would one day extend his divine inheritance to us, the adopted sons and daughter of his Father in heaven. And the shepherds, to them, it was a silent night on earth, but when they closed their eyes, they heard the reprise of the Christmas hymns sung by the choir of angels. Even the barn animals, the oxen and the donkey, tradition tells us that their breath kept the infant Jesus warm from the harsh elements. What wonder they too must have felt when they considered that that child would warm the hearts of Christians each and every year from the bitter cynicism of the world.
When you visit a doctor, the first way you explain to him how you are feeling is by listing your physical symptoms. The doctor will then ask you about your medical history to give him context with which to understand your ailment. But always each and every time, the doctor will also place his stereoscope upon your chest to listen to the sound of your heart. It’s one thing to see your symptoms (a cough, a running nose) and it’s helpful to be reminded of your past health problems. But a doctor has to see what is going on inside of you to put the pieces of the diagnostic puzzle together.
It’s the same thing when it comes to our experience of Christmas. There’s nothing wrong with experiencing Christmas through a microscope like a child does, but it shouldn’t be the only way. Otherwise, we just experience the mystery of the Incarnation like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle by looking at each piece up close and separately. And there’s nothing wrong with experiencing Christmas through the lens of a telescope. That’s what traditions are—yearly rituals that let us relive the joyful memories of the past. But that shouldn’t be the only way either. That is like what I tried to do with my sisters—we started the new tradition of putting together a puzzle in the hopes of recapturing some of the magic of our childhood past. But experiencing Christmas only through the lens of a telescope is like using the picture on the puzzle box to recreate a preconceived image of Christmas, ruling out the possibility that we too can be a figure in the nativity scene. We too can place ourselves into the scene of the birth of Our Lord this Christmas, like a puzzle piece that is placed onto the stage of divine providence, when we, like the figures present at the First Nativity, immerse ourselves in the unfolding of the mystery before us.
That is the lesson to remember if we start feeling the spirit of Christmas slipping away as the years roll by…that Christmas is too big in “scope” to experience only under a microscope or a telescope or even a stethoscope. Christmas is a mystery to be pondered, not a puzzle to be solved. Christmas is a gift to be adored, not a present to unwrap. The Spirit of Christmas is not a feeling to be recaptured. The nativity scene is not something we should pass by in our homes every day this Christmas season; it is designed to remind us to stop in wonder and praise of the King who has come into our lives. Christmas is meant to be seen through our imagination, held in our memory, and pondered in our heart.
You know, it’s ironic that our family’s first Christmas jigsaw puzzle was that of the Seven Wonders of the World…It’s ironic because Christmas is the Wonder of all wonders—the Mystery of the Incarnation. You see, the wonder of Christmas is that the God who once dwelt among us two thousand years ago now can dwell within our hearts!1
1 Paraphrase from Roy Lessin.
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