It’s getting all festive! Decs up, lights twinkling, advent calendar chocolates counting down to the BIG day. Out have come the old Christmas albums – I would say CDs but even that is pushing it with streaming. We have a mix of choirs from Cambridge, 70s rock and crooning rat packs – all sprinkling Christmas dust in our ears and reminding me of the times we have played them, over and over, and over. Somewhere the tunes blur into the background, an ambient mix for one mighty game of Monopoly where we’re all dreaming of simply having a wonderful Christmas time in excelsis Deo.
But there are some songs that we really can’t play without dispute. There’s a slurred Beach Boys number that get’s fast forwarded every year, despite protestations that some would like to hear all the songs on this CD for once! And there’s others that we like musically, but the lyrics are just plain wrong. There will always be a Heaven above us. We always cry knowing that Santa Claus is coming to town. Having had teenage musicians in the house, we are not likely to ask a drummer boy to play for me par rum pa pum pum.
More perplexing is the song that suggests that God is watching us but from a distance. This may sound like a nice idea, like a Star Wars version of God, who lived A long time ago in a galaxy far far away …. but somehow it’s just not the way I know Him, and especially not at Christmas. For me, Christmas is about God rolling up His sleeves and getting stuck in and deeply involved in the messy, complicated lives of you and me. He turns up not in a luxurious palace in Palestine, circa year zero, but right in the middle of the overcrowded, jostling streets of Bethlehem where crowds of people are living and sleeping and talking and buying and selling. He is rubbing shoulders with the bustling crowds and squeezes into a tiny stable for animals as the first born son of a very young mother and a very confused father. It’s a dirty, smelly, grubby affair where he ends up sleeping in a trough made for animal feed. It all feels very up close, very intense, very sweaty, and very personal.
If I think God is distantly watching me, then I only talk with Him as if He were far away and very far removed from me. I only bother Him in an emergency, when there’s no one else to help. Yet His behaviour in Bethlehem would say differently. It would suggest I can talk to Him, like I would to my friend, someone close by my side. George MacDonald, says it so beautifully.
Speak from the heart as if someone was listening, someone who, in the dead of night, does not sleep, but keeps wide awaked in case one of his children should cry (2)
Oh that’s easy for you to say, George as we imagine a soft focused Hollywood movie scene of a gentle Dad getting up late in the evening to comfort a crying baby. But George was not a movie star, he was a busy nineteenth century man: a minister, a writer, a mentor. Later writers claim him as their inspiration: C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien, Lewis Carrol to name a few. More impressively, George was a caring husband to Louisa and father of eleven children. When George talks about lying awake at night, listening for his child’s cry, I think he knew exactly what that was like. It wasn’t a one off gentle vignetted scene, but a busy, tiring nighttime routine. But it was also one that takes you away from the busyness of the day, to the closeness of a child’s whisper; to the leaning in to find out what’s wrong, allaying nighttime fears, hugging a little one close when they feel all alone.
So yes God is watching, always, but not, for me, from a great distance. When I talk with Him, when I pray, it is not an echoing shout to a vast and empty night sky, but a conversation with someone who is close and interested in my ups and downs. Someone who is so close He can hear my sighs, see my smiles, catch my tears. Interested in the daily details of my life, your life, all our lives, all our days.
(1) Free earth image, public domain planetary science CC0 photo. More: View public domain image source here
(2) George MacDonald, Weighed and Wanting (D.Lothrop:1882)
Into the heart of things 