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Setting up the Christmas tree that’s been stored away for 12 months in the top of the wardrobe makes me think, where has the year gone?
I actually feel as if I’m back in July somewhere.
Putting up the decorations triggers memories of Christmas’ that were either tough or wonderful, and final relief comes when the Christmas lights work first pop.
Wrapping up the gifts and putting them under the tree with my favourite Christmas CD playing gives me the warm fuzzies.
Posting and receiving Christmas cards is a way of keeping up with the news of friends dotted around the world.
When I make my great, great grandmother’s Irish pastry recipe for my fruit mince pies, handed down through the generations, I find a certain family connection with those who have long gone and whom I never knew.
I thoroughly enjoy the end of year gatherings and Christmas functions once I’ve figured out what to wear along with my Christmas earrings.
Christmas offers a unique sense of friendship, enabling us to enquire about what others are doing for Christmas because no one wants to see another alone.
Wishing Merry Christmas is a prayer of blessings offered and received.
Yet, when these age-old traditions, sounds, memories, smells, songs, tastes, and customs are peeled back, the truth that God entered human history in the birth of Jesus 2,000 years ago stands before us.
Simple and uncomplicated this child is God. This invisible God becoming visible.
A personal God who knows each of us by name and remains with us forever in the spirit of Jesus to this very day.
Advent is about pausing to take all of this in.
At home, the nativity set is placed on the mantelpiece and the advent wreath on the dining room table, both reminders of the reason for the season.
I let Advent speak to my heart. What do I hear? What do you hear?
The joint pining with our Old Testament faith ancestors longing for the coming of Emmanual, perhaps? – and today’s great hope in Jesus coming again.
“A maiden is with child and will soon give birth to a son, whom she will call Emmanual” Isaiah prophesied in 7:14.
Conceived by the power of God’s Holy Spirit, Mary and Joseph didn’t need to have a gender reveal party.
Isaiah had let the cat out of the bag centenaries earlier!
No time to prepare baby’s bedroom either.
They had to get to Bethlehem’s smallish and obscure town to participate in the compulsory Roman census.
With zero accommodation, all came to pass when Mary gave birth to their first-born son named Jesus in a farm yard stable. Just getting her breastfeeding established, it was back on the donkey bound for Egypt to avoid their baby being killed by the narcissist Herod.
These young parents would have been very conscious that other parents would have blamed them for their own sons’ killings by Herod’s lynch men.
This would have wrenched their hearts at the huge cost of lives slaughtered to protect their boy.
It was a close shave for Jesus, but not come Good Friday.
This child – this saviour of the world who bought the message of Joy, would come to be crucified and rise, opening the way to life eternal in Heaven. Death didn’t have the final say. Christmas is mixed with joy and sorrow.
And it’s in this exact truth when we find our lives turned upside down in suffering and personal struggles, we discover deep within a certain joy, all because of this baby being born. This God-who-is-with-us is in the thick and thin of our lives.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says this in his book called Preparing for Christmas on the last page.
Incarnation is already Redemption.
The problem is solved.
Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days.
Not only is it “Always Advent,” but every day can now be Christmas because the one we thought we were just waiting for has come once and for all.
- Sue Seconi – The Catholic Parish of Whanganui – Te Parihi Katorika Ki Whanganui
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