Out in the Open: A Christmas Reflection

We forget what an almost insanely daring, revealing revelation the Divine babe in the manger is. We forget that it is not just an event, however pivotal to our salvation, but a sacrament: one no less, in a sense, than Baptism or Holy Communion, because it is at once the ground and soil and fount of both. In other words, the Christ-child is not a wall behind which God hides before coming out into the open, but rather a point of entry - even for us! - into the Heart of His Divine Life. Which is to say, not a disguise but an unveiling; not a pretense, but a portal; not a transient phase or passage - or scaffolding to be discarded - but rather a window, into the inmost room, the inmost self, if you will, of the God who does not merely know or command or judge, but creates, and so loves us. And how better to love us most intimately, and most knowingly, than Himself to become created?

Which is, let's admit, hardly the way that perhaps most of us tend to look at God's human infancy. Indeed, the very notion - of that same infancy as integral to our understanding of who God is - may be especially hard to swallow nowadays. But in particular, I think, in a hypersophisticated Age like ours, in which the acme of human progress - or even perfection? - is measured by values and ideals rather different from those embodied in our Lord's Nativity. Measured, in short, not by some mysterious childlikeness of God, but by the increasingly smart, "cool", awesome and wholly rational (if not "big and bad") unchildlikeness of Man. 

But might it be, I wonder, hardest of all to digest in today's Neojeffersonian, messianic, "exceptionalist" America? A country in which nothing seems less important than our human origins, than where - and Whom - we came from: in which the future is constantly being reinvented, the past perpetually overturned and made obsolete, and where Everything Is Possible. Everything except, perhaps, a childlike humility, and wonder. Because, after all, who needs those - especially if you are this limitless god-in-the-making, who is constantly leaving behind, forgetting, discarding your origins?

In fact (one might argue), if the whole point of our earthly human sojourn is to explore, test and transcend the limits of our own divinity, shouldn't we be having rather less and less need for either wonder or humility? I mean, really: if we humans can't become the sort of gods who are surprised and awed by nothing - who can literally know and do it all (at least eventually?) - what on earth are we here for? And why on earth were we made in His image?

Indeed I wonder if not a few of us - mostly by default - think of God, too, as a creator rather like that. In short, as a maker rather like us. Or like what we would be, if only we had or could acquire the awesome power to create, and command, and destroy, as He does. We may find ourselves instinctively imagining God as one who, so far from creating everything from nothing, actually Himself came up from nothing. And who gradually, by working His way up, through much ambition, toil and travail, finally forged within Himself the high-handed power, the insensitivity, the callousness and ruthlessness not only to create, but more importantly to command and control - and thus terrorize? - all things. So that for, say, you or me to be most like Him would be to identify with precisely that pride, confidence, arrogance, ferocity, etc, by which He has succeeded in wrestling all things into the most abject submission. 

But suppose God is nothing like that. Suppose that the way to the Heart of God - yes, even the very heart of His power - is not to imitate that power by which He (supposedly) wrests, and wrenches, and bends and molds and sculpts all things from the outside, as it were. What if the one Way to know Him most intimately is to enter into, to trust, to feed upon, that Lowliness - that Sonship, if you will - by which He knows, loves and grows every created thing not externally, but from within its very self. Or as some have written, nearer to it than its own self. That same Sonship indeed which, precisely because of its littleness and lowliness, alone can enter the soul of, alone can guide, feed and nurse the proper growth of every creature, however lowly or "insignificant." But most essentially, and dependently, every human creature? Even to its utmost progress, and perfection?

And what if this is the very "trait" of God which, however hidden, draws us most finally and utterly to Him?

Anyhow, something tells me, if for once we could see our Maker for the sort of god He is, practically everything else would be different. Could we see Him in the full and rich distinctness of His Godhead, I more than suspect, we'd have all we could do to stop thinking about Him. If we could but see and know Him, in all that makes Him God with a difference - in all that reveals His divinity in its most proper and accurate contrast, say, to Almighty Us, and to the sort of gods and lords we're all too prone to become over our earthly spheres?* - we'd barely be able to take our eyes off Him. 

*And in particular the persecuting, harrowing effect our own human "deity" has on earth's other visible creatures.

And if we could know His deepest, yearningest power - in contrast to the barbarous noise, pride and frank ugliness of our own hollow might, and utterly conditional earthly dominion - if we could know the exquisite humility, tenderness and quiet of real power, of omnipotence and love wholly without conditions: if we could  but see that - why, I should think we'd find our God almost wholly irresistible.