What Are We Waiting For?

I write to you all on this Eve of anticipation as we look forward to tomorrow. For some, Christmas Day will be primarily one of deep faith, for others a day of warmth and family and feasting. Some will be part of a large, boisterous gathering. Some will wait quietly with a select few. Some will be alone.

I’m in a shadowy kind of mood this season. There is darkness in the world. After Winter Solstice we are supposedly heading toward more light. Yet it’s hard to feel that in my bones when so many are struggling.

Yesterday a frighteningly thin, grizzled older man sat at an intersection on a rickety lawn chair with a handmade sign on a piece of cardboard. “Homeless. Please help.” It was mountain-cold, cloudy, and with a slight wind rising. I was able to pull over and hop out, and he rose to meet me. I gave him a twenty dollar bill. He looked at me with pale, watery eyes, and smiled and said, “Thank you. You have a Merry Christmas.”

I said it back. I reached out and patted his arm. I got in my car and drove away. I felt the deep sting of it all the way home. I’m still feeling it. That money, and other modest donations of support I can make, are like water molecules in specks of mist falling on an ocean of need. There is desperation everywhere. There is suffering everywhere. There is grieving and pain and chasm-deep sorrow. Wars and rumors of wars. Division and strife and enmity even among and between our fellow citizens.

I’ve been open about my struggles with my Christian faith, with what I’ve been able to believe, to hold onto. I’ve jettisoned a lot of it, to be honest. The reasons are manifold and for another day.

But the thing that keeps me with one foot in? Believing in the possibility of Mary’s song of praise in Luke’s gospel, the Magnificat.

“My soul (life, breath, inner being) magnifies (enlarges, increases) the Lord.” What Mary goes on to describe is a complete reversal of fortune, a remaking of the world.

Luke 1:51b: ...he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
52 he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
    and exalted those of humble estate;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
    and the rich he has sent away empty.

She sings this song because in her very body she bears the one through whom this new order will come, a new order that is, I believe, consistent with the original dream God has for humankind and for all of creation. (See Genesis 1 & 2 and pretty much every Old Testament prophet ever.) What keeps me with one foot in is the possibility that Jesus is a doorway, a portal to this new way of ordering our world.

Listen, I don’t know much anymore. We live in confusing and alarming times. All I do know is, I want love to abound. That’s it. I fervently wish and hope that, more and more, the absolute fiercest kind of love would abound.

Because everywhere, pushing back against the darkness, there is also love. I have seen it, I have felt it. Sometimes I have even been it. You have, too. Hands and feet and hearts and minds, building and planting, feeding and clothing, comforting and consoling, protecting and protesting, speaking and advocating, helping and holding.

More of that, please. If I have a Christmas prayer, it is this: that whatever it was that was at work in Mary to imagine a different, more expansive, more just, more loving world order coming to fruition would also be at work in us. That with our words and actions we would magnify and enlarge and increase and, like Mary, deliver Ultimate Love into the world.

Christmas wishes to those who celebrate the day. Holiday greetings to those of other faiths, of no faith, of in-between faith. Reminder: nowhere is it written that we have to believe together to love together.