On love’s birth at
Christmas
O Living Love, by
your birth we are able
Not only, like the
ox and ass of the stable,
To love with our
live wills, but love,
Knowing we love.
Space is the Whom
our loves are needed by,
Time is our choice
of How to love and Why.
--W.H. Auden
These lines from Auden’s Christmas
Oratorio are in that part of the work entitled “At the Manger.”
As the visitors gather before the child they come to recognize that
after experiencing this birth there can be no way back to an easy
ignorance where they can, like the ox and ass, love without knowing
they love. The Wise realize they cannot return after coming to an
awareness of love’s birth, but must go by “another road.” (Matthew
2:12) They have become aware of the “choice of How to love and
Why.”
There are few human beings who, when
having a baby placed in their arms, do not feel and do not have the
will to love, the instinctive response of life to life. This is
that love that Auden identifies with all living creatures, an
instinctive act of the will. But this is not the full meaning of
this birth. The birth is not about the instinct of love, but
rather the freedom of love. The freedom of love in coming to an
awareness of its own loving meets the responsibilities, the
difficulties and the dilemmas of love in the real world. God
comes in Christ to bring us into the freedom of love, and to a
knowledge that we are loved and give love.
The freedom of knowing we love is the
dilemma and the promise of the Christmas birth. The instinctive
and natural loves of mother and child, and of family and friends, are
neither questioned nor challenged by the Christ child. They are
affirmed as expressions of God’s love incarnate in human form.
The dilemma is not with these kinds of “natural love.” The
dilemma comes because this Divine birth brings an awareness that God’s
love is given in freedom to all. In the last lines Auden makes this
clear, “Space is the Whom our loves are needed by, Time is our choice
of How to love and Why.” Love is needed in all things, and we are
given time as the place of freely choosing “how to love and why.”
This is the dilemma: all things need
our love and require our compassion. And yet we are limited
mortals. We are aware of the limits of our love. Our
freedom that comes from that awareness also brings us to an awareness
that there is a need beyond our capacity. We must decide and make
choices. The Christmas story is about the wonder of love as given
in human form, and how that love is an Incarnation of the infinite love
of God. It is also about the freedom we are given to love, and
thereby the dilemmas we face in the decision. This all comes to
us in the wonder of the vulnerability of the child of God. This
Divine vulnerability brings us back to an awareness of our own
limitations. The dilemma comes as we make the decisions about the
“how and why” of love, faced with our own limits and needs.
It is not that we must forget the
wonder of the Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love of this Holy Birth. Nor
that we have become cynical about the wonder of the birth.
Rather, we are called to discover all this wonder incarnate in all the
dilemmas and difficulties of human life. The story of the birth
of Christ in both Matthew and Luke is remarkable precisely because it
is a birth in difficult and uncomfortable circumstances. It is a
story that claims that in the ordinary, in the difficult, in the
dilemmas, and in our human choices, through our freedom to love, God is
born. It is a message that calls us to the Divine grace of love
and to its responsibilities. Christ is born in the midst of all
the dilemmas of our lives. This Holy Birth is Wonder found in the
manger of the ordinary.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
On making room in a time of no room.....
“We live in the time of no room. Into
this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for
him at Thomas Merton
They are bitter sweet garlands of memory those Christmas days of my
youth. The sweetness comes in the wonder, never fully expressed
in the plethora of gifts of human care received and given. The
tree was all decked with bubble lights, garlands, tinsel, angels, red
and green glass balls, with that old battered crèche
beneath. Outside the house announced a certain celebration
within, blinking lights on the gutters and decking all 20 feet of the
living fir tree. The press of family, 60 or more souls, young and
old, cousins, aunts, uncles and the newly married into the clan,
arriving Christmas day to fill all corners of the old house.
There was human warmth that caused the windows to fog up and the heart
to feel that at least in these moments love was indeed incarnate, and
no harm could enter. And then the lingering farewells with the
left-over turkey stuffed into hamburger buns at midnight with cranberry
sauce and eaten as the closing communion to an evening of talk and
games and play. And yet, the bitterness mingled with this
sweetness, as marriages dissolved in silence and old resentments and
wounds were scratched and bled. We never reached that perfection
a family and a Christmas was advertised to be.
It is that old battered crèche, in its imperfection, that speaks
to the “no room” in our crowded and imperfect celebration. It is now
sitting on our mantle, and it holds for me the memory and hope together
with the forgetfulness and pain. It is not a masterpiece.
It is a rough hewn shed holding an even rougher hewn crib whose angels
have lost wings and whose Holy Figures are chipped and cracked.
My brothers used to say it was too old and battered to go beneath the
glimmering and sparkling of the tree. It is an image of
vulnerability, of the real human consequence of birth and time, and all
the difficulties of human life. And yet, there is the announcement in
it of a still point of Sacredness and wonder born into human form. How
do we greet this surprising birth of the Sacred? The memories of
a childhood Christmas and the battered scene of Wonder’s birth on the
mantle announce something beyond the glittering lights. The human
face of Holy Love, comes uninvited yet incarnate as a wonder born even
in the difficulties and fears of a crowded, rushed and even demented
world such as ours. Obscured by all the hype of the glittering
tree is the question of the old crèche below: now the Holy Child
is born, how shall we make room in the Inn of our battered hearts and
world?
Blessings at Wonder’s Birth;
May you find the wonder of the Holy
Child be born this Christmas and throughout all the ordinary days of
your life.
In
Wonder’s Birth, Dr. Dan.
