Look, your God is coming: stories of the Christmas welcome

By Donna Sinclair

Let the wilderness and the dry lands exult let the wasteland rejoice and bloom let it bring forth flowers like the jonquil, let it rejoice and sing for joy.

Strengthen all weary hands, steady all trembling knees and say to all faint hearts, “Courage! Do not be afraid. Look, Your God is coming…” – Isaiah 35:1-2, 3, 4a (Jerusalem Bible)

We all know the story. Three kings journey to a stable to say welcome, welcome, to the tiny God.

That’s what Christmas is, a welcome. But how do we, in our post-modern, some say post-Christian, universe, welcome the child who will redeem us? In this last month of the last century of the second millennium after the child was born, how do we become welcoming people, a welcoming church?

It’s hard. It doesn’t come naturally. If we go by the story of the kings, it means seeking out the weakest and most vulnerable.

It means letting go of our expectations and prejudices about where the Christ will be found. He is born in a place rife with paradox and ambiguity – those favorite terms of a post-modern world – golden crowns and fresh straw; frankincense, myrrh and the smell of poverty. Nothing is quite as it seems. The holy child is difficult to recognize.

And it means, if we take the kings seriously, patience, silence, waiting. A long journey in which we will be changed, in which at last we will learn to see clearly. This knowledge will snap away too quickly, of course – but just for one light-filled moment in the stable, we will understand ourselves to be both welcomed and the welcomers. We will know how to greet the Christ.

Some pictures, then, of blinding moments of welcome.

It was Christmas Eve service, the early one. Traditionally, most of the children arrive already in their pyjamas; it’s noisy and crowded and vibrating with excitement.

But it was time for communion, and a moment of stillness had fallen over the sanctuary. Then a small figure darted down the aisle to the table that was laden with tiny wine glasses and loaves of bread. “Look,” she shouted up at the minister, whose arms were already raised high, holding up the chalice. “Look at my ring,” she ordered, in perfect trust that she was God’s beloved child, and always, at any moment, welcome at God’s table.

The minister lowered the cup and carefully examined the outstretched hand, sporting its bright circle of neon-pink plastic. It was indeed a magnificent ring, no wonder she was happy. The satisfied four-year-old raced back up the aisle to her parents (whose clutch was a little more determined after that)

and the chalice was raised again, in a hush that seemed deeper and richer than before.

A wonderful service, said one member of the congregation later, as she made her way out to a star-lit evening. “A surprising service. I just wasn’t ready, hadn’t known, that Jesus would come tonight as a little girl.”

Such paradox. The holiest of moments; the humblest of ornaments. The majesty of an ancient liturgy; the child.

But paradox is the essence of Christmas. Kathleen Norris, in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton Mifflin) explains how Saint Benedict himself admonished his monks to “receive all guests as Christ.” That kind of endless hospitality – ask any woman in the midst of Christmas preparations – can be a burden. In fact, Norris tells a story from a Russian monastery in which an older monk tells a younger one that he has “finally learned to accept people as they are. Whatever they are in the world, a prostitute, a prime minister, it is all the same to me. But sometimes I see a stranger coming up the road, and I say ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?'”

In T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, one of the three wise men mutters in the same way about the contradiction of Christmas: “Were we led all that way for Birth or Death . . . this Birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” He would do it again, the magus continues; but he knows he is “no longer at ease,” can no longer be at home in his old life, having recognized and welcomed the Christ.

So it is for all of us. We glimpse the way things should be – and then we swing between the two poles of exhaustion and affection, excess and love, so that we scarcely know what calls us most clearly. Is it the maxed-out credit cards? Or the humble, impoverished, redeeming child? The dazed shepherds, confused and suspicious, or the confident, shining angels? The rush and exhaustion of shopping and wrapping and parties and glitter? Or the simple candle fire, and song, Silent Night. Holy Night.

God is met, then, on a path between extremes. Buzzing excitement, or peace. Awe and glory, or the tenderness of everyday. A small child leads us, and welcome is found on that path.

Another Christmas. Some years before this confident child raced through a crowded church, a faithful, grown-up member of an Ottawa congregation found herself similarly confronted by a trusting guest.

This woman had been confined permanently to her bed by rheumatoid arthritis. Her friends stuck with her. And her cousin was a friend of Pierre Trudeau, then Prime Minister of Canada.

One evening the Prime Minister arrived, with her cousin, at the door of the bungalow she shared with her parents. His arms were full of gifts: champagne and caviar and maple syrup. They visited in the room where she spent her days. For hours, they talked politics – it was October 1981 and Trudeau was occupied with patriating the Constitution – and family. His birthday was coming, she remembers, and his boys were full of plans. Christmas, the birthday of two of the children, was not far away.

After a while he declared that he hadn’t had supper, and described a French-Canadian dish he liked. A little later, her father reported that “your mother is in the kitchen with Pierre Trudeau poaching eggs in maple syrup.”

Trudeau served her eggs and English muffins, first wondering if she would like him to cut it up for her. He tried to figure out a way she could attend an official reception. It was impossible, she could sit up for only an hour each day. But they toasted her parents’ coming anniversary, and it was, she says, “wonderful.”

This also is welcome; it is to be empty of stereotypes or fear about people who cannot walk, or people who lead a nation. Empty – as the children come home or the guests arrive – empty of prejudging, predeciding the way people should act or think. Such actions clutter the emotions; and embracing the Christchild requires an open space in our hearts.

Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen writes that hospitality – welcome – requires both poverty of mind and poverty of heart. “Someone who is filled with ideas, concepts and opinions cannot be a good host,” he says in Reaching Out, The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (Doubleday). “There is no inner space to listen, no openness to discover the gift of the other. Poverty of mind as a spiritual attitude is the growing willingness to recognize the incomprehensibility of the mystery of life.”

A mystery that a lovely young woman should be struck down with this terrible disease. Incomprehensible, that she should spend a life in the bustle of the nation’s capital, bed-ridden.

But when we live willingly with mystery – however it appears in our lives – we can be both host and guest. We can receive the stranger who turns out to be more than we had thought, barging into our lives to serve us.

The powerful are brought down from their thrones, said Mary. But what if they descend willingly? Perhaps it is wise to be ready for the unexpected – when the too-rushed clerk in the store stops and smiles, when the lonely one interrupts our lives with an invitation for coffee.

Welcome is housewife-like, perhaps; sweeping away the litter of piled-up expectations until there is room for the holy child.

To be at a birth is holy, says Anne Smith, who has attended many. “All time stands still, nothing else matters.” Smith is a nurse and a midwife’s assistant in North Bay, Ont., and she loves to “feel that baby in my hands, to have it come into itself as a new being.”

But the waiting beforehand is also “part of the holiness.” In a room where a child is being born, she says, “there is often silence.The midwife and I will just sit there, we give encouraging words to the mother, we look at each other. It is a holy silence, just that waiting for transformation.”

So the kings must have felt, on their long journey. Surely they ran out of words, plodding along in the knowledge that they were part of a story much larger than themselves, one far beyond their ability to influence or change.

Only the power of the contractions will make the birth happen, says Smith. “It is beyond our control.” Sometimes a woman may call out to God, even if she has not done that for years, because “she is needing something beyond herself to bring the birth to happen.”

That, too is part of welcoming the child. Seeking, not to be the boss, not to be in control, but simply to be present at the transformation, fetus to baby, woman to mother.

Annie Dillard writes about birth in For the Time Being (Viking), the nurse showing the parents how to wrap the infant: “‘. . . and then you wrap the last corner tight around the whole works,’ the nurse says. As she finishes binding him into his proper Thermos shape, the baby closes his mouth, opens his eyes, and peers around like a sibyl. He looks into our faces. When he meets our eyes in turn, his father and I each say ‘Hi,’ involuntarily.”

Perhaps at Christmas, to be full of welcome, we need to be ready to say “hi” to the small God who appears in many forms. The third king, tripping up the aisle in the pageant. The bus driver, cranky with the snow, who nevertheless responds to a wave from a departing passenger.

We take these miracles for granted. Babies who open their eyes. Children who mysteriously love us, even when we are frantic. Choir members who sing their way through the Christmas story as eager as if it was all new, today.

Such wonders need to be greeted with quiet attention.

That, too, is part of welcome. To be not too proud to take Christmas as it comes, in its own good time, as dangerous and uncontrolled and long-awaited as a child’s leaving the womb.

We will always be welcoming the Christ. That’s what the monks tell us. When the visitor appears, far-off down the road, it is the Christ, even though we cannot see his face. And he will draw us into life and holiness, as surely as people in a Christmas Eve church are drawn into holiness by a small child sporting a plastic ring.

We will entertain him, hardly aware; he will be disguised as a politician or a bus driver, a doctor or a teacher. Or a midwife or an infant.

Because surely this is the silence of the birthing room, this last month of the last year of this century, as our churches wonder who and what they are and the world identifies itself as post-Christian. “The whole spiritual birth parallel is coming so alive for me,” says Smith. “God gives us all a passion for something, but sometimes it gets lost in life and we have to find it again and nurture it. And then life goes on.”

Surely passionate courage will be born to us, even so late in this strange century. We will welcome again the baby God who, in Isaiah’s words, will strengthen our weary hands and stop the trembling of our knees. And we will, as Isaiah predicts, join those who… come to Zion shouting for joy, everlasting joy on their faces; joy and gladness will go with them and sorrow and lament be ended. – Isaiah 35: 10b