Loading...There seems to be a great deal about God that can be known.
Creator God made and makes all life, so I can look around at creation itself, all the people, animals, trees, and rivers, and see the finger prints of God all over the place. Christians believe that God is love, and so when you love me and I love you we are loving each other by and with and through God who is love. God loves through us in some felt ways. Hug your spouse, child, godchild, grandchild, or neighbor. You can feel that love, right? The bible is full of stories about God that I know. I can feel the stories in my bones and in my blood. There is great deal that we can know about God.
Likewise there is an enormous amount that we don't know about God. God is elusive, inscrutable, unseen, untouchable, mysterious. God is like the wind; God is deeper than the ocean; God is infinite being. The love and Grace and wind of God can whoosh into life unseen and leave suddenly in the same unseen stroke. God is untraceable and un-containable. The joy of God can leap like lightening into your life and disappear into mist just as quick. Confounding. How do we learn about the inscrutable Grace of God which comes from a source unseen? A number of ways no doubt. As children many of us began to learn about gifts of love coming from a source unseen through the mythology which surrounds Santa Claus.
My five year old is "all in" on Santa Claus. She thinks he is great. She also thinks he is a big mystery. He comes from a place unseen, delivers jolliness, joy, and love and presents and retreats back into the source unseen. Now, one day soon she will grow out of believing in Santa Claus and that will be natural, good and right, but for now she's learning a great spiritual lesson in age appropriate terms: joy and love can come naturally into our lives from a source unseen - God - and patience, anticipation, and good behavior help us enjoy the mysterious gifts of Christmas love and joy ever more deeply. Now don't misunderstand we can go too far with Santa Claus and we often do, but if we keep it simple then he's a great character to begin to teach our little ones about love and grace emerging from a source unseen - the mystery of Christmas, frankly the very mystery of God. A little child will struggle mightily with an abstract concept about an unseen trinitarian God, so we localize the abstract in a character and in actual gifts to help them begin to imagine the generous, loving, and merciful character God. That is what so many of our bible stories do, and that is what, at his best, Santa does, too.
My family took a Christmas train ride last week. It was a joy. Our five-year old was ecstatic. It was a ride on the North Pole Unlimited, and the promise was that Santa and Mrs. Claus would get on the train when we got the North Pole. We went through magic tunnel and arrived safe and sound at the North Pole and sure enough Santa and Mrs. Claus came on board to visit. The five-year old was "all in." I, of course, am too old and encumbered with adulthood to be all in, but fortunately I recognized in her a spiritual lesson. Do you remember the word Kenosis that we've been talking about lately? Kenosis refers to an emptiness that makes one a receptor site for the Grace of God. Kenosis is a practice of self-emptying or self-forgetting in order to make myself empty for God. Grace loves empty space. Well, sometimes a person is organically or naturally empty. Young children often are. The five-year old is empty or impoverished of all the life experiences that I have, so she believes in Santa Claus and is thus a little living receiver station for the joy of the visit. Mother Mary was organically empty - she called herself lowly or humble - so she could easily and naturally receive the impregnating love of God in Jesus Christ. Now, here's the trick - it's not our hope to go back to childhood innocence or ignorance. That is unnatural and unhealthy regression. Our work is to let the child's innocence and emptiness be an icon which mirrors back to us our own call to kenosis - self-emptying. What can I put down, let go of, so that I will have empty space inside of me where Christmas grace might flow? How can the organic emptiness, ignorance, and innocence of the child remind me to work on emptying myself out?
Some of us simply need to be more humble. We need to be emptied of our pride. When we got to the North Pole the five year old, Mary, looked out the window at all the "elves" packing presents on the depot loading dock. She waved at them as they tossed presents back and forth. Our on board tour guide said, "Now children look very close at the presents that the elves are carrying and see if you can see your name on one of them." All the children pressed their faces into the glass windows to look. As you know little children will often speak verbal asides to themselves out loud. Our Mary said out loud to herself, "Yeah, I don't think there is one for me....I haven't been all that good."
What honesty! What humility! What self-awareness! If half the adults I know would be that honest, humble, and self-aware the world would be a different place. And yes her line is cute and clever and funny, and yes, "kids say the darndest things" and more...it invites me to ask this question, Where in my life do I need to be more honest and self-aware? And isn't this a great Christmas view of the mercy of God. None of us has been all that good. Be honest. And yet God is merciful. The pile of coal is a ruse and lie. All get gifts of love and joy, presents from a source unseen, even little kids (of all ages) who haven't been that good. Merry Christmas!
