This holiday, I am asking Santa for a new vacuum. I want the most powerful one there is. I want one that not only cleans the open spaces but also seeks out the nooks and crannies where things hide. I want one that can eradicate the land mines within my heart of unchecked expectations, rampant selfishness, and effortful conformity to the illusion of the perfect holiday.
For the Pinterest holiday home and Hallmark movie scene are all illusions. We may intellectually agree this to be true, but our hearts love it enough to cling to its possibility of being reachable this year.
Like the nativity that emerges every year with its key players, we set our own scenes with the holiday key players– stress, envy, shame, and disappointment. They may not have stockings with their embroidered names but they are the tried and true figures in our modern Christmas scene. Our stress and frantic hurriedness are Christmas traditions.
The season begins with great intention. The memories of the season make us smile and cause us to count the days. We pull out the pictures from the past and we let the tapes roll through our imagination. Traditions “promise” the continuity of experience. We already imagine the family gathered around the Thanksgiving table with pumpkin pie as the meal’s reward, the gifts wrapped carefully underneath the tree, and the faces lit by candles on Christmas Eve as “Silent Night” wafts to the heavens.
Traditions are beautiful gifts. But they are slippery things. Just as mysteriously as the stories of reindeer, jolly men, and tiny elves, the traditions transform like magic from gifts we receive to idols we cement in gold. They become not enacted rituals but unreachable expectations.
The child spills the milk all over the table and yells “Yuck!” when she catches sight of great grandmother’s cream corn. The mere sight of the big empty space beneath the tree incites stress within your bones. Social media measures your preparedness and sends “not enough” coursing through your veins. Illness and tragedy catch one by surprise when they do not skip the month of December.
This season, I pray that our rituals of stress, envy, shame, and disappointment are the places where God shows up in the darkest nights and hints of a whole new joy that exceeds anything beyond our control or creation. I pray that God is who we believe God to be – not just “I am what I am,” but, “I will be who I will be.” I pray that new life is born within my own whatever will be.
If it is a time of great joy, may my feet be light and my laughter be heard.
If it is a time of great sorrow, may my hands be still and my tears be full.
If it is a time of great fear, may my eyes be open and my hope be uninterrupted.
Whatever it will be, it will not be as I imagined. It will, instead, be the place where I cry out for a God for whom the world still yearns and upon which my redemption still depends. It will be the birthplace of God’s greatest new adventure – living Spirit within dying flesh that saves the world in ways that exceed our expectations.