Christmas Eve Meditation

An outline is a dry and uninteresting bit of information. It contains the essentials and nothing more. But sometimes that is how we hear God's message at Christmas. We feel as if we understand the essentials of the Christmas message, but we never really live in them. Where is peace? Where is hope? Where is joy? Where is love? Where is Christ?

The present happy realities of the season are toys, ugly Christmas sweaters, and new slippers for cold winter feet. The present unhappy realities of the season are terrorism, hunger, suspicion and fear. We light the candles, but we don’t live in their light. We live in the blindness of bright electric bulbs, strings of colored tree lights and blinking neon shopping signs.

Yet, the candle burns and the neon has not been able to overpower it. It is there, it just isn’t easy to see with all the shiny distractions and the hyperactive music that rocks us around the Christmas tree.

But here, tonight, we take the time to be still, to look purposefully for the breaking in of something unexpected, a flicker of light, a small whiff of a reality that is perfumed with kindness. It is an odor that lingers in the air, a glimmer of fire that flares up and then, without the aid of an electric cord, burns steadily. It gives us a shiver of anticipation, a sliver of sharp pain, a split second of surprise. We catch our breath. And then we are distracted by something else.

Can we live in the dim and dancing light of a candle when everything around us is filled with the blinding, stark light of neon? Maybe, but I think we have to start small. We have to notice the smallest of evidence for the light we believe surrounds us, unseen. We have to give that evidence a name. We have to focus our attention on the candle that burns, the voice that cries, the angel song that sounds like a distant battle cry, but ushers in peace instead of war, a peace that is a byproduct of God’s reality. It is a peace that comes from a place we have neither been to nor seen, but hope in and move toward. We do have to be quiet for a while in order to hear it. We do have to close your eyes now and then to see it. We do have to quit grabbing at things to touch it. We do have to stop being afraid to feel it. We do have to stop filling our mouths with empty sweetness in order to taste it. Bitter at first and then … indescribable richness.

Listen! Touch! See! Taste!