On Christmas morning there wasn't much beach left to walk on. The tide was fully in, and a walk along the shoreline was a game of tag with the waves as they broke on the last two or three metres of sand. So a linear stroll became a meandering wander, avoiding wet feet but wanting to be near the gathered energy and final sprint of each wave. The result was not so much a walk on the beach, as a dance with waves, with the occasional broken rhythm, and these reflecting the inner ebb and flow, and broken rhythms of my own spirit.
On Christmas morning, walking the shoreline watchfully at full tide, I became aware of an inner coalescence of deep and self-defining emotional responses. That sentence needs some explanation. The first part is theological conviction; the second is personal history; and the third part is when these two perspectives merge in a deep acceptance of what faith in God entails when great loss and great joy reside in the same heart.
1. Christmas day is the high holiday of Christian faith, its priority over Good Friday, Easter morning and Pentecost being both liturgical and theological. Advent begins the liturgical year and comes prior to everything else; it is also true that the incarnation is the theological prerequisite of the ministry, passion and resurrection of Jesus and is the precondition of making any sense at all of the Christian story. The incarnation, the voluntary vulnerability of God in Christ is the high tide of Divine Love at its most creative, purposeful and self-expending. The birth of Jesus is the decisive initiative of God in revealing, demonstrating, and evidencing once and for all his purpose of reconciliation. Every Advent the Christian soul is confronted with the scandal of Bethlehem, and the sheer embarrassment of that manger. Three times Luke mentions it; but not without spelling out the shocking paradox: "born to you..a Saviour, Messiah, Lord...and this sign...wrapped in cloths, lying in a manger." The one whose three names out rank Caesar's claims to deity and lordship and world authority, is a baby in a cow feeding trough.
2. Advent this year has had a deeper than usual significance for me. The celebration of the birth of the Christ child inexorably reminds every parent of the birth and the gift of their own children. Exactly a year ago on Christmas Eve, our daughter Aileen died, and the rhythms of our family life were irreparably broken. Life of course goes on, but no metaphor is near adequate to explain or describe what that means. A jigsaw that has lost pieces and is now essentially incomplete; a journey that seemed to have a set destination now diverted into strange and even frightening landscapes of life experiences; a piece of rare china falls and is broken, and however skilfully repaired, will never again ring with the clear sound of intended wholeness. Something beautiful, unique and irreplaceable is lost beyond recall, and that loss is felt in the deepest fundaments of the human heart where love, hope, joy, fulfilment and our own ultimate identity are formed.
3. So walking by the sea on Christmas morning, dodging the more determined incoming waves, my heart was already in tune with the deepest chords of my faith; "for unto us a child is born...God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself...glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace." But there were broken rhythms too, because my heart was also ebbing and flowing with memories of love and laughter, loss and longing. In contrast to the joy of the angels, the nosy curiosity of the shepherds, the adoration of the Magi, there was the now familiar ache of love seeking its rightful owner, Aileen. There is in the Christmas story, at least for this bereaved parent, something of the pierced heart of Mary and, God knows, a sense that on this day of all days, God comes close to those who grieve for their child.
It took the whole day for all of this to settle into words that might make some sense. Not complete sense, but a way of holding in one heart the joy of the birth of the Christ child, and the sorrow of a parent's greatest grief. An understanding glimpsed, of how the waves of joy and sorrow, the ebb and flow of faith, the rhythms of life, are to be lived as faithfully and fruitfully as our weakness and strength allows. And in all of this, the growing acceptance that brokenness and wholeness, risk and trust, grief and gladness, fear and faith, despair and hope - these are the rhythms of life, the low and high tides of a life mysteriously gifted, and graced by the God who came amongst us in the Christ child, knowing that self-surrender would break His heart.
(The photo immediately above was taken some years ago, showing the storm-exposed remnants of old breakwaters on Aberdeen beach, viewed from a quite precise angle).
Recent Comments