Lo How a Rose Ere Blooming.....

Fear. When we think of Christmas it isnt something that really comes to mind, is it? Yet, as we have been doing our Advent devotions, listening to Christmas music, and meditating on the true meaning of Christmas, it is plain to see how the real Christmas--the first and most special Christmas--was one completely predicated on fear. Absolute, unabashed fear. Consider Mary, who was told by an angel that she would conceive a baby who would become the savior of all nations. How was she to explain this to her family and friends, who later would shun her? Consider Joseph, who was betrothed to Mary (back then, people were "married" as soon as they got engaged...but they could not have sex for a year), and later found out, when Mary returned from a three month visit with her cousin Elizabeth, that his wife to be was pregnant with someone other than his baby. How he must have felt--how he must have wrestled with what to do, how people would react, and what his future life would be like. Joseph often gets overlooked, in fact--even when he does take responsibility for the baby Jesus, he has to know in the back of his mind that this baby will not--nor will ever be--his own. As a father of two, I can only imagine the loneliness and unsureness this must have brought him.

Fear. We just dont think of it at Christmas time--we go out, we buy presents, we drink egg nog, and we eat ham. We dont usually fear things at Christmas; in fact, the holiday is more or less based on peace and joy and love and forgiveness. It is based on a 'returning' to the things that matter in life. Isnt it? A returning to family, a returning to love, a returning to unresolved issues that are later rectified: These are the precepts on which Hollywood Christmases are based. Which is why it is so appropriate, in fact, that the original Christmas, the one stoked in fear and unknowingness, is latently a story about returning. Joseph needed to take his wife and her unborn son back to Bethlehem, to the place of his own birth, to satisfy the census that Caesar wanted to take on his subjects. A journey of a hundred miles--from Nazereth to Bethlehem--made up the first Christmas journey to return home; a journey made by so many of us, either physically, mentally, or emotionally each and every year. To what do we return when the weather turns cold and the wind blows and the days become short and we find ourselves seeped in thought and meditation about where we are and what we have become and where we want to go? To whom do we want to return? Who has left us and who has abandoned us? We could never possibly fathom the abandonment and the fear and the unknowingness that Mary and Joseph must have felt--but we can come close.

For all too many people I know--and sometimes myself--Christmas is about that journey home to satisfy the needs of someone else. Joseph didnt want to travel one hundred miles to Bethlehem--who would? A pregnant wife? A feeble donkey? Thieves? It doesnt sound all that appealing, does it? But he did it. But that is the way of a journey home, no? There are the unresolved emotions and reactions and things left undone. But he had to do it, simply because the emperor wanted it. But, as the author Thomas Wolfe once wrote, "can we ever really go home again?"

And, for all too many people I know--and sometimes myself--Christmas is a time of fear; a holiday so rooted in joy and good tidings somehow innately brings out all of our own iniquities and shortcomings and lackings--we strive to make it good and we push to make it worthy and we dream of a time without fear or inadequacies or questions about our own motivations or wills. And this is sad. For so many reasons. Why is our first impulse fear? Even the shepherds, when seeing the star over Bethlehem that first Christmas, were "so afraid." So what are we to do? Perhaps we need to look toward the song--the beautiful song--"Lo How a Rose 'Ere Blooming"--and just enjoy the moments life brings and think of the rose--the beautiful, mysterious, and complicated rose, with all its own shortcomings, shrouded in thorns and sharp stems, and how, each spring, it finds the courage to bloom, in all its resplendent beauty, and awe the world. Just a little bit more than it had been awed before.