At least for some of us,
Christmas disappoints.
We hope to receive a gift that we will love
but did not know we even wanted.
We hope ourselves to give gifts
that will delight the ones we love the most.
We hope to sing songs that will lift our hearts
above the sorrows that shadow every life
not just for a moment, but forever.
We hope to prepare a meal that will fill
not just our bellies with food
but our hearts with joy.
But as the morning passes
and turns into day and then into evening,
we might find our shining hopes turn bitter,
like the aftertaste of too many sweets.
Sylvia Plath, in The Bell Jar,
her memoir-disguised-as-a-novel,
wrote, “I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed,
the way I always do the day after Christmas,
as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles
and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents
and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey
and the carols at the piano promised
never came to pass.”
Christmas disappoints
as hopes grown great in anticipation
are gradually deflated with the passing of the day.
Christmas disappoints.
We hope to receive a gift that we will love
but did not know we even wanted.
We hope ourselves to give gifts
that will delight the ones we love the most.
We hope to sing songs that will lift our hearts
above the sorrows that shadow every life
not just for a moment, but forever.
We hope to prepare a meal that will fill
not just our bellies with food
but our hearts with joy.
But as the morning passes
and turns into day and then into evening,
we might find our shining hopes turn bitter,
like the aftertaste of too many sweets.
Sylvia Plath, in The Bell Jar,
her memoir-disguised-as-a-novel,
wrote, “I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed,
the way I always do the day after Christmas,
as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles
and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents
and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey
and the carols at the piano promised
never came to pass.”
Christmas disappoints
as hopes grown great in anticipation
are gradually deflated with the passing of the day.
Were the shepherds disappointed in Christmas?
After the angelic array and the celestial songs
and the proclamation of good tidings of great joy
and the promise of peace to God’s people,
were they disappointed when they found
a quite ordinary looking infant
and his ordinary and no doubt exhausted parents
who probably were not at that moment
terribly excited to receive guests,
especially not a bunch of scruffy shepherds.
Did they look at the humble surroundings
in which their supposed savior was found
and wonder how this could possibly be
the fulfillment of their hopes—
hopes that had grown in anticipation
not just for hours or days or weeks
but through centuries in which
their people had longed
for a kingdom of God?
Did the shepherds leave there deflated,
their hopes disappointed
by the ordinariness of it all,
regretting that they had ever
hoped in the first place?
But Luke tells us that
“the shepherds returned,
glorifying and praising God
for all they had heard and seen.”
Perhaps the shepherds were graced
with sight to see beyond the ordinary.
Perhaps they could see already here,
in this tiny infant in the manger,
the light that had come into the world,
the light that enlightens all people,
the light that the darkness could not overcome.
The seventeenth-century poet Richard Crashaw,
imagined the shepherds speaking to the child:
We saw thee in thy balmy nest,Young dawn of our eternal day!We saw thine eyes break from their eastAnd chase the trembling shades away.We saw thee, and we bless’d the sight,We saw thee by thine own sweet light.
Christmas is not simply
our feeble human endeavor
to find a bit of hope
amid the dark days of winter’s gloom;
it is not simply our desperate attempt
at convincing ourselves
that people are not so bad after all,
that we are not so bad after all.
It is not simply pine boughs and candles
and presents and birch-log fires
and the Christmas turkey and carols.
If that were all it was,
then, yes, we should be disappointed.
But if we can see the newborn Jesus
by his own sweet light,
the light that he sheds abroad in our hearts
to chase the trembling shades away,
then Christmas will not disappoint.
our feeble human endeavor
to find a bit of hope
amid the dark days of winter’s gloom;
it is not simply our desperate attempt
at convincing ourselves
that people are not so bad after all,
that we are not so bad after all.
It is not simply pine boughs and candles
and presents and birch-log fires
and the Christmas turkey and carols.
If that were all it was,
then, yes, we should be disappointed.
But if we can see the newborn Jesus
by his own sweet light,
the light that he sheds abroad in our hearts
to chase the trembling shades away,
then Christmas will not disappoint.
Sylvia Plath, after recounting
her disappointment in Christmas,
adds wistfully,
“At Christmas I almost wished
I was a Catholic.”
It is as if she recognizes
that the only way
that Christmas will not disappoint
is if we find in it the mystery of faith
that we proclaim each week:
that God from God and light from light
has come down from heaven
and taken flesh
for us and for our salvation.
Christmas will not disappoint
only if we can see in it
what the shepherds saw:
the young dawn of our eternal day.
Christmas will not disappoint
only if Christ gives to us, here and now,
the unanticipated gift of eternal life;
if he fills our hearts with angelic song
that is endlessly delightful,
if he spreads for us the feast of his love
that is our foretaste of the heavenly banquet.
her disappointment in Christmas,
adds wistfully,
“At Christmas I almost wished
I was a Catholic.”
It is as if she recognizes
that the only way
that Christmas will not disappoint
is if we find in it the mystery of faith
that we proclaim each week:
that God from God and light from light
has come down from heaven
and taken flesh
for us and for our salvation.
Christmas will not disappoint
only if we can see in it
what the shepherds saw:
the young dawn of our eternal day.
Christmas will not disappoint
only if Christ gives to us, here and now,
the unanticipated gift of eternal life;
if he fills our hearts with angelic song
that is endlessly delightful,
if he spreads for us the feast of his love
that is our foretaste of the heavenly banquet.
Christmas does not disappoint
because it is the great act of God in Christ,
making himself what we are
so that we might be what he is—
beloved children of God,
and heirs in hope of eternal life,
“not because of any
righteous deeds we had done
but because of his mercy.”
So let us pray
on this Christmas morning
that God, who is merciful,
might show us Christ
in his own sweet light,
chasing all shades
of disappointment
from our hearts,
and revealing
his mercy in us all.
because it is the great act of God in Christ,
making himself what we are
so that we might be what he is—
beloved children of God,
and heirs in hope of eternal life,
“not because of any
righteous deeds we had done
but because of his mercy.”
So let us pray
on this Christmas morning
that God, who is merciful,
might show us Christ
in his own sweet light,
chasing all shades
of disappointment
from our hearts,
and revealing
his mercy in us all.
