Bah, Humbug

Where Is The Joy?

I'm not officially bah, humbugging, but I have ended up a little lost on the Christmas Spirit spectrum this year (sorry, Santa).

Maybe it's because I'm not as aligned activity-wise with the traditional activities that used to both excite and comfort me about the season (no Christmas Tree, for example, except for what has become my outside favorite, see below).  Maybe it's because of the overwhelming residual fatigue from this last year (beginning last Christmas) and the pervasive emotional out-of-breathness we have felt ever-since.  At the very least, I hope it's not overall cynicism.

And, maybe, it’s not just me. Ever noticed that, from the increasing commercialization of the whole holiday season, you rarely find real joy? Sometimes you still find pockets of happiness, perhaps from the nostalgia, sentiment, and even occasional connection with people (although, most of the time, people describe the season more in terms of stress than anything else).  But, where is the collective joy these days?

Even if it tries to sell meaning, there is so little of it in commercialization because its content is largely consumable, not to mention vacuous — commercialization has no real soul.  And, for me, this year things have really started to sound pretty tinny.

It seems to me that, like many things related to God, everyone must come to identify whether or not they believe that Christmas is basically a human construct.  Most certainly an awful lot of it is (not that that, in and of itself, makes it automatically bad).  But, so are most cultural things anyway.  

But, if at its core Christmas is not (exclusively a human construct), that changes everything.  The incarnation of God is as profound as it has ever been.  Commercialization hardly (sorry, pun-intended) holds a candle to the depth of this significance.  Perhaps even greater, at least on the cosmic scale, is that even the inevitability of death in the human realm does have the final word (but, that is for another holiday in the Spring).  The divine choice to submit to enfleshment, in solidarity with us as human-beings, is not only astounding by most measures, but also engrossing to consider.  God with us.

Wasn't God already (with us), though?  Yes, I think creation itself reflects that in multitudinous ways.  But, God always takes it further, to leave no room for doubt about both God's intentions and love (despite all the continuous ways we find to corrupt things).

God joins (even now) our misery, even as God continues to pulls us forward.  

I heard a sermon recently about how God chose to start this version of incarnation — through the womb of the female body.  Just think about that; how ridiculous it seems (especially in terms of typical human strategy).  But, the dignity it represents about how God views us is...well, I can't even find an adequate word.  God trusts a woman to bring the full power of the universe to life on earth, to nourish it, to let it form and grow...unable, in the end, to be stopped.  Amazing is such an inadequate description of the pure joy that reality evokes from our consciousness, at the very least from mine.

And, so, despite all the surrounding circumstantial swirl, a reality can once again emerge for me this season in the form of a question — what after all am I putting my trust in?  Because if it is the pure the message of Christmas, then the inevitable 'bah, humbug' landing pad really starts again to hallow itself out, regardless of how many more derivatives the commercial version comes up with.