On Christmas Day

Today I want to offer first an excerpt from a blog by a guy named Prayson Daniel.

(The whole article can be found here: https://withalliamgod.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/bonhoeffers-solution-to-the-problem-of-pain/ )

“Understanding Christianity in times of prevailing evil is what moved Bonhoeffer. His solution reflects his religionless reinterpretation of Christianity. In this reinterpretation God is not called upon to solve the problem of pain and suffering as if he was deus ex machina, but we as Christians are called to participate with God in powerlessness and weakness. He wrote, “God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us.”

Bonhoeffer believed that the difference between a heathen and Christian is that in the former people call upon God to solve their problems while in the latter, God calls upon his people to participate in their problem. He explains:

“That is the opposite of everything a religious person expects from God. The human being is called upon to share in God’s suffering at the hands of a godless world. Thus we must really live in that godless world and not try to cover up or transfigure its godlessness somehow with religion.” —Letters and Papers from Prison”

This Christmas I really felt that call. I will not retreat from this godless world. I wrote the first part of this on Christmas Day, but then got distracted by the demands of the day. I did want to put it out there though, that the idea of being asked to participate with God in powerlessness and weakness is an absolutely seminal one; one that carries layers and layers of meaning and significance to those of us who are trying to follow the Way.

 My niece’s sister-in-law, a priest in England, posted this poem by Laurie Lee on Christmas Eve:

‘Christmas Landscape’

Tonight the wind gnaws
with teeth of glass,
the jackdaw shivers
in caged branches of iron,
the stars have talons.

There is hunger in the mouth
of vole and badger,
silver agonies of breath
in the nostril of the fox,
ice on the rabbit’s paw.

Tonight has no moon,
no food for the pilgrim;
the fruit tree is bare,
the rose bush a thorn
and the ground is bitter with stones.

But the mole sleeps, and the hedgehog
lies curled in a womb of leaves,
the bean and the wheat-seed
hug their germs in the earth
and the stream moves under the ice.

Tonight there is no moon,
but a new star opens
like a silver trumpet over the dead.
Tonight in a nest of ruins
the blessed babe is laid.

And the fir tree warms to a bloom of candles,
the child lights his lantern,
stares at his tinselled toy;
our hearts and hearths
smoulder with live ashes.

In the blood of our grief
the cold earth is suckled,
in our agony the womb
convulses its seed,
in the cry of anguish
the child’s first breath is born.

—Laurie Lee

The door God will open for us when we knock does not lead to a garden of complacency and comfort, but to a world that is riddled with fault-lines; a territory where ready-made excuses sell at a discount, scoundrels babysit children, and honest grief is treated like a disease.

We won’t be able to bear living in a world like that, unless we’ve got our priorities straight. We won’t be able to do any good at all if we won’t dare to hope.

Above all, we will have to give up in order to go on.

What we choose will have to be—

Not terror, but trust.

Not coercion, but compassion.

Not pomposity, but practice.

Not ideology, but involvement.

Not righteousness, but respect.

Not conviction, but confidence.

Not rules, but risk.

Not guarantees, but God.