In the beginning [or should it be "Once upon a time. . . "], there was a story. . .
And God was with the story [no scratch that]
And God was in the story [that’s still not quite it]
And God was the story [yes, that's good]
Everything that exists came through the story - it was only through the story that God created. Each character, each setting, each creature, each backdrop was created in the story and for the story. When the time was right, the story started to come together, took shape and form. Characters emerged, were introduced - with personalities and names, and with them plots and sub-plots. The storyline began to unfold.
In one form it was the tale of a young woman, Mary the unmarried and unsullied, impregnated by God, while her husband to be, a minor character in the drama, Joseph the bewildered, stands outside the action A law abiding man, he follows the rules. And since he was directed to return to Bethlehem for the big census. Just before they get to town Mary’s water broke, and he scrambles but the best he can come up with is temporary shelter in a barn. And it was there amid the shit and straw, the smells and sounds, that this most holy of births occured, the story became human, took on form and substance. She could and did nurse the infant story, all he could do was wrap it in rags and lay it admiringly in a feeding trough. Ironies abound. The male, symbol of potency in human history a hapless bystander, relegated to the sidelines. This story is not his to control.
In another form the same characters appear, but the setting is different. Again there is a census, again Mary is unmarried and expectant, and Joseph this time is more than bewildered, he is embarrassed and ashamed. He dithers continually on the journey, trying to figure out about how to explain the situation to the censusman A few miles from Bethlehem Mary goes into labour, and Joseph, now utterly embarrassed, finds a cave to hole up in – then he leaves the scene, goes ahead into town looking for a midwife. He knocks on door after door until he finds one, but they return to find the Holy Child already born. He’d missed the whole thing. Different tale, same story, same truth.
God’s own story became human, became us, broke into our own cycles of myths, contained and predictable, broke the spine of our narrative, and like our spiritual father, that bewildered hapless Joe, we emerge as but characters in God’s story. And in this story we live and move and have our being, we live out the narrative, we triumph, we fail, our faults undo us and grace restores us, we live the story scene by scene but we don't know the ending, we don't even understand all the nuances of the plot.
We have entered again the season called “Coming” [why we would keep the Latin word "Advent" is a mystery – perhaps we prefer the obfuscation]…. But what exactly is it that is coming?
That's the essential point of the season of Coming. We don’t know. It is not ours to know. We are characters not authors, it is ours to live page by page [and that is challenge enough]. As characters we can influence plot but not control it. The wonder of the Christmas story is not that we tell it, but that it tells us, and in its telling we are again born a divine-banal hybrid, wrapped in rags by our own ineptitude, yet held and nursed by radiance, so that once again, refreshed and awakened, we can wander forward into whatever it is that happens next.
[btw ...few more advent meditations of mine from the dusty nether regions of the past: prayer of Mary the refugee , Advent Reflection 2: Mary. and Advent Reflection 3: Bethlehem. More advent stuff on other shelves in the Back Room too ]