Why the Quiet Questions of Christmas Still Matter

Grateful to be able to republish this Seen & Unseen article by Belle Tindall, a speaker at our upcoming NYC Conference. 

Clive Staples Lewis, or C. S. Lewis, if you’re short on time. You know him?

Of course you do.

Lewis is the acclaimed author who had us all wishing that our wardrobes housed a snowy world inside of them. He’s the mastermind who made us all long for two things: a friend like Mr. Tumnus and a piece of Turkish delight that actually tasted as good as it looked. Neither of which exist.

But his fiction is not actually what I’m reaching for to help me right now. It’s his non-fiction I’m after.

In 1963, he wrote an essay entitled “The Seeing Eye,” as a response to the Russian politician — Nikita Khrushchev — who famously declared “Gagarin flew into space but didn’t see God there.” Yuri Gagarin being the first man to ever go to space, of course. Khrushchev considered the fact that God wasn’t spotted up there to be proof of his inexistence. And Lewis was having none of it.

By way of response, C. S. Lewis wrote:

Looking for God — or Heaven — by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places.

Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff or Lady Macbeth […]

My point is that, if God does exist, He is related to the universe more as an author is related to a play than as one object in the universe is related to another.

If God created the universe, He created space-time, which is to the universe as the metre is to a poem or the key is to music. To look for Him as one item within the framework which He Himself invented is nonsensical.

Dang. He’s good, isn’t he?

God, if he exists, is over all things, in all things, and through all things. It’s hard to get our heads around, and that’s exactly why Lewis’ Shakespeare analogy is so wonderfully helpful. You can’t find God in one place; he’s in every place. He’s not merely an object in the universe, he’s the one that holds the whole thing together.

Now, let’s move a step further. Say Shakespeare wanted to let Lady Macbeth know that he’s the author of her entire reality — that he created her, and everything around her — how might he do that? How might he introduce himself to Lady Macbeth in a tangible way? Well, he’d have to write himself into the play.

And this is where I’d like to welcome to the stage, Dorothy L. Sayers.

Dorothy was a hugely influential murder-mystery novelist (who happened to also be a Christian). She wrote a series of novels and short stories, all centered upon the fictitious character of Lord Peter Wimsey, a detective. About halfway through the series, the perpetually lonely Lord Wimsey meets and falls in love with a woman named Harriet Vane.

Here’s where that gets interesting — it’s widely thought that Harriet Vane is an autobiographical character. As in, Dorothy wrote herself into her own novel. She created Lord Wimsey and was distressed by his loneliness and his flailing, so she wrote herself in to help him.

The (pretty outrageous) Christmas claim is that God (kind of) did this for real. That he saw humanity, struggling in a thousand different ways, hurting each other and ourselves, so wrote himself into the plot he had created — to love us up close, and to save us.

This is what we Christians call the “incarnation,” the belief that God became “flesh” and moved into the neighborhood. And in so doing, he bound together centuries worth of prophecies, predictions, expectations and hopes.

The maker squeezed himself into the confines of the made – it is, without a doubt, one of the most outrageous claims that Christianity makes. God became a man. A man with a name (Jesus — in case that wasn’t obvious), an accent, a bedtime, a favorite food.

But still God, fully God, always God.

Dr. Martin Shaw (professional mythologist, relatively recent Christian, and new-found obsession of mine) put it this way:

God put a dog in the race, his own son. His own self. It’s the most extraordinary act of love, so catastrophic in its beauty, we’re still in shock two thousand years later.

I like that quote because I think, despite reading and re-reading this story throughout my life, that’s how I spend each and every Christmas — in shock. In shock at the cosmically sized implications of this event: that God refuses to be God without us. That the God of the universe, if he exists, would come to us. That he was here. That a plan with such epic proportions was enacted in such gritty circumstances. That he would wrap himself in the confines of time and place, that he would clothe himself in matter. That he would make himself see-able, touch-able, kill-able. That he would appear, right? And that he would do so, in order that our souls would feel their worth.

The playwright took the stage, the author hopped onto the page, the architect inhabited his own plans. The wonder of it all. The poetry. The glory. It’s all just … it’s so … well … “so catastrophic in its beauty, we’re still in shock two thousand years later.”

Oh, reader. I implore you to let it shock you. The playwright taking the stage. Whether you believe all or none of it, be shocked. Allow yourself that, give yourself the time and space to feel the shock of this season, of this claim.

Don’t be numb to it.

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, don’t they? And I’ve always thought of that as a phrase that points toward subjectivity — as in, whether something is beautiful depends on who’s looking. Right? But I’m re-thinking my understanding, I think I’ve actually missed the whole point. I don’t think that well-known phrase is actually about subjectivity, I think it’s primarily about contemplation. So — to translate it a little — the beauty of something is seen by the one who looks at that something the longest, the deepest, in the most earnest.

Beauty is in the eye of the one who will behold it, contemplate it, be attentive to it, look at it long enough to let the beauty of it shock them.

I think that the incarnation, the playwright hopping into the stage, is true. I think that Jesus was born, in Bethlehem — a town that is now rubble. I really do think that it happened. But even if I didn’t think that the story was true, I’d think it was beautiful. I’d still want to behold it; I’d still be curious enough to wonder why, when I stare at it long enough, it touches upon my deepest yearnings, my most sacred aches.

The poet inhabited the poem, God was born into the “framework which He Himself invented” — believe it, or don’t. But let yourself be shocked by it.