Now that even the most strictly observant liturgical types among us have left the skeletal remains of our Christmas trees on the curb and put our mantelpiece nativity sets and strings of colored lights in storage for another year, where does the end of the Christmas season leave us (other than a couple of pounds heavier and dropped back into our regular workaday existences)? Now that the Magi have made their way to the Christ child, what does the fact of the incarnation mean for us? A common temptation is to look to the life of Christ as described in scripture and try to “go and do likewise” (Lk 10:37). This isn’t a bad impulse, but when our response to the incarnation gets reduced to attempts at imitation, things can go awry pretty quickly. Of course, if we’re going to attempt to imitate anyone, Jesus is the best choice, but it should be more holistic and soaked in humility than it often is, more about a posture than recreating specific acts.
Getting too focused on being like Jesus through replicating his actions is like buying a closetful of zip-up cardigans to slip into when you get home from work, hoping that will make you more like Fred Rogers. By doing so, are you in some small way more like him than you were? Sure, but also not really. Turning the Christian life into something akin to a calculated, acts-based challenge, rather than the prayerful, almost unwitting self-emptying that comes out of the acknowledgment of the abundance of love we’ve already received from God, we end up falling into a trap. As the Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren warned in his book Gospel and Church, “When man grasps at divinity he not only fails to attain divinity, but loses humanity as well.” The incarnation isn’t about us trying to match God, it’s about God coming to us.
And it’s actually even more profound than that. Wingren writes that the incarnation means that:
Nothing is profane any longer, and nothing is purely biological any longer. The hidden meaning of the incarnation interpenetrates the whole of the created order and brings into being springs of life which are just below the surface for any who dig to find them, i.e. wherever there is faith, or repentance, or conversion. The willingness to acknowledge one’s guilt and to reconsider one’s way of life.
This willingness is the actual starting point of our being able to “imitate” Christ. It is where we make the turn from grasping at things and attempts to achieve, to following him “into suffering and death, and thereby into life and resurrection,” by paying more heed to the needs of our neighbors than to our own concerns, in receipt of God’s unwarranted love. Wingren continues: “Since the aim of love is the good of the neighbour, if I have such an aim it means that I have ceased to be concerned with personal pleasure or advantage. It is precisely this forgetfulness that makes the new activity of the Christian life new.”
Last month, I came across a lovely literary example of this “new activity” when I read Claire Keegan’s short novel Small Things Like These, which was also recently made into a film with Cillian Murphy playing the coal merchant protagonist, Bill Furlong.
In the story, Bill realizes something isn’t quite right at the nearby convent in 1985 Ireland, that there’s something sinister about “the laundry” based there and staffed entirely by young women no one in the community seems to know. Early one morning, upon delivering coal to the convent, he comes upon one of them locked in a shed, cowering in the corner. When he finds her, he has an initial impulse to help, but “the ordinary part of him wanted to be rid of this and get on home.” Upon bringing the girl back to the main convent, the Mother Superior feigns shock and tries to write it off as a prank pulled among the girls that went too far. Bill doesn’t buy this, but leaves her there nonetheless, albeit with a troubled conscience.
On Christmas Eve, as he is out picking up a few last-minute gifts for his family and running other errands, Bill realizes he has to help this girl. Prior to this decision, Bill had recently found himself sleepwalking through life: “He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.” And though he loved his wife and daughters: “Of late, he was inclined to imagine another life, elsewhere.” He had to force himself out of the pit of nostalgia:
Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.
It is precisely in focusing on the well-being of this teen girl, recently thrust into his life, that he is able to forget about all of his existential troubles:
How light and tall he almost felt walking along with this girl at his side and some fresh, new, unrecognisable joy in his heart. Was it possible that the best bit of him was shining forth, and surfacing? Some part of him, whatever it could be called- was there any name for it? – was going wild, he knew. The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this.
I wonder if the “ordinary part of him” that initially kept Bill from helping this girl and the newly discovered “best bit of him” which got him to act, are analogous to Luther’s “sinner” and “saint” distinctions. Both of these parts of him are him, they are all of us. The “ordinary part” is the part that grasps and is curved inward, whereas the “best bit” is receptive and outward facing. We often try to convince ourselves not to respond to the demands of the world by closing ourselves off in the private worlds of our minds or focusing on personal goals, whether they be fitness, career, or even spiritual. We eventually find that these self-directed things are meaningless. What actually sticks with people in the end are the instances (big and small) of unexpected and selfless love for them from others.
A few months ago, I was rummaging around in my garage when I heard a loud “thunk!” against the outside wall. I went around to find my teenage stepdaughter hurling lacrosse balls against the side of our house. (If you haven’t seen a lacrosse ball, they’re made of hard solid rubber, more rock than whiffle.) Annoyed, I said, “What are you doing?” She looked at me with a typical teenage look of unconcerned surliness, and said, “I’m practicing lacrosse.” I countered, “But why are you doing that against our house?” Then, with her bad mood zeroed in on me, “Well, I need to practice! And unless you want to practice playing catch with me, what else am I supposed to do?”
The impulse of “the ordinary part” of myself (the “me” part of me) was to meet or exceed her attitude and let her know how destructive and careless she was being. But just as I was about to do that, the “best bit” of me (the Spirit-receptive bit) heard the invitation under her sarcasm. She wanted me to help her practice, but was afraid I wouldn’t, so she shielded her vulnerable request under a hard shell. I found myself saying, “I’ll practice with you.” Her whole demeanor instantly changed, the toughness and anger replaced by surprise, and ultimately contentment. A few minutes later, my wife joined us, and we all had a lovely afternoon playing catch with lacrosse sticks in our backyard.
It doesn’t always go that well. We can’t expect observable positive results every time. More frequently, we don’t see the ripples of divine grace until much later (if ever). But what other faithful option do we have than to let Christ’s love spill out of us for the benefit of those around us, trusting that God has it all ultimately under control even when it feels foolish or risky in the moment?
It fits that Bill Furlong’s decisive action to help the girl from the laundry takes place on Christmas Eve, while the broader implications of it will have to slowly unfurl in the weeks, months, and years to come. Like Small Things Like These, the Christian life is a slow and quiet affair, more often like an early Sunday morning service in the middle of January than the buzzing excitement of a Christmas Eve Nativity Play. Any attempts to grasp it are generally futile, and any achievements or growth we come by are more frequently things that happen to us than things we bring about on our own. We think following Jesus consists in big, well-thought-out decisions, but the heart of it all is actually small, unplanned, pinprick feelings — ones that ask us to forgo our personal concerns to be with and for our neighbors in their times of need (and letting our neighbors do the same for us in ours).
