Christmas Eve 2008
Re. Colin Bossen, December 24, 2008
I saw Santa Claus once. I was nine, maybe ten, years old. That year on Christmas Eve, well past midnight, I got up to walk the corridor between my bedroom and the bath. My route took me past the living room and the bright Christmas tree. It was then that I saw him, the jolly old elf. He was dressed in red velvet and white fur. And he was furtively stuffing presents under the pine.
I snuck past him as quickly as I could. I thought it unwise to be caught by Santa out of bed. I do not think that he saw me. When I returned to the hallway he was gone but his presents remained.
My sighting of Santa was probably the product of an overactive imagination. Maybe I was having a vivid dream. Perhaps I saw my father and choose to re-imagine him as Santa Claus. At that early age I desperately wanted a world more filled with magic than this one often appears to be.
Christmas is a time for magic. The bright lights sparkle. The candles glow. Fires burn at winter's chill. And Santa Claus or no Santa Claus, we are reminded that life is a miracle. This is the true story of Christmas. Life itself is a miracle. The son of God comes not as a child of powerful kings but as an outcast mother's infant. The divine is found in the lowest of the lowest so that it might be found in all of us.
Most Unitarian Universalists believe that, in the words of Sophia Lyon Fahs, "Each night a child is born is a holy night." All children, all people, are miracles. None of us asked to be born. All of lives are accidental, the result of a string of unimaginable chance events.
We are here because the universe was birthed with just the right set of physics. We are here because more than five billion years ago a large star fell in upon itself and created a new solar system with just the right balance of elements. Our Earth sits neither too close nor too far from the sun. Eons ago liquid water formed and the planet's primordial soup cooled enough for the first bacterium to wiggle through the muck. All of us have millions of ancestors who survived long enough to have children--miracles upon miracles upon miracles. Any night that a child is born marks another miracle.
At Christmas we celebrate not just the miracle of any birth but the miracle of all births. Christmas comes at the dark of the year as the Earth herself, pregnant with spring, creeps closer to the sun. Under the grey, damp and frozen ground life is stirring. Months from now the flowers will come. First there will be snowdrops and violets. Then in May and June others will appear until all of nature is glory. Flowers turn to fruit and in autumn comes the harvest. The harvest is followed by another Christmas--and the promise of the sun's increase.
The return of the sun year-after-year is a miracle and a gift. Christmas is a time to remember that. It is a season in which we show our gratitude for the gifts in our lives. Many of us exchange gifts with our loved ones, tokens of our appreciation of them. Sometimes we get caught up in trying to find the perfect gift, hoping that some material object can capture our love. And yet at Christmas the greatest gift of all is simply the gift of life--that we are here together and we are taking another breath.
The baby Jesus reminds us that life is miraculous and as he is born all of the world stops in wonder at new life. An angel heralds his arrival. Shepherds come in from the fields. The magi appear and offer gifts. The miraculous has occurred, a new life, a new being is upon the planet.
All babies should be heralded thus. Any new life is rich with possibility. Jesus, the Buddha, Einstein, Sappho, Lao Tzu and Jane Addams were all babies once. Their parents could not have known how their lives would unfold.
And that is magic. The future is not yet written. At Christmas we celebrate the better world it might hold. The air is touched with songs of hope. The dark is kept at bay by warmth, fellowship and the light from candles and Christmas trees.
The magic of the season brings me back to my vision of Santa Claus. More than a hundred years ago a young girl asked a newsman if there was such a thing as Santa Claus. He replied:
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy."
This is the promise of Christmas. The world may yet be filled with love. We can kindle the wonder of the world and always be aware of the possibility within each. And so tonight we celebrate the miracle of life.
Merry Christmas.