How was your Christmas?
Mine was fantastic! At 5 and 2, our kinds are at a perfect age for Christmas: there is no present in the world that disappoints them, they love "dressing up" in special Christmas outfits, they have no reason to question of doubt that the baby Jesus was God. Every festivity is The. Best. One. Ever.
On Christmas Eve, I talked in the pulpit about the mystery of the Incarnation and how this year, I'm going to rest in that mystery without trying to deconstruct or unpack or reveal it. God wanted to be with us. I can't imagine why, but it is true.
After preaching that, I spent a few days with my crazy little rugrats steeped in the post-Christmas madness. A new thought has come to me: I wonder if one reason God came down to hang out with us is to see the world through our own wonderment. There's a lot that we've royally screwed up here on earth, but there is a lot still left that is beautiful and magical and mysterious. Maybe God wanted to be a part of the very mystery God created, to experience it afresh.
God is complicated-- if only because God is so much bigger than we are and God's ways are beyond our tiny little powers of comprehension. But as a parent, watching my kids fall totally and completely in love with the world around them makes me think-- or maybe hope-- that this was one of God's motivations for joining us down here for a little while. I genuinely hope that God got to experience this dual feeling of parental pride in these little beings and a wonderment that almost matches their own as I watch them grow. To think that I had a hand (well, okay, not a hand exactly) in creating them is humbling and joyful.
That wonderment about the world thing reminds me of Alanis Morisette as God in the movie Dogma, in which she (as God) spends a little time smelling the flowers and doing some handstands or cartwheels on the grass....
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