This is the day we get the sense for what it might mean to be a child again – fresh, alive, unclouded by despair and worry, no real sense of anything other than the fact we are alive. I was born 7:28 am in a hospital in Oregon City, Oregon, a place my mother had just moved. She gave birth to me in a place she barely knew, but she knew this place would be my home. I was born when Reagan was president (I know this may make some of you feel old). The Moral Majority was organized and the Christian Right was beginning to rise to power. I was born decades after two world wars, after Vietnam, after the cultural revolution of the 1960’s rose and disintegrated into disco and drugs. I was born when investors were literally making a killing on Wall Street, when the term yuppie was invented, meaning someone under 35 that was able to live in an affluent lifestyle. My father decided to grow a mustache around this time, because like Tom Selleck, that was cool.
My mother told me during her pregnancy that she craved spicy foods, so she would eat currys and hot sauces.
She told me I would kick in her belly quite often, waking her up in the middle of the night, and making it nearly impossible for her to get a full night’s sleep. I knew none of this until years later of course…years after my birth when I learned to talk, and could comprehend the very notion of being born, of having a beginning.
Like you, when I was born I knew none of this. I knew nothing of the world. I didn’t know the culture, the language, my food preferences. I didn’t have a way to understand the concept of pregnancy, of being born. I think this is our irresistible attraction to babies – they don’t know anything about the world. The concern of a baby is to live, to stay alive, and if they’re fortunate like you and me – they have someone that can keep them alive in their extreme dependence. That’s another thing that is attractive to us, scary but attractive – dependence. We depend on our mothers to keep us alive. Regardless of what our relationship is like with our mothers, that much is clear – we were dependent on them for our very survival. And because of them we were given the chance to live, and experience what life had to offer us.
It offered us odd concepts like the Moral Majority, concepts like totalitarianism and nation state. We were given the chance to be overwhelmed, to be confused, to be outraged, to wonder at the simple and mysterious process of being born.
Into the world we have come – full of sound and light and expectation. This is birth, and in a sense, it has little to do with whether we asked for it, or planned it. It mostly happens to us – a thrust into a world we don’t understand. And we most certainly don’t understand it the way adults like they understand it. The world is sound and light and expectation. We are born into our parent’s expectations, our nation’s expectations, our religious or cultural expectations.
It’s common for babies to cry. We cry out of overwhelm or frustration or a last-ditch effort to communicate. We try to be understood but we don’t have the words yet. We don’t get the context we’re in, the history. We don’t know our parent’s stories. We don’t know how they met, what kind of couple they are, whether they love each other. These are not questions we have yet.
Christmas Eve is more compelling to me than Christmas itself. Christmas Eve is full of the one thing I love – anticipation, longing, desire. Christmas Eve is a day in the Christian calendar when the hope of mankind is on the verge of becoming real. A child is on it’s way, but they’re not born yet. The mother is still expecting, and so is the father, and so are the wise men, and so is all of humankind. We are all waiting to experience the birth of something we have never seen or experienced before, and yet in this mystery we sense it’s coming is full of good, full of promise.
I can’t think of a better year to celebrate Christmas Eve – to celebrate the birth of a child which holds the promise of saving all humankind from political, economic, and spiritual oppression. The Unitarian approach to Christmas Eve is very simple and revolutionary. We do not just wait in rapt anticipation for the birth of a savior that comes to us as Jesus the Christ. We take heart that this Jesus uncovered a deeper and more radical truth – that the birth of each of us is a miracle of hope. And to go a step further, our birth holds the possibility of salvation for all humankind.
The world salvation may seem like a big word, but I’ll break it down. The root of salvation is salve – a balm or healing agent that can be used to treat wounds. Each of us is born to be a salve – to bring healing to the wounds of this world. This calling is truly a joy to the world quite literally. We have the capacity to help a hurting world find joy.
Do you notice how when people see babies they instinctively smile, they soften? There’s something disarming about babies. They’re not trying to cure the world of all its ills, and yet their presence changes the entire world. Babies give us faith that our very presence is an act of love, and this love has the power to change the world. Babies possess this gift without realizing it, but all the adults see it at once. They see love – pure, open, accessible.
And this journey begins with ourselves, with a simple act of faith. Faith that our birth was the birth this world has been waiting for. A child is born. And the child still resides in us. The child doesn’t go anywhere. We build padding and layers of meaning around this child, but the child remains – carrying one simple and impactful truth – I was born. And I’m still alive.
This Christmas Eve is not waiting for a future child to be born. It not just celebrating the birth of a child 2,017 years ago near Bethlehem. This Christmas Eve is about your birth. This Christmas Eve is about your truth, so basic and so necessary. It’s about your love, embedded in your very being. Into the world you have come, into this world you were born – feel that, cherish that, wait with anticipation to fully appreciate that. It is not just your salvation that depends on it
