When the Divine Came Down

Christmas Eve

I am not the best person to say anything meaningful about Christmas Eve. My favorite one ever was at a writer’s retreat in New York State, spent entirely alone. The little white pine I found in the woods was decorated with feathers and red berries. A light, dry snow had been falling for hours, so every branch I could see outside my windows wore a puffy white blanket. There was a fire burning in the fireplace, making the room dance with shadows while the flames warmed the bottoms of my feet. O Holy Night. It was my only gift, the only one I wanted.

Every Christmas Eve since then has been more complicated—with family, memories, expectations, and church services, all while carrying the massive cultural weight of the holiday. Most of us have heard all the versions of what the evening means through the years, latching onto different ones and finding different ways to honor them—or dismissing the whole thing as a hustle. I’ve shed plenty of attachments to Christmas Eve in my life, but there is one that lasts. Don’t ask if it’s a religious imprint, a reality, a metaphor, or an invention. All I know is how reliant I am on the story of the Divine come down to earth.

Most of my Christian education had to do with looking up, not down, for God. God lived on high. Heaven was the place to look for guidance, wisdom, and solace. No one stretched their arms down when they prayed. We raised them high, like children asking to be picked up. High was where we wanted our minds to be, our values, our purposes. Up was where we wanted to go when we died. Nothing under our feet was going to save us. Our only hope was to be raised up by the Risen One and join him on high.

When I studied religious art in divinity school, the most famous images of the saints showed them looking up at something no one else could see. The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Saint Francis in Prayer, Saint John on Patmos. As different as they were, their eyes were all raised up, cheeks bright with reflected light. This changed the day we studied images of the Nativity, and everyone was looking down instead, at a baby they could all see. The light had moved. It was coming from below, not above.

One way of viewing the rest of that lit baby’s life is to note how he used the light in him to spot the light in everything else: not just birds of the air and lilies of the field but also shushed children, disabled beggars, foreign soldiers, and defiant women, among many others. He made the ordinary luminous by noticing what was happening right where he was and calling others to notice it too. When time ran out, he sealed his teaching by shining light on the simple acts of washing feet and sharing supper with his friends.

Whatever more his birth story means, it means an end to any estrangement between the Divine Above and the Divine Below. The light goes both ways. Heaven and nature sing. My wish for you is that you find a moment to step outside tonight and stretch your arms down to the earth before you raise them up to the sky—and stay long enough to hear the song.