Holy Day or Holiday?

Tomorrow night we celebrate a birthday. The irony, though, is that nobody knows when Jesus’ real birthday was. December 25 was chosen by the early church, several generations later, as a way to blunt the impact of Roman winter solstice celebrations. As the pagans celebrated the coming of the sun, Christians celebrated the birth of the Son of Righteousness.

Most births are moments of joy, because even the most anxious, impoverished mother typically finds some way to put worry aside and marvel at the gift of new life cradled in her arms. But as we journey through the years of our lives, and as birthdays pile up one atop the other, many of us greet the day with a bit of dread.

Birthdays, of course, are not only an acknowledgment of who we are. They’re also potent signs of the passage of time, and many of us are not all that happy about growing old.

Think of the poignant celebrations of 100-year birthdays. As the new centenarian gathers her precious breath to blow out the candles on her cake — surely fewer than 100, for that would be a conflagration — there’s the lingering question of how many more such celebrations there may be for her. As everyone sings Happy Birthday to her, she’s aware of how many of her contemporaries are no longer around to join in the festivities.

As Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth, she sings her own birthday song: an anthem of God’s triumph that is not without its dark themes — the scattering of the proud, the fall of kings. What a burden she has to bear! Yet, what a blessing she discerns in the midst of it all.

Jesus’ birthday is a burden for Mary and Joseph, no doubt about it. The news of Mary’s pregnancy during her betrothal period sets off a minor scandal. It nearly leads to a breakup of her relationship with Joseph. As so often happens with awkward pregnancies everywhere, Mary travels away from home for a while. Whether her parents arrange to have her sent away, or whether she undertakes the journey on her own, no one knows. It could very well be that everyone needs to get a little distance from each other to sort out this ambiguous news — a mixture of joy and anxiety.

Fortunately for Mary, she has somewhere to go, a place where she can be assured of a warm welcome. Her older cousin Elizabeth is also expecting. Whatever her neighbors in Nazareth may be whispering about her, she knows she and Elizabeth will have much to talk about.

Elizabeth receives her with the warmest possible greeting: “Blessed are you…” It’s not the sort of thing people typically say to an unmarried teenage mother. But Elizabeth has no reservations. She welcomes her kinswoman with open arms. She blesses her.

More than that, Elizabeth treats Mary as her social superior, despite their difference in age: “And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” The very fact that Elizabeth’s own unborn child leaps in the womb is an early sign of what the adult John the Baptist will one day say of his cousin Jesus: “He must increase, and I must decrease.”

Mary’s not the only one who can sense the blessing in this upcoming birthday. Elizabeth does, too. Between them, they have more than enough faith to see this thing through, giving life to both Jesus and John: two men who, between them, will change the world.

It couldn’t have happened, though, without the faithful vision of Mary and Elizabeth, enabling them to bear the burden of this birthday.

It’s not always an easy thing to glimpse God’s promise in these days before Christmas. It’s so much easier to see the things the world is fond of seeing this time of year. As all of us know, the promise of the secular Christmas is merrymaking. It’s a profusion of material goods, bereft of spiritual values. It’s frantic, scurrying people grasping for things they don’t have, all the while failing to celebrate gifts of the Spirit they’ve already been offered in abundance.

Faced with the onslaught of Christmas materialism, it’s easy for good, Christian people to get discouraged about the holiday. We all do it: we complain.

• We complain about Christmas trees going up in department stores before Halloween.
• We complain of how “Grandma Got Run over by a Reindeer” so often seems to drown out “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”
• We complain that the holiday seems to have hijacked the holy day.

Well, these things are all true observations, but if we let our distaste for yuletide materialism eclipse the spiritual meaning of Christmas, then the materialists have won. The birthday will have become a burden.

There are two ways to get sidetracked by secularism at Christmas: Either we simply surrender, giving in completely to shallow “Seasons Greetings” materialism, or we invest so much energy fighting it that we lose track of what Christmas is all about.

Far better to go through the season smiling with amusement at the tinseled excess all around us — all the while remaining attentive to the true gold that glimmers only briefly, and can be discovered only by those who earnestly seek it.

And how do we teach this sort of spiritual discernment to others? Dorothy Bass tells the story of a mother who has a rather wonderful way of teaching her children to be attentive to signs of God’s activity around them. At the end of each day, instead of asking her young kids, “How was your day?” she asks them instead, “Where did you meet God today?”

And they tell her, one by one: a teacher helped me, there was a homeless person in the park, I saw a tree with lots of flowers on it. She tells them where she met God, too. Before the children drop off to sleep, the stuff of this day has become the substance of their prayer.

We could do much the same thing in these swiftly-passing days before Christmas. If, as we move in and out of both the sacred and secular manifestations of the holiday, we only ask ourselves, “Where can I meet God in this?” we may be pleasantly surprised at how often God pops up.

Even the tackiest, most materialistic holiday observances have at their base a deep yearning for the good, the kind, the beautiful. Better to affirm the good that’s present there than to lose ourselves in griping and criticism. It’s a sure-fire way to make the birthday a blessing, not a burden.

In the words of Luke, blessed are you, O Mary, “who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken … by the Lord” (v. 45).

Blessed are you, as well, if you walk through these final days of Advent with eyes wide open to the signs of God’s presence — and God’s promise — all around.