Tonight, listening to the exquisite Puer Natus hymn, I found myself overcome.
In the last few years, December has proven a difficult month for me. At the best of times, it is beset with events, expectations, and demands. Three years ago I faced it for the first time without my mother; two years ago it was marked by a truly phenomenal bout of food poisoning immediately followed by COVID; last year it was marked by unexpected professional changes.
But this year is calm.
Gifts are brought and wrapped. My Christmas lights are bright and shining and the living room is aglow in gold. Homemade candies sit in tins on the shelf. I have wrapped up the year-end work tasks, put projects and initiatives to bed.
I have time, more time than I expected, to reflect. And as my mind skims back over Advent, I find myself thinking of surprising things.
Like how after years and years of begging God for community, community has found me this year in the form of local friends and a local church and relationships in places I did not remotely expect them. Somehow, inexplicably, I have people.
Like how this year, for the first time, going to see my mother’s grave was not punctuated by somber silence. That night, afterward, we went to drive around and see Christmas lights together, and my father laughed and smiled. This year he has people, and a community, and they have buoyed him up over the year into a merry holiday.
Like how despite the turbulence in my institution, God has protected me.
Like how I am learning, even in discomfort, to find joy.
And most of all in these quiet moments I think of how God’s word into the silence, especially at Advent but really at all times, is always Himself.
To desire God and not the things of God, to desire God and not just the attributes of God, to desire God and not just the benefits of relationship with God: this is the end state of all the searching. Every year and every day in various ways I fly to and from this truth.
God is enough. Even when I forget He is enough.
Listening to a radio station recently, I found myself surprised and bewildered that some contemporary Christian musicians have rewritten carols. The sound is the same—I’d recognize Hark The Herald Angels Sing anywhere—but the words are different. Sometimes they weave the old carol into the new, bringing the recognizable into the modern.
I always turn the radio off.
That’s not to dismiss those to whom those new version might speak. But at this time of year, I want simplicity more than anything else: the fundamentals of the story, the complex and astonishing theology wrapped up in the narrative of a single, reverberant truth.
God came to us.
Into silence and darkness, God came to us. And He is, in one way or another, always seeking us there, always making Himself manifest, always revealing Himself. In the minute workings of my own life, I see His work—often so fine I scarcely recognize it until the tapestry is half-woven.
What a beautiful time this is, Christmas. And what a beautiful thing to celebrate. God will pierce the dark, always. He will speak into the silence. He will make a way, every single time.
Laudetur sancta Trinitas,
Deo dicamus gratias,
alleluia.
Merry Christmas.
(If you’d like, you can listen to my favorite version of Puer Natus here).
Samaritan's Song 