Day: December 25, 2022

“Fear not, for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy,
which shall be to all people”

It is really all about what we behold. And what we behold is what has been given to us. “Love is in the nature of a first gift through which all gifts are given,” the great Medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas notes. His words capture something of the wonder and the mystery of the Christian celebration of Christmas but extend as well to the sense of the awesome mystery of life that belongs to the other great religions and philosophies of the world. It is about the awareness of what is greater than ourselves.

One of the passages of Scripture which always catches my imagination at Christmas is from the Wisdom of Solomon. “When all things were in quiet silence and the night was in the midst of her swift course, then thy almighty word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne” (Wisdom 18.14-15). It awakens us thoughtfully and prayerfully to the presence of the wisdom of God in the world, an image that counters so much of the hype and busyness of this time of the year in our distracted and now much divided and hostile world. While in its context in Wisdom, “thy almighty word” leaping down from heaven refers to a “stern warrior”, it has become associated with the gentleness of wisdom embodied in the Incarnate Christ at Christmas, the Word made flesh. The gift of God’s own givenness.

This sense of “the givenness of things”, to borrow a phrase from the American novelist and theologian, Marilynne Robinson, is part of the greater wonder and mystery of Christmas, part of the greater wonder and mystery of the wisdom of the ages. The simple givenness of things in which we find wonder and delight stands in contrast to the idea of life as simply that into which we have been thrown, the ‘thrownness’ of things, as it were, in which we find only alienation and despair, a sense of nihilism. It also stands in contrast to the contemporary illusions of the radically autonomous self, freed to its own projects and interests to be whatever it chooses to be regardless of the givenness of things in creation; in short, as if we were self-complete. But this is all a lie and a delusion. It is equally nihilistic.

The simple givenness of things is about life as a gift, about life as light and love. The simple givenness of things is the love through which all other gifts are given.

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