the reality of christmas

every year, christmas is such a busy time that i have to fight to find times of contemplation.
usually i find a book or a song or a quotation that i latch on to and spend all of advent mulling over. i was sitting in church at the beginning of advent listening to some woman wailing out a song that massacred matthew 11:28-30 and wondering why church people have to make my Story sound like it’s being told on the shopping channel or in a B movie. i had to get up and leave because i seriously wanted to hit somebody so i went to the church library, cracked open a book, and here is what i found and have been chewing on since:

Take Christmas, for instance: a season of nostalgia, of carols and candles and firelight and
happy children. But that misses the point completely. Christmas is not a reminder that the world is really quite a nice old place. It reminds us that the world is a shockingly bad old place, where wickedness flourishes unchecked, where children are murdered, where civilized countries make a lot of money by selling weapons to uncivilized ones so they can blow each other apart. Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don’t light a candle in a room that’s already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that’s so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are. The light shines in the darkness, says St. John, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Christmas, then, is not a dream, a moment of escapism. Christmas is the reality, which
shows up the rest of ‘reality’.

- N.T. Wright from For All God’s Worth

(and for a brilliant rendition of matthew 11:28-30, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuUkPz7sZw)