Christmas Time is Here

After years of putting it off, I'm finally getting around to reading Flannery O'Connor. I'd heard a lot about the impact of her faith on her writing and about her sacramental understanding of creation. It can be a bit tricky to see in much of her writing, because so many of her stories are about people who ultimately lack these things. I finally did pick up on it, though, and about that time, as if to reinforce things, I hit the penultimate paragraph of "The Artificial [Black Person]", which reads as follows:

"Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again, but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise."

This is Christianity, as I understand it, in a nutshell. This is the freeing power of surrendering to the truth of your guilt and brokenness and, in accordance, the inexplicable blessing that is God's mercy. This is coming to grips with the enormous power of God's grace and its ability to fill you to whatever extent you allow and the futility of trying to live without it. This, strange as it may seem, is joy.

Today is Christmas. It is a day for recalling the fullness of God's love, that He would come helpless among us to suffer and bear away our guilt. It is the initiation of a promise of which we are not worthy, but that's the point. If, in our unworthiness, God sees fit to come and serve us, why should we feel as though we ought to be anything better than servants ourselves?

Today, we bear witness to God's mercy taking root in the world, and we ask it to snuff out our pride. We open our eyes to our sinfulness and consecrate ourselves anew to servitude under the grace of God. In doing this, we make ourselves available to the promise of our own redemption and to the work that will redeem creation. Today, we are told that no matter how sad and undeserving we are, we are gifted boundless Love, and we struggle against ourselves to reflect that love so that we may better glory in its undeserved culmination on Easter.

Merry Christmas.