Charlie Brown goes to his
front door, where Snoopy stands offering him a Christmas present. “For me?” says Charlie Brown. “Thank you very much.” Then he opens the gift card: “For the rounded-headed kid . . . Merry
Christmas.” As he looks toward the
departing Snoopy, Charlie Brown observes, “It would be nice to have a dog who
remembered your name.”
I have few secret passions in life, but one of them is Peanuts, the Charles Schultz comic strip featuring Charlie
Brown, Snoopy, and the gang. I started reading Peanuts
in the daily paper in fourth grade, and I have followed the cartoon through all
its developments—Linus’s struggles to quit the blanket habit; the birth of
Charlie Brown’s sister, Sally; the introduction of Snoopy’s bird friend,
Woodstock; the arrival of the first African American member, Franklin; the
search by Snoopy’s brothers Andy and Olaf for their desert-dwelling sibling,
Spike.
This season my bedtime reading has consisted of working
through a book that collects all the comic’s yuletide cartoons, A Peanuts Christmas. The strips are memorable: Linus
agonizing over having to recite the Christmas story we heard last night in
front of the PTA; Sally writing to Santa and rhapsodizing about the joys not of
giving but of getting; Lucy slugging Linus because he shows her up by writing
his thank-you notes more quickly than she does; Charlie Brown putting up
Snoopy’s Christmas tree in his doghouse and asking if Snoopy would rather
unplug the TV set or the clock radio. Peanuts is so
much a part of my life that I cannot imagine Christmas without it. “It
would be nice to have a dog who remembered your name.”
And part of why I love Peanuts so much
lies in the way it combines a sincere appreciation of childhood’s joys with a
frank assessment of the pains and struggles of life. It would be nice to have a dog who remembered your name. I fantasize that our two terriers know who I
am, but when I’m realistic about it, I realize they probably think of me only
as the big guy with the leash and the treats.
We look for fulfillment where we probably shouldn’t hope to find it. “It
would be nice to have a dog who remembered your name.”
Today is Christmas Day, and
for most people in our culture the celebration of the season is coming now to a
close. In modern America, Christmas
begins on Black Friday and ends at around noon today, when the carols suddenly
leave the airwaves to be replaced by pop hits.
For those of us who live by the church’s calendar, though, the Christmas
season is just beginning, and the next twelve days will open for us a series of
abiding gifts, each one more surprising than the last. Last night we heard the story of Mary and Joseph
giving birth to the baby Jesus in a stable.
Today we hear not that familiar story again but a reflection on what it
means. From the beginning of John’s
Gospel:
And the Word became
flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory,
glory as of the only Son from the father. [John 1: 14 RSV]
What both of these biblical
passages are trying to say is that, in Jesus, God has come right into the midst
of human life. That’s a hard truth for
you and me humans to take in. We are prone
to think of God as someone or something remote, distant, far away, removed from
human experience. But for Christians,
and for all people of faith, that way of thinking is wrong. God made human beings in God’s own image and
invested us with divine significance.
The Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth. The one at the center of creation is born in
a Bethlehem stable. Whether we know it
or not, we are steeped in and surrounded by radiant holiness. That is the perception at the heart of all
the world’s religions. It’s what
Christmas is really about.
To burnish my reputation as
an intellectual, I’ll add that in addition to reading A Peanuts
Christmas, my other bedtime reading has been the poetry of William
Blake. (You ought to see my nightstand.
It looks like a used bookstore.) Blake was a visionary 18th century
English poet and engraver, and one of his best-known poems (“Auguries of
Innocence”) gives voice to this universal perception that we’re steeped in holiness. It begins,
To see a World
in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven
in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity
in the palm of your hand
And Eternity
in an hour
Anywhere
you look, says Blake, anything you pick up is charged with that holiness. But the poem doesn’t stop there. Here is how
it ends:
God Appears
& God is Light
To those poor
Souls who dwell in Night
But does a
Human Form Display
To those who
Dwell in Realms of day
Here’s
how John’s Gospel puts it: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, full
of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the
father.” Here’s how William Blake puts
it:
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day
The
pain of being human is that we live, as Buddhists tell us, in illusion. We think too much, and when we think we fall
prey to the idea that we are alone, cut off, walking around in darkness. Worse than that, we fall prey to the illusion
that God and we are somehow separate from each other. Christmas is the antidote to that
illusion. The Word has become flesh and
dwells among us. God displays a human
form to those who choose to live in the daylight. The world is precious. You are precious. All your human brothers and sisters, all
created beings are precious because they participate in God’s holiness. As a
spiritual director of mine once said, “We are holy because God is holy.”
One of my favorite living poets is a
Buddhist woman, Jane Hirschfield, who lived for three years at Tassajara, a Zen
monastery in California. She not only
writes poems, she writes about poetry and the spirituality of it. Here is something she said earlier this year
about what her Zen practice has taught her about the holiness, the preciousness
of the world:
What is is enough.
You don’t have to add anything to reality to feel awe, or to feel respect, or
to see the radiance of existence. Radiance simply is. . . . It may seem
simplistic, but I truly believe that if you put a person in a prison cell with
nothing but the chance and the desire to pay attention, everything they need to
know about the radiance of the world is there, available. [Jane Hirschfield,
“Think Assailable Thoughts or Be Lonely”, Poetry,
February, 2012]
Everything we need to know about the
radiance of the world is there, available.
That’s not only a mystic insight.
That’s the truth at the center of Christianity. The Word has become flesh and lived among us,
full of grace and truth. The great gift
of Christmas for you and me this morning is a further revealing of what the birth
of Jesus means for us. In John’s words,
that birth means that we have been given “power to become children of
God”. To William Blake it means that God
now displays a human form. To Jane
Hirschfield it means that radiance simply is. The Word has become flesh and
lived among us. You, your life, your
household, your community, your world—all display the meaning and purpose and
radiance of God. The One whom we welcome
at Christmas is not a strange visitor from another planet. The One we welcome at Christmas is us, and we
are him.
As you go about your life in the
next twelve days, try to pay attention to signs of this radiance and blessing
as they reveal themselves both within and outside you. See that radiance when you look in the
mirror. See that radiance when you
attend to the creation. Be open to that
blessing when you encounter others, perhaps in surprising and unexpected places
and ways. Christmas opens us up, as
Blake says,
To see a World
in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven
in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity
in the palm of your hand
And Eternity
in an hour
The
Word has become flesh and has lived among us and lives among us now. You and
your world and your life and relationships are holy in ways we can only now
begin to imagine. Snoopy may think of
Charlie Brown as the “round headed-kid”, but if there’s one thing I’m sure of,
it’s that the God we know in Jesus remembers his name. Amen.
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