THE LAST OF THE MAGI

I am very grateful to a beloved aunt who introduced me to Aunti-Climax – that uninvited relative who always manages to slip in unannounced smack in the middle of big, much anticipated events like birthdays and Christmas, dropping off giant parcels of crabby. She visited our home on Christmas Day, but only briefly – her visit is always so much less disruptive if you remember to forewarn your children of the inevitability of her coming.

The lead up to Christmas is so filled with pageantry, glossy shoes, ribbons, mass choirs pressing our hearts in to the sacred. We gaze upon ancient stars, submitting to the hush that our soul demands as it marches reverently in line to the stable. Our spirit bends its knees before the holy, holy, and waits. Everything is mystery; secrets are kept, voices lower to whispers, doors are locked, presents put on paper veils.

Christmas morning is chaos and crumpling, as gifts are undressed, embraced and stacked into piles. On that sacred morning there is nothing I want more than to worship God in rumpled pajamas. I want all the carolling to stop, to make room for the sound of laughing and loud voices calling up and down the stairs. I am done with pageantry – I want children running in circles around the house bumping into tables, knocking ornaments over, irreverent, full of life, happy. My soul wants to cast off its trappings of sober stillness and meditation. My soul wants to rise and twirl. My soul wants to stop singing about rejoicing, to stop demonstrating appropriate amounts of gratitude for all its blessings, to stop burning candles and watching contemplatively as flames flicker and dance in windows – it wants to get on with it.

I see it on my children’s faces – about half way through the day, when the better half of the toys have been unleashed from their plastic bindings, and lips are full and sweet with chocolate.

Is that it?

It’s a letdown. Anti-climax. It’s everything we hoped it would be, everything we planned for it to be. We received what we asked for, exactly on the day that we asked for it to be given – it was all handed to us with blinking lights and buttery cookies and shiny paper. It’s good. It’s wonderful. It’s too much, too generous, we didn’t deserve it. We’re grateful. Still, something inside us whispers, That’s it?

It’s over?

That’s what all the fuss has been about?

It is not ingratitude, it is not gluttony – it is only that we have become intoxicated by our own expectations. The fulfillment of a long-deferred hope is so very seldom what we imagine it to be.

And Jesus wasn’t – he was not what anyone expected him to be.  Jesus was not the kind of saviour we thought we were waiting for, he didn’t do what we thought he would do, he didn’t behave the way we imagined that he would.

If I’m honest, he still doesn’t. Sometimes, after the angel choirs have finished with their annunciations, after the shepherds have gone home, after the dramas are done, after the stars stop being road maps, my soul can gaze upon that little babe in the manger, crying and needing diaper changes and not behaving like Divinity at all, and it can feel a little bit let down. That baby won’t even do anything for another thirty years. It’s nothing if not anti-climactic.

I felt it when each of my children was born – both the miracle and the letdown. Is that it? After all that anticipation, all that preparation, all that longing and dreaming and work, I thought I would experience something more. I didn’t ever imagine the birth of my child to be anti-climactic.

This is why I think that Christmas and babies and Jesus himself, despite all the longing and pondering and anticipation, despite all the joy and wonder and holy adoration, are blessings that still manage to sneak up on us and catch us unprepared.

You can’t prepare for that glow that fills you – somewhere around the third day – after  you have let go your affection for expectation, after you have relinquished your hold on hope and longing, after you have given and received and have given thanks, and have realized that nothing really has been added to you that wasn’t already there.

You can’t prepare for Emmanuel – God with us, God born in our hearts, God breathing resurrection life into us from the inside. God is not how we imagine, God does not fit into the space we have prepared, God does not make us feel the way we believe we are supposed to feel. We are satisfied – but still we are not really satisfied.

This year, I saw Aunti-Climax for who she is. I recognized her – how she comes so unabashedly after every offering of worship, after every rejoicing in the miraculous, after every celebration of life and love and God.

She is the last of the magi, come to show us the space – the sacred void. Our soul knows it, it feels the vacuum, it whispers to us, No, that’s not it. There is more.