for them, held in His Mother's arms for them, held up by His Mother for us.
Only the God who made the vast reaches of space, its black holes, its sprawling galaxies, its supernova, could have made Himself so small. And what is it we see in that small-ness? A child we want to lift to our breast, a child we want to sing to, a child we want to rock in our arms.
What is the word for something so magnificent and so clever, so grand and irresistible? So splendid and so mun-dane? No wonder that Christmas remains irrepressible, no matter how its critics rise and fall.
And they do come in all guises, from the strict Christians who deplore the hymns in the commercial department stores, to the skeptics who want to ban the Christmas family from secular space. Protestants once banned the medieval Christian pageants; they drove the Holy Family from the church square.
Puritans in America went so far as to make the celebration of Christmas illegal. Puritanical secular critics denounce the street decorations that proliferate at Christmas, and the piped-in carols that bring shoppers to the commercial mall.
And yet, as I have suggested earlier, the Christmastime commercial mall is sometimes the only place where one can, in the bustling concrete cities of the modern world, feel the power of the sacred as the old hymns echo and re-echo the shattering sweetness of the original feast.
One has to question the power with which religious puritans and secular puritans try to stamp out all ancient religious feasts in America, how they become bedfellows in their war on Hallowe'en, and their war on Christmas - and how determined they are to rid American experience of the ancient seasonal calendar that once undergirded rural and urban life.
They know not what they do.
Hallowe'en survives with its rich echoes of the Feast of All Souls, and the Feast of All Saints, and is being reconfigured in many places in America; thank Heaven, it refuses to die.
The Holy Family always survives. The Christ Child will not be denied. And everywhere on December 24 and 25, the Child is born again in the midst of inevitable winter darkness and reaches out with warm delicate and curling fingers: A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices For yonder breaks a new and glorious dawn.
This is the mystery that rivets me to the heart of Christ.
This is one way of talking of the miracle that theologians have written volumes to describe. This is the mystery that drives my life. You became a child for me, a babe that helpless?
What can I do for you?
This love, this pondering, this obsession with God as a Human Being, has been the fruit of my labors in writing two books dedicated to Christ.
But my education from 2002 on involved not only an obsession with God's mercy and love in the pages of Scripture that I so effortlessly embraced. It also involved many new experiences of what religion meant to people in America, and what the contemporary concerns of my church were.
As I wrote one book and went on to write another, I was in fact traveling two distinct paths. One path was to the Christ Child, but the other path brought me deeper and deeper into the wilderness in which I am still, to some extent, lost.
Chapter Thirteen
The path to Christ is the path I wanted to travel from the very beginning. I wanted to understand Scripture, but to put it more humbly, I wanted to know it. And knowing it involved intense rereading of the Gospels and the Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles, and continuous exploration of the Old Testament as well.
I expected to travel this path. I began with so little knowledge of Scripture that it was embarrassing. The Gospels were inert to me. I couldn't tell the voice of one Evangelist from that of another. I didn't know which incidents occurred in Mark, as opposed to Luke; or what was unique to Matthew; or what was so stunningly unique about the Gospel of John.
Also because I'd heard every word of Scripture from the pulpit, it was hard not to skip over the familiar passages as I read, denying myself an experience of the fluid and living Gospel.
Reverend Rick Warren mentions this very problem in The Purpose Driven Life. "We think we know what a verse says because we have read it or heard it so many times," says Reverend Rick. "Then when we find it quoted in a