Dear Fellow Travelers,

Hannah is adamant that the figures in the manger scene in our Christmas Angel are Mama, Papa and Hannah. No Joseph, Mary, and Jesus baby. No way. I have tried to dissuade her from this fantasy, mostly because it disturbs the way I want to experience the scene. But that is why I use the word adamant above: Hannah simply reasserts who is who, sometimes accompanied by “Nein!”

As I was talking with Almut about this, she suggested that Hannah had a point. “One can see one self in the scene,” she said. Then the light clicked on, “Of course! It is like the Jesuit ‘Imaginative Prayer’ practice of projecting yourself into the story” I replied. “Nein, it is deeper,” she said. “We really are Joseph and Mary and Jesus.” Then I grasped it (however faintly): Not delusions of grandeur, but the vision of the holy in all the ordinary, even in our own ordinary stories. The thing that makes our family sacred (not metaphorically “sacred,” but really sacred) shares the same numinous (or Divine) quality of that birth on that night. All the sacredness comes from the same place and is the same thing.

We are Bethlehem. We are the stable. We are the holy family.

This is the vision of the mystics over the centuries that has often gotten them into trouble (good trouble, as the civil rights pioneer John Lewis called it).

So for this first Sunday in our journey, we invite you to behold the presence of God in your life.

To do so, you might choose one of two exercises:

1) Behold the presence of God, the numinous, in a manger scene (even this contemporary version below, commissioned by the Guardian newspaper). You can project yourself into it, seeing yourself as one of the characters and telling the story from within, as the Jesuits propose. Or,

2) You can recall some scene in your life where you felt the presence of God, some “manger moment” from your own life story, and behold the faint image of the presence of God there. I outline this practice below.

And as always, may Christmas find you where you are.

-Chuck (with strong assist from Hannah & Almut)

A practice in Beholding

We have mentioned two meditative practices in this post, one the Jesuit practice of Imaginative Prayer and the other beholding the sacred in your ordinary life. For the Jesuit approach, see this post from a previous 12 Days of Christmas series. It provides a step by step guide that you could use with any manger scene.

For the practice of beholding the presence of God in your own life, I provide a few steps below as a tentative guide. Please consider the comments at the end before you walk through the steps.

1) Recall some moment in your own history. I called this earlier a “manger moment.” This is a moment when sacred meaning from the manger story breaks through into your own life.

I remember, for instance, singing morning prayer while holding my daughter up into the first sunrise of her life (she was born short before midnight). But I can see this same shimmer of the sacred today when she turns to me and smiles. Your moment does not have to be family, it can be any moment of nurture or connection.

2) What is the setting of the story? Give detail. What time of year is it? What does the place look and smell like? Who are the characters in the story? Why are they there?

3) Choose a particular crucial moment toward the middle of the story. What are the characters feeling and thinking then? Don’t think forward to outcomes, but stay in that moment.

4) Now look with compassion on each person or interaction or context. And look for where that person or that interaction might show some hint of the sacred, something deeper than happiness, where God’s presence shimmers. Try to give some few words or images for this presence, sit with it, speak with it, meditate on it without judgment.

Now for the last comment. Do not do this lightly with just any memory, particularly with dangerous ones. Practice instead with ordinary ones. Begin again with the ordinary, and look for the holy within it.

And yes, May Christmas find you where you are.

This post is part of our 12 Days of Christmas Series 2021/22: “Always we begin again…”, a Contemplative Journey towards the heart of Christmas. To enter our virtual gathering space or to subscribe click here. To share your thoughts with us, write us here or comment below.

To offer your gift for this journey, click here.

Peace and Blessings, Almut & Chuck