Without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.  –J.R.R. Tolkien

I was spending some time in my Advent devotional recently, returning to a place that has become tradition–not to mention a reflection and resting place–this time of year (see also: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, any airing of The Nutcracker, and, oddly enough, Mickey’s Christmas Carol). On this particular day, John the Baptist was the subject matter, his forerunner status mentioned along with his designation of peace-bearer. It left me picturing him as an asexual, amiable, rugged Fabio with hands full of honey, and I considered his cousin J.C., the birthday boy himself, and their differences. Because Jesus, the baby-turned-man, is mentioned as bearing peace and swords, and it kind of made me wonder if there was a good cop/bad cop scenario at play here.

I thought about it for a while, and a bit more reverently, and that’s what we do this time of year, isn’t it? Think about what we believe, during these days that are shorter but somehow more sacred, once you’re away from the mall at least. They feel dipped in quietness and holiness, dripping with lights and pine needles and snowflakes, suffused with tones of gold and silver, imbued with a meaning the world can’t give or explain, baptized in a sense of more. I thought about it during reports of protests and violence, lives lost on city streets, fathers gone in a moment, forever. I thought about what it means that we’re asked to believe that he showed up as a virgin’s swollen belly, how he strains credulity and boundaries–the peace and the swords and the table-turning in the temple and the water turning into wine and the overturning of expectations. I thought about it because I know plenty of people who don’t believe it and there’s a part of me that can’t blame them because a lot of them, these non-believers, are better Christians than I am, and this world is rife with sadness and fatherless and so barren, it would seem, of miracles, and this guy–this God, if you will or won’t–he was sort of all over the place, no? Not just one thing like John the Baptist, not amiable and working within the bounds of our believability or the limits of our thinking. But all over the place.

And that’s when something shifted into place for me, because I began to get it in a new way. Which, by the way, is one thing Christmas is great at–new gifts. The thing I began to understand is how he–how grace–how it’s not just one thing, because it’s everything. It’s the kindness to the children on his lap, it’s the table-turning in the temple, it’s bringing wine to the party, it’s calling out the zealots, it’s not condemning the prostitute. It’s knowing that sometimes what we call bad neighborhoods are hopeless ones.  It’s knowing that the orphans and fatherless are sometimes grown men now, and that they–along with the rest of us–we all have brokenness running through our veins. It’s looking into people’s hearts rather than at the color of their skin or uniform, at the size of their paycheck or the orientation of their sexuality. It’s more, and it’s deeper, than the bounds of our believability or the limits of our thinking. It’s everything.

It’s making space for the doubt because we are all doubters sometimes. It’s the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night. It’s the hospital stays and the healing, the restful nights and the sleepless ones, the conflict and the resolution. It’s the Christmas card photo and all the other ones that didn’t turn out. It’s everything, because he’s everything. Peace and sword, baby and God, believable and unbelievable. And a life with everything in it–the good and bad (as we define the terms), the easy and hard, the failures and victories, the disappointments and hurt alongside the hope and love–these are not contradictions to or separations from faith but the things that put us closer to it, bathe us more fully in the grace that refuses to be just one thing, in the God who refuses the same, who embodies the more.

Merry Christmas.