The lovely old carols played and replayed till their effect is like a dentist’s drill, the banalities of the pulpit, people spending money they can’t afford for presents you neither need nor want. Yet for all our efforts, we’ve never quite managed to ruin it. That in itself is part of the miracle, a part you can see.

Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived us otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed – as a matter of cold, hard fact – all it’s cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word became flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not touching. It is not beautiful. It is unimaginable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God . . . who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.”

Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life (Mary) holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death (this child) takes at her breast. (Adapted from Christmas, pp. 27-29, in Whistling In The Dark: An ABC Theologized, by Frederick Buechner.)

—Pastor Lamont