Feeling Christmas

 By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’ (Luke 1:78-79)

Having loved a child, you never get beyond the longing to envelop them in your arms and love away their pain. Their age doesn’t matter, nor does yours. You hear struggle in their voice, and love’s longing springs to life, your heart aching to enfold them in a circle of love where burdens are shared and the load lightened.

It never goes away. The years do nothing to diminish the desire to bathe them in the love first awakened by their infant faces, those faces now lined with the anxious wear having lived, loved and lost.

Love’s longing is the truest, most noble and beautiful part of us, the most divine and the answer to my annual Christmas prayer, a prayer that has never gone unrequited.

Each year I pray to feel Christmas, ever hungry to be enveloped in the Love who comes to us, incarnate in the Lord Jesus Christ. I cannot abide the thought that Advent days would slip by without tears filling my eyes with the unspeakable beauty of Love’s sweet presence in the poverty of my heart, making me rich once more.

Some might argue this is a selfish prayer, self-indulgent and insensitive to the millions who will never enjoy the kind of life I take for granted. Or maybe it’s merely the yearning to escape the sad welter of the daily news where what bleeds … leads.

Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I think my prayer is as average as I am, normal, typical, the common longing of human hearts hungry for home, for the unfailing Love we each secretly crave.

So, I pray it ever year: Let me feel Christmas, Holy One; bathe me in the beauty of your heart. I hunger to feel what you feel for me and for the whole broken world, at least to what paltry extent that I can.

It’s an audacious petition. Who can feel what God feels, if it is even proper to attribute human emotions to the greatness of the Unimaginable One? But this year, again, I realize that the Holy One answered that prayer long ago in love’s longing for my own children and those others for whom I am moved to pray.

Love’s longing appears, even here, in this feeble heart of mine, as I think of my beloved ones, yearning to sweep each of them up and enfold them love’s healing circle. And each time it happens I feel Christmas once more. I feel what God feels, love’s holy longing, for me, for you, for this whole beloved world.

For the Holy One sees it all, all that we are, all this broken world with all its wounded souls and tortured places, longing to sweep us up in Love’s healing embrace.

Surely, we know the feeling.

David L. Miller