It's been an odd Advent. Hampered in "doing" by my recovery from surgery, I have had the opportunity to do a lot of reading and reflecting. I have been in midst of a personal quest for direction, which has lead to me to generate a pile of books that might help me get "answers". And with the tragic events of the last few days, again I find myself looking every where to find "answers".
So, imagine my confusion as I find myself coming back to two words over and over. Mystery and nuts. What??
Christmas, in a nutshell, is a mystery.
I've been reading God is in the Manger, an Advent devotional using Dietrich Bonhoeffer's writings. Week two was spent on the word mystery:
"The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty."
"How we fail to understand when we think the task...is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason! It's sole office is to...glorify Gods mystery precisely as mystery."
It's hard to get a grasp on mystery. It's hard to allow mystery to be the final answer.
"Children have open, wide-awake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery...we [adults] destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being."
I am comforted by these words when I think of the children who lost their lives last week. I see them entering heaven with wide-awake eyes, open to the mystery. Even as we here on earth remain, trying to find answers. Trying to understand what can not be understood.
And so it is with Christmas. We over complicate it. We want to understand. It is so simple, that we think we need to make it harder. It's like a Rube Goldberg experiment...because we will still end up at the same place, it just takes longer.
Christmas, in a nutshell, is a mystery. And that is the gift. In the midst of chaos, God loved us enough to send us a mystery in the form of a baby. Mystery is the gift. It lets us be free and not understand.
This is hard. And we are bad at it. But maybe it helps if we realize we are surrounded by all kinds of mystery that we never question. Like nuts. If you think about it, the inside of every nut is a mystery. We never know if the nut will be good, bad, whole, broken. We open it and just accept what we get. We accept the mystery.
I am not a poetry person, but today I read this poem. I was struck by the irony "I hate mysteries...and yet he sits all season snapping nuts".
May we all get a little nutty about the mystery this Christmas!
PS - I was also struck by the timely post of this video by my pastor as I pondered nuts....sometimes God knocks so loud the door just falls over.
