The Christmas tree is tall and wide, and its sharp smell fills the room. It seems to own the space around it, and the rest of us hover in its shadow, coming and going like ghosts or puffs of wind. Somehow, the tree feels more real than the thing we call “reality.”
My child self draws near and immerses her face in its branches. Inside, a different world is revealed: one made of green-black patterns and euphoric points of light. My child self is among the stars, and the stars are close to her. The air is warm and verdant, and time does not exist.
In a moment, voices break the spell.
•••
Beneath the tree, there is a little house—or actually, a stable. It looks brown with age, like old porcelain, but it’s made of resin and stamped with a factory mark from 1982. Inside its shadowed interior, tiny brown figures sit in dignified stillness, heads bowed forever, contemplating the tiniest figure of all: a swaddled infant on a tuft of molded hay.
What are they thinking? What is it like in their tiny world, outside of time, bowing forever in quiet reverence? Are they at peace? My child self thinks they are. She thinks they are the most peaceful creatures she’s ever seen.
The Transcendentals
In many of his books, Fr. Spitzer writes about the Transcendentals: eternal qualities that resonate with every soul, kindling our awareness of the divine. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty are well-known Transcendentals discussed by ancient and medieval philosophers. Added to these, Fr. Spitzer identifies the Transcendental of “Home.” This is the time of year when many of us feel that sense of Home most vividly and piercingly. And with it, we feel other Transcendentals too, whether we are religious people or not: the goodness of welcome and generosity, the truth that our lives have meaning, and the beauty of light, ornament, complexity, grace, and harmony.
Childlike Faith
I think faithfulness isn’t usually born in intellectual assent to true propositions about the universe. Instead, it’s born in “home” moments that take us to places deeper, more familiar, and more comforting than our very houses themselves. These home moments come from spaces and smells and shapes and things—the sensory, the beautiful, the embracing—not from doctrines or words.
This time of year excels at creating those moments. And it is from such moments that a new generation will know faith for the first time—a faith that is not articulated, but felt, and that shapes deep memories that will never quite go silent, even if the rememberer drifts and challenges and rages and blames.
So many of us wander from the path, growing cynical and estranged. But maybe it can sometimes be enough, as life reaches its end, to remember a tiny brown infant on a bed of hay. How blessed are the ones who made such memories possible! There are memories, I think, that can usher a soul into heaven.
Providing Space for Wonder
Of course, I’m not a child anymore. But as I grow older, face health challenges, and watch my own children grow up, I hope I can provide some of the same “home” memories that inspired the child I used to be. I hope I can make spaces and foster experiences that imprint deeply on people who need them, reflecting, by the grace of God, a sense of meaning and peace that strikes to the heart.
And I hope the same for our disconnected, low-trust, mass-produced culture. This Advent, may we learn to wonder again, and to create moments of wonder. May we remind ourselves, and those we love, of the flesh-and-blood God who broke bread with us, died on a tree, and lay in a stable under the stars.
