Reflection on Christmas: The Irrational Season

In a well-known poem, the writer Madeleine L’Engle describes Advent as “the irrational season/when love blooms bright and wild.” I love this idea. It flies in the face of “the reason for the season” that often obscures the deeper meanings of these dark, cold, silent nights. The crankiness that descends upon me when the gauntlet that is the holidays begins is not irrational. It arrives on Black Friday, that monument to greed and the good deal the day after Thanksgiving. It is more than the commercialism (although that is horrific), the marketing ploys to start holiday sales in July or to garner social credit by not being open on Thanksgiving. Nor the images of shoppers duking it out over mammoth toys.

No. The hoopla that surrounds these not-so-holy days reanimates powerful myths of perfection. Perfect family, perfect home, perfect tradition. If I am not mindful and diligent the holidays, or rather my anticipation of the holidays, puts me, a survivor of violence, into an entirely rational horror film frame of mind.

Maybe that is the reason why every year I anticipate the arrival of the wacky new movies that mine dysfunctional families for comedic effect. This year’s entries include “The Coopers,” four generations of a family who gather and relearn the importance of kinship. And there’s a new Christmas horror movie, “The Krampus.” The Krampus is an ancient “Germanic alpine legend, which posits Krampus as a goat-like entity that comes at Christmastime to punish children who were bad—something of a darker, shadowy counterpart to St. Nicholas”. In addition to the troubling practice of coercing “good” behavior from children with the fear of punishment, it is said that Krampus appears when the true spirit of Christmas is lost.

What is the “true” spirit of Christmas? The carols, garland, and twinkly lights of these days cloak a different reality that many survivors of sexual and domestic violence slog through - freedom from violence often comes at a high price: separation, distance, and even rootlessness. The genuine joys and hopes of survival are challenged when the idealization of home as the place of belonging reaches its surreal zenith during this season. For some, thankfully, home is not a myth or longed for ideal. For others, home and belonging must be found in the liminal space in-between.

So, it is an “irrational season” where solace and comfort may be found in the darkness, cold, and silence of winter. Embracing the contrast of light in the darkness gives hope. It speaks of the attention that truth-telling requires— instead of running after an unreal, ungraspable ideal, an artificial light. Instead of being wedded to a fixed past and a figment of a future. If I pay attention, these winter days remind me of presence, of silence, of a quest for peace and understanding grounded in the lived experience of persons who persist with grace and resilience. I journey home to the familiar, quiet understanding that love can be found in the spaces between.

The Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue describes this place as “a frontier region and intense threshold.” It is a sacred space that “opens up and suggests itself as an ancient circle of belonging in which past and future, time lived and time to be lived form ultimate presence.” It is a “sacred ground from where it is wise to begin a journey: initiation as the journey of life in Spirit, and requiem as the beginning of the invisible journey” (John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, 160-161).

I find the true Spirit of Christmas when I remember that we celebrate the birth of solidarity, through the bone and sinew of human flesh, the totality of human experience, light and dark. God with us. Meister Eckhart understood that “God is always needing to be born.” Without the sweet darkness and silence of this irrational season, I would not be able to witness the blooming of love “bright and wild.”