From the Mind of Meegs

So here's another go at a spiritually-inclined entry with a title inspired by a Christmas carol. Hopefully, it's a bit more hopeful (no pun intended) than my last spiritually-inclined entry with a title inspired by a Christmas carol.

In my opinion, Do You Hear What I Hear? is one of the more overlooked Christmas carols. It's not hard to see why it gets passed up. It features people, animals, and one typically mute entity (the night wind) passing news of the incarnation along like some giant game of telephone. Pretty nonsensical, that. But once you get past the talking sheep and such, I think there's something very profound at the heart of the song. The song rests on three questions, questions that might appear rather simple: Do you see? Do you hear? Do you know?

Are you paying attention? Are you noticing this?

I think you could make the argument that the entire theme of the Bible is God trying to get people to pay attention. In the Old Testament, God sends prophet after prophet to Israel, hoping to get them to listen. The key prayer for the Jewish people is the Shema, a word that means "to hear" and comes from the first word of the prayer. "Hear, O Israel!" If I were Eugene Peterson and was all trying to put the Bible into contemporary vernacular (not a dig at Peterson, btw), I'd probably translate that something like, "Listen up, knuckleheads
--don't miss this!" Do you hear what I hear?

Then we get to the New Testament, and Jesus. And he walks around, telling cryptic stories and performing miracles, hoping to get everyone to see that the Kingdom of God is at hand, even though it looks nothing like what they expected. "Open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest!" Just in case the people are really dense (they usually are) and missing they point (they usually do), he opens the eyes of the blind. He gives people their sight, literally. Do you see what I see?

Further on in the New Testament, we get the early church. And Peter and Paul and all those other early Christians make it their business to go to all corners of the world, telling everyone what they know about Christ. They have finally seen and they have finally heard, and now they want to pass this knowledge on to others, via letters and in face-to-face meetings. And in one of those letters, Paul claims that God gave us "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ." Do you know what I know?

And since I'm on the topic of arguments I think you can make, here's another. Christianity isn't about the do and the don't and the good evangelical checklist. Christianity is about cultivating a divine mindfulness, though I really wish there was a less new agey way of putting that. (I'm open to suggestions.) It's about paying attention. It's about noticing. It's about not letting any of this pass you by, because it's all meaningful. It's about subverting a culture that encourages us all to live like consumeristic automatons.

Christianity is about seeing. It's about looking into the faces of friends and family and seeing them, really seeing them for who they are. It's about seeing the poor and the marginalized and all the others who are mostly invisible to our society. It's about looking at the stars or the mountains and seeing a God who must be even brighter than the stars and grander than the mountains. It's about looking past the outlines of this world and seeing the countours of a redemptive story that's being told even now. It's about seeing the Kingdom of God at hand. It's about seeing what we can't see.

Paul got it. In the same passage where he talks about being given the knowledge of the glory of God in Christ (do you know what I know?), he says that we fix our eyes on what is unseen. I love that because, on the one hand, it makes no sense at all. Fix our eyes on what is unseen? Isn't that sort of, maybe...I guess "impossible" is the word I'm groping for? On the other hand, it makes perfect sense. We have to take what we've got here and now
--our physical sense of sight--and connect that to what is, right now, just beyond our reach--the eternal glory that Paul talks about. Because that's what Christianity is about: connecting the present with the future, the temporal with the eternal, the seen with the unseen.

In fact, "impossible" might be just the right word for this task. Yet I suppose it's worth noting that the events we commemorate this month include a young girl who asked an angel (in keeping with the contemporary vernacular theme), "Ummm...I'm sorry. What the hell are you talking about?"  The reply? " You heard me right. But nothing is impossible with God."