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This is an extract taken from an interview in 1989 with David Hardin and Frederick Buechner on the feast of Christmas.
Just a reminder that the official feast of Christmas isn't over until the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord which this year is celebrated on Monday, January 9.
Full article was taken from here. ( Update- Sadly this link is now broken. I've searched for another source but can't find one.)
Anyway, here's the extract ....
Anyway, here's the extract ....
Buechner : "It seems to me one of the miracles of the Christian faith is that the
feast of Christmas survives what we have done to it -- all the hoopla,
clap-trap, commercialism and all the rest of it that I don't even need
to go into because everybody knows what it is. Yet, somehow it does
survive.
This extraordinary moment when the whole year slows down and
you point to this unimaginable event where God somehow became made
flesh.
It is so cataclysmic; it is so extraordinary; we try to make it
habitable; we try to make it cozy; we make creches and we sing Christmas
carols. At best, it can be touching and real.
At its worst it can be
cheap and banal. What often occurs to me about Christmas is that if it
is really true, if the word really became flesh, if the mystery behind
all that really took the form of a human life, this vulnerable, tiny
human life whose skull you could have crushed with one hand, then there
must have been extraordinary anguish and intergalactic struggle to have
this extraordinary thing come to pass.
It wasn't an easy thing to
happen. There is a kind of terror about Christmas, a kind of holiness
and awesomeness about Christmas that we tend to forget.
The resurrection
and the life came down and tasted the bitterness of death.
Hardin: It is almost as though we say, "I've got to
get through this. As soon as I'm through it, then I am going to sit back
and take in Christ and this wonderful event of God's gift to us all.
But, I've got to get everything out of the way and usually that ends at
about 6:00 PM on Christmas Eve."
Buechner: Do I have time to tell you a story about Christmas?
Hardin: Sure.
Buechner: One Christmas Eve, exhausted, about to go
to bed having put all the presents under the tree, I remembered that our
neighbor had asked us to feed his sheep every day he was gone.
The snow
was falling -- this was in Vermont - my brother and I went down the
hill to feed the sheep. We went into the barn and we got the bales of
hay. We took them out into the sheep shed, cut the string, turned on the
forty-watt bulb and began scattering the hay.
The sheep came bumbling
up, getting close to it. With the smell of the hay, the smell of the
sheep and the snow coming down, all of a sudden I realized where I was.
I
was in the manger and I almost missed it.
Hardin: You were in the right place.
It seems to me that in a way, you could say that the world itself is a manger where God is continually being born into our lives, into the things that happen to us.
Most of the time, if you are like me, you are looking the other way."
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