When Jospeh found out that Mary, his betrothed, was pregnant there might have been a cosmic crisis. If he had not been a good man he might have openly shamed her and thrown her out. Instead, he listened to a dream and took her home as his wife. That dream keeps us going in our personal lives and as a human family throughout history.
It is the dream that despite dukkha – a foundational concept of Asian wisdom – life is bearable and ultimately bears fruit. Dukkha means suffering in the deepest sense but also just life’s tendency to disappoint, derail and get messy. The word contains the image of a faulty hub in a wheel which gives a bumpy ride or even crashes the vehicle. To put it mildly, things rarely go according to plan and initial optimism is soon undermined.
‘Happy Christmas to you, too,’ you might be saying. Actually, without figuring this truth into the picture, happiness becomes an unfunny joke. Jesus, we hear, came ‘to save us from our sins’. The work of saving, or putting-right, started from the moment of conception with the narrowly averted crisis of shame and social exclusion. It continued through the homelessness of his birth and the painful exile that followed. His subsequent life and way of dying were also full of dukkha. Think of him as a wheelwright, a handyman who fixes faulty wheels and gives us a smoother ride. This is, however, not merely temporary comfort. It exposes the real certainty of the waking dream that life is redeemable, that we are loveable and even that the final end is not the end.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer died at the age of thirty-nine, after two gruelling years in a Nazi prison cell. His destiny had denied him the ordinary happiness he sought yet, through his manner of living, he became one of the most influential witnesses of Christian faith in our time. Writing to his fiancé about Advent, he said that prison life reminded him of the true meaning of this season. ‘One waits and hopes and potters about,’ he told her, ‘but in the end what we do is of little consequence, for the door is shut and can only be opened from the outside.’
We can still celebrate a happy Christmas while man’s inhumanity to man is raging on every continent, the good are mocked and the dealers in darkness continue their campaign against the light. Christmas is a happiness flowing from the pleroma, the fullness of being. It is not a fantasy but a dream proving itself real even when the applecart is upset – yet again reminding us of the inevitability of dukkha. Piercing through all the disappointments is the goodness of people like Joseph, the openness of people like Mary and wise people who come a long way to help us, hard-working people who get little recognition but don’t give up, not to say the occasional glorious angel who pays a brief visit with a life-changing message.
The door is being opened by the birth of the Word: in eternity, in Bethlehem and in our heart. All we have to do now is go forward into all the joy and peace that it opens in us.
