Put Christ into Christmas! (2)

First, when we put Christ into Christmas, our hearts are reveived by a renewed sense of the divine at the heart of life. On February 24, 1948, one of the most unusual operations in medical history took place in Ohio State University’s department of research surgery. A stony steath was removed from around the heart of Harry Beshara, a man thirty years of age. When only a boy he had been shot accidentally by a playmate with a .22 caliber rifle. The bullet had lodged in his heart but begun to form over the protective covering of the heart and gradually was strangling of the ribs and moving the left lung to one side. Then the stony coating was lifted from the heart as an orange is peeled. Immediately the pressure on the heart was reduced, and it responded by expanding and pumping normally. “I feel a thousand per cent better already,” said the patient soon after the operation.

There is a parable of life here. Our hearts develop a hard protective coating because of accidents and incidents of life. They are coated by the deposits of a thousand deceits and rebuffs. They are hardened by the pressures of sensitive of the divine. Ever so gradually we find it easier to sneer than to pray. It becomes simpler to work than to worship. Self-satisfied, proud, often cynical, our hearts need a spiritual operation that only Christmas can perform when we dare to surrender our hearts’ burden before the cradle of Bethlehem.

In the shadow of a little town on the wondrous night of long ago a ragged little boy watched the procession of the kings and noblemen with their chest of rare gifts for the Christ Child. His eyes filled with tears. “If only a pearl would fall from the hand of a king, then I could go too. But I am ashamed to go. I have no gifts for the Saviour.”

He was about to turn and run into the hills. Suddenly, an angel appeared before him out of the night and said, “Give what is closest to your heart.” They say that a bright star, the Christmas star, appeared in the heavens over Bethlehem as a ragged boy placed a faded blue sack beside the rubies, the gold pieces, the myyrth and frankincense. It contained the things closest to his heart: a sea shell that whispered in his ears, a piece of rope used to climb high trees, a jagged slingshot made from a forked limb, and a butterfly preserved in candlewax.

“The tappering years have moulded many things since that night in Bethlehem.” During those years men have discovered a wondrous thing. When in quiet adoration they bring to the Master the things dearest to them, the tough coating of their hearts is lifted and stars appear in their skies again.

Phillips Osgood puts this idea in these words:

He who devotes his utmost to the immediate is the creature of the temporary and insignificant. Exclusively to identify my life with the materialistic will be to make myself the slave of the accidental. If the mundane thing to which I have harnessed myself goes to flinders, I myself go with it; I have no stance for the abiding . . . I stand or fall with the accidental—money, power, fame—if the accidental is my goal. But if I am caught up by the glories which shine in the highest realities; if I bind myself, no matter in what awesome humility, to the values which motivate the universe; if I take for my ideal such a life as that of the Christ who lives in God, the spirit behind all values, worths, beauties, and joys; if I, too, lift up my life to God, I shall be above the swirl of the accidental; I shall have the infinite coursing through me.

We are like the man in the fable who had a mania for building towers. He finally succeeded in building one tower with eleven thousand stairs. Nothing like it had been made before. He was very proud. He was about to congratulate himself on his accomplishment. Then the standing on top of his tower, he looked up and saw the stars above!

God grant us the grace at Christmas to pause in our stair building—our labour and our concerns—and look up and see stars. At least see the one star leading to the Christ of the Christmas. Our hearts are revived by a renewed sense of the divine at the heart of life.