I had a strange series of dreams this week about babies. In
the first dream, I had a new baby, but he didn’t require anything of me. Most
of the time, somebody else was taking care of him, and when he was with me, he
didn’t ever cry; he was never hungry; he never needed his diapers changed. He
just slept soundly at the foot of my bed in a little crib. I woke up from this
dream sad and disturbed, as if I had been deprived of something.
And then I dreamed that I was out
walking in the field behind the church. It was late in the afternoon on
Christmas Eve and was starting to get dark. I found a tent pitched under the
trees in the very back corner of the field, and I heard a baby crying inside. Approaching
timidly, I saw a young couple with tired circles under their eyes huddled
inside with an inconsolable newborn baby. “Can we stay here?” the young man
asked me with feigned bravado. “We’ll be moving on in the morning.” He must
have heard the “let me suggest a good homeless shelter” speech from priests
before, because he added quickly, “We don’t want our baby in one of those
shelters downtown. You don’t know what kind of germs he’ll pick up in there.
He’s only 5 days old.” I told them that they could stay—after all, who can
refuse to help a couple with a baby on Christmas Eve—and then, quite brave and
welcoming in my dreams, I invited them to come to the family service at 5:30.
In the strange way of dreams, I then found myself transported to the packed
church during the Christmas Eve service, and the couple with the baby must have
accepted my invitation, because there they were in the “Jury Box” in the back,
and that baby was still crying. Crying during the songs, crying during the
Christmas Story, crying during the Eucharistic Prayer. It was almost
unbearable. And then, all of a sudden, we weren’t in the church any longer, but
we were at my house! It was still Christmas Eve night, and my grown children
were home visiting, filling every bed in the house. They were all asleep. Yet,
lo and behold, that young homeless family was there, too, right in the middle
of my living room, with their dirty clothes that reeked of wood smoke and their
muddy shoes, and that poor crying baby. “Where can I put them,” I remember
thinking, “where they won’t keep us awake all night? What am I going to do?” I
kept fretting to myself. “What am I going to do? If only this baby would quit
crying!” And then I woke up, with a sermon to write.
At first, I thought of this crying
baby dream as a wake-up call for me to hear and respond to the pain of the
world. Perhaps. But I believe that there is more. When we picture the Holy
Family and the animals and the shepherds gathered around the Christ child in
Bethlehem, how often do we have the sound turned down in our minds so that we
can play our own favorite accompaniment? If you are like me, you hear “Silent
Night” playing in the background, along with the peaceful lullaby “Away in the
Manger,” where “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” Even though we know
enough to admit to the paradox of God being born in the roughness of the
stable, surrounded by the smelly animals, the dirty straw, and the poverty of
Mary and Joseph, we imagine Christmas night as a night of soothing peace in the
presence of a sleepy, cooing baby—a baby like the one in my first dream, a baby
who doesn’t require anything of us, a baby who needs nothing except to be born
and admired.
Anyone who has ever been around a
real baby, though, knows that there is no such thing as a baby who doesn’t
require anything from us. I remember thinking, as a twenty-three year old new
mom and seminary student, that I would go back to class with my newborn after
the Christmas break. All I had to do was to put him in his little carrier and
sit him down on the floor while I took notes, right? I’ll never forget that
first day of classes. After a sleepless colicky night, as soon as I got us both
dressed, he spit up all over his jumper. As I changed him, he peed right on my
wool sweater. By the time I had changed clothes, his diapers were oozing, and
he was crying again. I never made it to class.
If God comes to us as a baby, God
comes to us as one that we cannot control, one who disrupts our carefully laid
plans and schedules, and one whose cries demand our most loving attention. Rowan
Williams puts it beautifully: “If God is with us as a child, he is certainly
with us as one who calls out our tenderness and compassion, but he does so by
an insistent presence without shame or restraint, crying and clutching.”[1] In
the manger, our sweet baby Jesus was crying and clutching. Crying in pain,
crying in need, crying for our attention, crying for us to hear him, crying
like the Father must cry in sadness and longing for our hearts and for our
world. Clutching onto our fingers, our hearts, our wills; clutching at whatever
bits of transformable life come within his reach.
Today, God comes among us, pitching
his tent in the back field of humanity, not just so that we can bow before him
or invite him to church with us or drop him off at the homeless shelter. God
comes among us to disrupt, to confront, to grasp hold of our hearts, to
transform our relationships, to change our world.
May we all find room in our lives
this Christmas to respond to a crying world—but also to a crying God--rather
than being satisfied with a God who sleeps quietly at the foot of our beds.
