Is your nativity missing a dragon?

This Christmas, we might be closer than ever to the story’s origins. Terror. Surveillance. Poverty. Genocide. Perhaps it is time to add a dragon to tame creche scenes.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

The head of a giant paper dragon glows orange and red against a night sky.

Oliver Needham on Unsplash.

Advent is not Christmas. The wisdom of the church is this: humans need time to take stock of the grim reality of life, as the nights get even longer. We can’t skip forward with shopping bags and fairy lights to Christmas. These weeks of Advent prepare us. For the unexpected. For the necessity of grace.

Advent is the time the church reflects on its hierarchical structures, its imperialist tendencies, its obsession with power. And repents. It repents because it is about to celebrate that God’s greatest power move was to become powerless. Yes, the church forgets this annually. Sometimes centennially. But inbuilt within the church year is a season that forces it – and ourselves – to come face to face with our hypocrisy.

Advent begins in the darkest time of the year.

Advent is also an enforced time of waiting for the miracle of the unexpected, often in times of grave crisis. We, like the church, can be perpetrators, but we can also be victims. Another aspect of Advent is a vigilant time of waiting alongside the oppressed, in hope, for what we cannot see. For some people it involves fasting, a sign of repentance. For others, it is an advent wreath with daily readings and meditation. Still for others, it is a time to challenge rather than give in to our consumerist global empire.

Advent invites us to remember that God doesn’t come how or when we want. God cannot be manipulated. God can only be received, and most often by those who least expect him. Those on the margins. Those pregnant by accident. Those under tyrannical rule. Advent grows in the church a reverence for the downtrodden and the abused, if we are paying attention. Advent teaches that God comes to those who think they least deserve him.

What if we stretched out Advent across four weeks of waiting, of gestation, refusing to allow Big Corporate Christmas to deliver the baby prematurely?

The first Christian account of the birth of Jesus is not, surprisingly, in the gospels – the four biographies of Jesus’ life, composed within living memory of him. We are accustomed to this first century record of sheep and shepherds, stars and stables. But there is a poetic nativity story that is composed prior to all these histories of Jesus, hidden in the middle of the Apocalypse – the book of Revelation. Written just a couple decades after Jesus’ death, this story is of a woman on the run, being pursued by a dragon. At long last, she is cornered. “The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born”. This child facing the dragon, against all odds, is the child Jesus.

This is the grim situation of people all over the world this Advent, far closer to the original nativity story than our chocolate calendars communicate. And perhaps this is a better text for this year’s Advent, as the world watches the fate of women and children in Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Africa. The dragon has indeed invaded the lives of so many. The world is holding its breath.

This Christmas let’s up our Advent game. Let’s put dragons in our nativity creche displays. Take out the baby – he hasn’t been born yet! And let’s hold our breath with the rest of the world, sensing the real and present danger. What if we stretched out Advent across four weeks of waiting, of gestation, refusing to allow Big Corporate Christmas to deliver the baby prematurely? What if we used Advent for its original purpose, which is to examine ourselves for our own hypocrisy, our own violence and hatred, our own abuse of power on micro and macro levels? Perhaps then we can truly welcome Christmas. As hope for the powerless. As the possibility for peace in the midst of war. As good news for the world.

As a teenage girl 2,000 years ago prayed in hope,

My spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant…

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

Explainer

Creed

Time

9 November 2023

4 min read

The unutterable preciousness of an ordinary day

A strangely named season of the Church calendar, Ordinary Time, is anything but that. Julie Canlis explores how it can point to wonder in the moments.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

A father sits on a bed and fixes the hair of his daughter standing in front of him

OPPO Find X5 Pro on Unsplash.

One of the strangest (and longest) seasons in the Church Calendar is called Ordinary Time. It feels caught like a fish out of water between the high pageantry of Easter and the thrill of Christmas. Ordinary Time – when school is out, and warm summer days are glorious – is there some mistake? Any kid with a high love of summer would know that the church had yet again missed the whole point.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Ordinary Time, despite its obvious insinuations for anglophones, means “boring” or even “not important.” It is not, after all, when the church gets a well-earned break from the supernatural, and things can be normal for a while. Nor is it when Jesus goes on vacation, alongside the rest of us. Despite the “terminological abomination” that is Ordinary Time (George Wiegel), Ordinary Time is when the church leans into the fact that all of life is sacred. All of life has meaning. Why? For Christians, it is because God decided to become human in every ordinary way, to bless and remind us that life is not so ordinary after all.

Because of this, no day can be a “time out” from the supernatural. Every day is now holy. And this is the riot of Ordinary Time.

The fact that God decided to walk our history in our shoes means that God’s life is available in all alleyways, everywhere, every minute. This means that every child whose knee has been scraped, and has been comforted, is in God’s territory. Every joy of friendship, and even rejection, has been experienced by the God-man. Every pubescent crush is understood. Every badly crafted project in our dad’s workshop or mom’s flour bin has also been in Mary’s kitchen or hanging on her wall. When Christians worship this God, they know that they worship someone who experienced everything that they are experiencing – every joy, every terror, and even the humdrum in between.

Because of this, no day can be a “time out” from the supernatural. Every day is now holy. And this is the riot of Ordinary Time, which has no holy-days but is itself one long holyday-holiday. And so, the church calendar is attempting to do precisely the opposite of carving up life into sacred and secular, a false division if there ever was one. The Church calendar integrates all things into the life of God who was also human, and so can testify to the goodness of jam and the horror of loneliness. This calendar, far from an attempt to lift people out of ordinary life, was an attempt to root them in the One who makes all things extraordinary. It’s no wonder that the chosen color for this season is green – that of new life, vibrant in its small seed-like ways, growing imperceptibly but persistently.

And this is why, when Christians have been vigilantes against things that prioritize the supernatural over the natural, the church has flourished for all classes. Even the good old stodgy Reformation forefathers (with their frilly collars) championed ordinary life as God’s sphere, against those who held it as lower on spiritual scale. Or again, there were Victorian priests like M. F. Sadler who intuited the dangers of church elitism and railed against “mischievous” theology cut-off from ordinary life. Or what of George MacDonald, Scottish pastor and fantasy writer, who says that Jesus’ miracles only seem like miracles because we take everyday life for granted. “How many more have the marvel of vision than those blind whom the Lord has healed.” He calls God the “divine alchemist,” turning every meal into a eucharist, not just the bread and wine on the high altar.

Today is the stillpoint from which all the days since our birth have been stretching forward. And today is the point from which all days rush toward our end

“Ordinary Time” in the Church Calendar is the season of the sacred ordinary. Or the ordinary extraordinary. Fifty days after Easter is “Whitsun” or Pentecost when, according to the history of the early church by Luke the doctor, the Holy Spirit came upon all people – young, old, men, women, Greek, African, slaves. The Spirit (and love) of Jesus was handed over to these ordinary people to continue what Jesus started. And that day the church was born. And here we are, 2,000 years later, as the same ordinary church, invited to hallow something as ordinary as time itself. How differently would we live, if we were able to recognize the unutterable preciousness of today? To be aware that we will never be given this particular day again? Today is the stillpoint from which all the days since our birth have been stretching forward. And today is the point from which all days rush toward our end. Without knowing this, and finding ways to honor it, can we be living at all? This is the invitation of Ordinary Time.