Do you think you think you could contain Niagara Falls in a teacup?

Is there anyone in our midst who pretends to understand the awesome love in the heart of the Abba of Jesus that inspired, motivated and brought about Christmas? The shipwrecked at the stable kneel in the presence of mystery.

God entered into our world not with the crushing impact of unbearable glory, but in the way of weakness, vulnerability and need. On a wintry night in an obscure cave, the infant Jesus was a humble, naked, helpless God who allowed us to get close to him.

We all know how difficult it is to receive anything from someone who has all the answers, who is completely cool, utterly unafraid, needing nothing and in control of every situation. We feel unnecessary, unrelated to this paragon. So God comes as a newborn baby, giving us a chance to love him, making us feel that we have something to give him.

The world does not understand vulnerability. Neediness is rejected as incompetence and compassion is dismissed as unprofitable…The spirituality of Bethlehem is simply incomprehensible to the advertising industry. The opening notes of Beethoven’s Symphony are being used to sell us pain reliever, and the prayer of St. Francis is being used to sell us hair conditioner.

The Bethlehem mystery will ever be a scandal to aspiring disciples who seek a triumphant Savior and a prosperity Gospel. The infant Jesus was born in unimpressive circumstances, no one can exactly say where. His parents were of no social significance whatsoever, and his chosen welcoming committee was all turkeys, losers and dirt-poor shepherds. But in this weakness and poverty the shipwrecked at the stable would come to know the love of God.

Sadly, Christian piety down through the centuries has prettified the Babe of Bethlehem. Christian art has trivialized divine scandal into gingerbread crèches. Christian worship has sentimentalized the smells of the stable into dignified pageant…

Pious imagination and nostalgic music rob Christmas of its shock value, while some scholars reduce the crib to a tame theological symbol. But the shipwrecked at the stable tremble in adoration of the Christ-child and quake at the inbreak of God Almighty. Because all the Santa Clauses and red-nosed reindeer, fifty-foot trees and thundering church bells put together create less pandemonium than the infant Jesus when, instead of remaining a statue in a crib, he comes alive and delivers us over to the fire that he came to light.

The Spanish author Jose Ortega put it this way:

The man with the clear head who frees himself from fantasy and
looks life in the face, realizes everything in it is problematic, and
feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth – that to live is to
feel oneself lost. Whoever accepts this has already begun to
find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the
shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling,
and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere because it is a
question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order to the chaos
of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the
shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who
does not feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say, he
never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.

The shipwrecked at the stable are the poor in spirit who feel lost in the cosmos, adrift on an open sea, clinging with a life-and-death desperation to the one solitary plank. Finally they are washed ashore and make their way to the stable, stripped of the old spirit of possessiveness in regard to anything. The shipwrecked find it not only tacky utterly absurd to be caught up either in tinsel trees or in religious experiences — “Doesn’t going to church on Christmas make you feel good?” They are not concerned with their own emotional security or any of the trinkets of creation. They have been saved, rescued, delivered from the waters of death, set free for a new shot at life. At the stable in a blinding moment of truth, they make the stunning discovery that Jesus is the plank of salvation they have been clinging to without knowing it!

All the time they are battered by wind and rain, buffeted by raging seas, they are being held even when they didn’t know who was holding them. Their exposure to spiritual, emotional and physical deprivation has weaned them from themselves and made them re-examine all they once thought was important. The shipwrecked come to the stable seeking not to possess but to be possessed, wanting not peace or a religious high, but Jesus Christ.

The Shipwrecked don’t seek peace because they aren’t disturbed by a lack of it. By that I mean a subjective feeling of peace. Circumstances can play havoc with our emotions, the day can be stormy or fair and our feelings will fluctuate accordingly; but if we are in Christ Jesus, we are in peace and there unflustered even when we feel no peace. Meister Eckhart’s equation, “In Christ equals in peace,” is always valid. When we accept the truth of ourselves — shipwrecked and saved – our lives are henceforth anchored in the Rock who is Christ, not in the shifting sands of our fickle feelings.ⁱ

Powerful stuff from Brennan Manning!

Being one of the shipwrecked, I can share without hesitation that we see things through a different lens.

The shipwrecked have weathered the storms of life and also experienced the “pause” in a world that never stops. The shipwrecked have discovered that the mystery of human heart is found in Jesus Christ. They have discovered that nothing less will ever satisfy us and it’s only in Christ that the heart finds true joy.

To those lost in position, power, prosperity and whose Bible is the Wall Street Journal; the shipwrecked say, “We can only serve one master and serving Jesus is incompatible with any other servitude and no matter how powerful you think you are, the most you can do without Christ is mere window dressing to a collapsing world.”

The shipwrecked have learned to stand on firm ground, live in truth and are rooted in the reality of Jesus Christ. They don’t allow the world to push them around and they find the vanity of this world ridiculous. In their integrity, the shipwrecked preserve the meaning of Christmas in its purity – the birthday of the Savior and the explosion of the good news of the Gospel into human history.

Do you hear what the shipwrecked are saying?

Are you one of them?

Let go of your puny desires and expand your expectations into what God wants to give you. Christmas means that God has given us nothing less than Himself and His name is Jesus Christ!

This Christmas, may you belong to their number…the shipwrecked.