Wow, it's been a little while since I posted last. This past month has been crazy, to say the least.
This post is, fittingly, about Christmas. Call it my first
annual Emotions and Photons Christmas post. And, also fittingly, it features
lots of photons (aka light).
So my family has a wonderful tradition. Every year we have
our biggest celebration not on Christmas, but four days earlier, on the 21st
of December. Why is that day significant? No, it’s not because we have long
been celebrating the end of the world (everything’s supposed to come to an end
this year on the 21st). The 21st is the winter solstice –
a holiday with a long, venerable tradition in cultures around the world.
The solstice is a celebration of light. It also happens to
be the shortest day of the year (the longest night), and the two are no
coincidence. Northern European tradition is to fill your home with evergreen
boughs (because they remain green despite the darkening days), light a host of
candles, keep a bright fire burning, gather with friends and family, and dance
and sing the whole night through. They believed that by so doing they could
keep the night at bay. And if they reveled until the morning sun burst over the
horizon, the nights would start to shorten again. The symbolism of this
wonderful celebration was the triumph of light over darkness, of love over
hate, of good over evil, of hope over despair.
It’s easy to see that the holiday we know as Christmas is a
modern (and somewhat perverted) adaptation of the ancient winter solstice
celebration. The Christmas tree (evergreen boughs) and electric lights
(candles) have clear solstice roots. Even the timing is only four days shifted
(to accommodate a Roman holiday, a festival to Jupiter – but we won’t get into
that).
I would like to use the comparison of Christmas to the
solstice to draw us back to what Christmas is really all about. It’s not about
presents, deals, sales, tacky renditions of beaten-to-death tunes; it’s about
light and love – and above all, it’s about the man who personifies and
exemplifies them in both word and deed: Jesus Christ. Like the Sun (an apt
homophone), he is an unbroken source of life-sustaining light. Without him, the
days would keep getting shorter and shorter until a day came when the sun
didn’t rise at all and night endured forever. His atoning sacrifice typifies
the love we strive to offer to our beloved friends and family at this time of
year: selfless, unconditional, pure, personal, intimate.
Which brings me to another modern practice with deep
historical and symbolic roots: gift giving. In fact, Christmas, for most
Americans, is little more than a ritual of gift giving and receiving. But where
does the practice come from? From Jesus Christ, of course. In Gethsemane and on
the cross he suffered for hours and sweat drops of blood on our behalf. And
why? To earn the right to run to our rescue when we need him, when all other
lights have gone out, and when no other help is available. Like he promised, he
will make our burdens light and easy through the mercy and grace of his
atonement.
But Christmas is about giving
gifts, not just receiving them. If the gifts we receive symbolize the gift of
the atoning sacrifice of the Savior, what do the gifts we give to others
represent? What could we possibly offer our Heavenly King? What could he
possibly want from us? The answer has ancient roots, once again. The people of
God before Christ came to Earth were asked to sacrifice their first-born
animals to God, in clear reference to the Father’s sacrifice of his first-born
son. When Jesus had accomplished this great sacrifice, he changed the
commandment. He no longer wanted the faithful to offer animals as sacrifices.
The offering he wanted instead was much more personal – like his gift to us.
“And you shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit” he said. The Savior’s gift to
us is a sacrifice, and so is ours to him.
But what does it mean to give a broken heart, a contrite
spirit? And why is it a sacrifice? And why is it what God wants from us on
Christmas?
To find the answer, we have to dive into the scriptures –
the Book of Mormon in particular – so stay with me. The answer is worth the
effort, I promise. It will change the way you celebrate Christmas forever and
open the windows of your soul to the light of Christ – the light that is the
object of our celebration at this dark time of year.
In the book of
Second Nephi, chapter 31, the prophet Nephi gives a masterful lesson on the
gospel of Jesus Christ. In particular, he speaks about baptism. He reminds us
that, while baptism symbolizes being washed clean from sin and born anew, Jesus
was baptized even though he had never sinned and didn’t need to be born again.
So what could the ordinance of baptism have possibly meant for him? It is true
that it reminds us of how much we
need baptism, but I think the matter goes deeper than that. Nephi taught that,
in being baptized, Jesus “humble[d] himself before the Father, and witnesse[d]
unto the Father that he would be obedient unto him in keeping his
commandments.” And in response to his humble promise of obedience, the Holy
Ghost descended on him.
In what ways did Jesus obey his Heavenly Father? Well, he
clearly didn’t do anything wrong,
since he never committed any sin (he kept the “thou shalt not” commandments).
But he did much more than avoid doing things that are wrong. He did a lot of
things that were right, too (a second
category of much more important commandments, the “thou shalts”). In fact,
every day of his life was an example of what it means to obey the commandments
of the Father, and gives us insight into what those commandments really are. When
we think of commandments, we first think of the proscriptive rules: thou shalt
not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; etc. Instead,
Jesus taught a different set of prescriptive rules: thou shalt be humble and
come unto me; thou shalt mourn with those that mourn, and comfort those that
stand in need of comfort; thou shalt hunger and thirst after righteousness;
thou shalt be peacemakers; thou shalt love each other as I have loved you; thou
shalt love your enemies, pray for them that curse you, and do good to them that
despitefully use you and persecute you. These are the commandments Nephi was
referring to when he said Jesus promised to obey all his father’s commandments.
But what does baptism have to do with the sacrifice of a broken
heart and a contrite spirit? Offering to God a broken heart and a contrite
spirit means humbly promising to keep his commandments the way Jesus did, to
follow in his footsteps in loving and serving and enlightening the way he did
while he was on Earth – and the way he continues to do in each of our lives, to
the degree that we will let him in. Jesus taught “whoso cometh unto me with a
broken heart and a contrite spirit, him will I baptize with fire and with the
Holy Ghost” – the same promise associated with baptism, and the promise that
was realized after his baptism.
So what does Heavenly Father want for Christmas? What is
Christmas really all about? It’s about discipleship; it’s about following Jesus
and, to the best of our ability, emulating his life; it’s about exercising the
ministry that he would have exercised were he here in our individual shoes
today; it’s about loving our loved ones for him, and in his place; it’s about
conveying his love for them through our love, in pure and simple terms; it’s
seeking to fill others’ lives with light and love, the way he has filled ours.
So when you see the lights on the Christmas tree this year,
think of the evergreen boughs and the candles; think of the light and life of
the world; and think of the commandments of the Father that he taught us through
the life of his Son – the ones that require us to reach out, to love, and to
lift; and remember that what God wants for Christmas is for you to humbly live
them – like his son did – each day of your life.
