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Morning Devotion for the Season of Christmas
December 25, 2024
Thirty years ago, Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered a sermon entitled “Christmas Gifts.” In it, he reflected on a modern adaptation of a medieval mystery play, in which the shepherds who come to the manger offer the Christ child gifts of their own. They give him a bowl of cherries, a budgie, and a tennis ball. His reflection on this is a Christmas gift itself.
Meditation - Rowan Williams
Three gifts: a bob of cherries, a pet bird, and a tennis ball. Much more difficult, aren’t they, to allegorize and make theological mysteries out of than the gifts of the wise men. And so infinitely more touching: pointless, useless presents, and so more eloquent than almost anything else could be…
God’s pure, causeless, gratuitous love can have no answer, except some faint fumbling echo of that very gratuity and pointlessness itself; the gift too great to make sense of. All we can do, like the shepherds, is offer our meaningless little presents. All we can give to God is the equivalent of what the shepherds here give…
That is what it all comes down to: all the useless, pointless beauty of our music and our ritual, our words and our acts, our struggles in prayer, all the great achievements of Christendom, every cathedral, the B-Minor Mass and Rembrandt and all the rest of it; a packet of sweets and a tennis ball. All we can do is offer God playful gifts, the gift of our celebration, our playing. He does not need it but he wants the hearts that will and can rejoice, gratuitously, uselessly, pointlessly, and beautifully in what he has done.
From: A Ray of Darkness
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I wish you all the deepest blessings of this Christmas spirit.
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