The Family at Christmas

On Christmas Day, after we opened our gifts, we sat down to eat. All ten of us gathered around our dining room table. Our daughter and son-in-law came from Texas with their two teenage daughters. Our two sons, who live near us in Nashville were here. One of them is married, and his wife and two-year-old son were with him.

The two-year-old was the center of attention, of course, drawing us together and warming the emotional atmosphere. It was a very happy time.

I sat in my chair at one end of the table, my wife at the other end. As I looked at my family on Christmas Day my heart was full. This kind of fullness or completeness is a religious experience. In fact religion can be defined as that which enables us to experience fullness in life (See the Introduction and first chapter of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age). Jesus said, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 14:10, NRSV).

This fullness is also, for a man of seventy, the hoped-for goal of the late adult stage of life. Erik Erikson characterizes it as integrity, the sense that our life has has meaning and we have made a contribution. It enables us, at the latter stage of life, to look over all of life with happiness and contentment and see that it holds together and is good. The alternatives to this are despair or dogmatic insistence that we were right in spite of our apparent failures.

One of my thoughts that day was of the nature of marriage. Before I married, I tried to imagine what it would be like. I could not visualize what it would be like to be a married person. I certainly could not imagine what it would be like to be a parent. If you had given me a list at that time of all the things we would do through the years, I would have been overwhelmed. But now I look back and review all that has happened and am amazed. I looked at my two-year-old grandson and my teenage granddaughters and recalled the infancy and childhood of our three children. They grew up healthy, finished college with no debts, married, in the case of two of them, and began their own families. They are all employed in useful occupations. I am proud of all of them.

I am aware that some people do not marry, or, if they do, they do not have children. Some marry, and the marriage does not work or is interrupted by illness or death. Marriage and parenthood are not the only ways of experiencing completeness and fullness. Jesus proved that you do not have to have spouse or children to be fully included in the family of God, but you do have to recognize and embrace your inclusion in God's family.

I am also aware that I cannot take credit for all that has happened these seventy years of life or these forty-eight years of marriage. Many others--parents, spouse, friends, teachers, church, school, and community, have all contributed. Above all, God has given us life and the ability to live. Some people in our secular world live full and meaningful lives with no reference to God, but for me there cannot be fullness or completion without transcendence.

As I look at my family and at my life, I find myself thanking God who is the source of it all. I find myself seeking God, who redeems us and forgives our many sins and failures (there are no perfect families or perfect parents or perfect children). I find myself relying on God to support me and my family in the face of all the uncertainties and contingencies of life and death. I find myself trusting God to preserve this great treasure of life and love that we enjoy.

The meaning of Christmas is that God has shown himself trustworthy and faithful by sending his Son, entrusting him in infancy to a human family and creating through him God's family on earth.