The Upside-Down Logic of Bethlehem

What if we viewed our own lives the way we read the Christmas story?

I hope this Christmas season finds you happy and healthy, with a peaceful heart and home.

If it doesn’t—if life right now is messy and frantic or confusing or hard—you’re in good company. The Holy Family didn’t have an easy first Christmas, either.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Mary and Joseph lately, and about all those details of the Christmas story we now savor with nostalgia. We talk and sing about Christ’s birth as if it went down smooth as spiked eggnog. But at the time, it probably felt more like the Flying Wallendas crossing the highwire without a net.

There they were, making a four-day, third-trimester trek to Bethlehem by donkey; enduring a bone-chilling, late-night hunt for lodging with a baby on the verge of arrival; and spending their newborn’s first overnight in a drafty barn surrounded by strangers, smelly animals, and probably a few thousand hay mites nibbling their toes.

Mary and Joseph were holy, but they were also human. And while we remember the hard parts of their story as the best parts, at the time, those parts probably just felt hard.

Photo by Walter Chávez on Unsplash

I think we’d say the same about our own hard times this past year. Most of us aren’t sending out holiday newsletters ticking off the year’s lows or group portraits of our most miserable days. We won’t toast at family gatherings to the moments that left us reeling or ranting. And when we reflect on the past year, we’ll probably tally its happenings into crisp categories of blessings and burdens: this part was great, that part was awful, hope next year brings us more of the former and less of the latter.

Yet seen in the light of eternity—in the light of that babe in the manger who turned all our worldly categories upside down—the burdens of the past year might be blessings, too. They might even be the biggest blessings. Because the burdens, not the blessings, are what force us to our knees, what spotlight and chisel away at our faults, what remind us why we needed that baby to come save us in the first place.

In the world-upending logic of Bethlehem—and of the saints who embraced that logic as their own—crosses become crowns, death days become feast days, sufferings patiently borne become badges of honor. As a wise spiritual director once told me, when I was a new mom lamenting the behavior of my most, ahem, challenging child: “That’s the one that’ll get you into heaven.”

Life’s hard parts, in other words, can be some of its best from a spiritual perspective—though they feel nothing like it at the time.

There’s a story I’ve always loved from Eternal Wisdom from the Desert, a 2001 collection of stories about the desert fathers edited by Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. It’s about a desert mystic known as John the Dwarf, who prays that God will strip away his troubles and temptations so he can pursue holiness in tranquility.

After years of praying, John finally gets his wish. So he goes to an older, wiser desert father to report his good fortune.

“I find myself in peace,” John says, “without an enemy.”

But the holy man doesn’t congratulate him. Instead, he tells him: “Go, ask God to stir up warfare so that you may regain the affliction and humility that you used to have. For it is by warfare that the soul makes progress.”

To his credit, John does it.

“And when warfare came,” the book says, “he no longer prayed that it might be taken away, but said, ‘Lord, give me strength for the fight.’”

That’s a bold prayer, more than a little scary to send up. But imagine what Jesus could do in our lives if we made that prayer our own. Imagine if we looked at the new year and asked not, “Lord, make this one easier,” but “Lord, give me strength for the fight.”

We might find our trials turned into triumphs. Not right away, of course. Some knots take years to unravel; some burdens may never fully ease this side of eternity.

But if we began each day with that prayer and really lived it, day in and day out, we could reach the end of our lives and proclaim with Saint Paul that “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4: 7).

We might even be able to look back over our lives someday and see them the same way we view our Savior’s birth: as stories where the hard parts were the best parts because they brought Jesus near, and where joy, not suffering, got the last word.