December 23, 2023
Listen:
Read Along:
A Dreamlike Wonder
by David F. White
This is the time of year when store windows, old movies, and tv commercials feature snowy scenes, flying reindeer, and wide-eyed children. Each year, even we hard-bitten Texans willfully suspend our realism and enter a dream state of wonder, surprise, and gift. Even those of us well versed in the manipulative fantasies of consumer capitalism find ourselves moved by the season’s images, songs, gestures, and stories that tap into a deep well of mystery. In a sense, Christian faith cannot be understood apart from a kind of dreamlike wonder that sees into the hidden heart of ordinary things.
God’s charge to the first humans in the garden was to “name” the creatures—to see with eyes of wonder beneath the bare facts of existence and to express things truly. The history of Israel is an education in wonder, learning to see beneath the ordinary—that an aged couple can bear children, a young boy can defeat a giant, a castaway child can deliver Israel from Egyptian slavery, and that dry bones live again. Pilate, who can only comprehend a world manipulated by power, in a signal failure of imagination, asks Jesus the prisoner, “What is truth?” By contrast, Jesus’s wonder names a common fisherman the rock of the Church, a hated Samaritan as neighbor, an adulterous woman as forgiven, and who instructs that we name our enemies as friends. The way of life he inaugurates cannot be reduced to mere pragmatism or rationalism but is suspended in a dream, in true sight.
And so, we do well to wander for a time in the dream of Advent--the liminal season between fall and winter, the pains of birth and the joy of new life, injustice and shalom, slumber and the new morning of promise.
“For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.”
“In our secret yearnings
we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair
we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
we are surrounded by witnesses
who yearn more than do we
and by those who despair
more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church and its pastors
in this season of hope
which runs so quickly to fatigue
and in this season of yearning
which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes, to the edges of our fingertips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
and come in your weakness in any case
and make all things new. Amen.”
