In the Eye of the Beholder
The image has stayed with me since I saw it a few days ago. So much rubble everywhere, dust and debris illustrating utter ruin and depravity at a scale my mind cannot comprehend. At first this is all I can see. Then I look again, my eye catching something else. A porcelain cherubic face peers out from between jagged pieces of concrete, mortar, and stones. Baby Jesus, all that’s left of a nativity destroyed by bombs, lies intact beneath the weight of the wreckage. My emotions outsize the image, and I’m ashamed.
Photo credit: Heidi Levine, The Washington Post
For weeks now, I’ve seen photographs of the atrocities from the latest of too many international wars and uprisings to count. Bodies of children and the elderly strewn by the sides of roads, killed in an early-morning raid. Kitchen walls stained with blood, the counters bearing the half-eaten breakfasts of those slaughtered. Smiling faces of children, men, and women printed on posters, held by the hands of those whose faces are etched with grief, tears streaming from swollen eyes, begging for the release of innocents taken hostage. Their pain is matched and mirrored just a few miles away by civilians equally blameless whose homes have been bombed in retaliation–fathers desperately digging with bare hands through bricks and concrete, searching for their children and families. Mothers, inconsolable, holding the bodies of infants to their breasts, unable to warm the cold, lifeless limbs dangling in their arms.
None of these images have moved me the way the photo of a porcelain Jesus did a few days ago. Puzzled and embarrassed, I’ve wrestled with the juxtaposition of my reactions. Dead children and infants, their soft skin mangled and streaked with caked blood and dirt, barely register. But a ceramic representation of an infant Jesus coated in dust suddenly blurs, my tears distorting the image.
I’m still trying to explain to myself the misplaced grief I feel, but today’s prayer from the Book of Common Prayer offered some perspective. “…when thy Son Jesus Christ cometh he may find in us a mansion prepared for himself…” My life is the furthest thing from a mansion. It’s been heavily damaged by countless battles I’ve faced, painfully obvious in spite of my feeble attempts to level the foundation and patch the cracks. Yet God, in his mercy, came anyway. No gilded walls to reflect his beauty. No palace to shelter and protect him. No fanfare to greet him. Just his face, peering back at me from amidst the rubble and debris of my life. His eyes seeing me. His hands praying for me.
It's easy for me to relate to the suffering of a world marred by warfare and violence. But God, willing to lie in the ruins with me–of me? This is a love I cannot comprehend. Yet it is this love I most need.
For me, this is the essence of Christmas. There was no mansion, yet God became like me–for me. He exchanged an ethereal cathedral for a rustic manger and drafty stable. The powerful on earth, ensconced in their palaces, didn’t notice. But those like me, trapped beneath the weight of their own lives, saw a Savior staring back at them from amidst their collective rubble. It would have been enough for him to merely look down and notice me. Instead, he chose to lie in the ruins with me, looking me straight in the eye, his hand extended. “Joy to the world, the Lord is come. Let earth receive her King.” In spite of me. Because of me. Merry Christmas, indeed.