Hearing Voices at Christmas

Ahhhh . . . taking a break from roasting chestnuts on an open fire to write a little something about Christmas. . . .

I noticed a few things about the birth narratives as Christmas approached this year.

1. There seems always to be an invitation . . . an invitation to hear, to act, to go, to stay.

Mary, Joseph, shepherds, Magi . . . they don't seem to move by compulsion and coercion nearly as much as they hear invitations and then respond with their lives. They move, they take action. They are not asked to take on a belief system as much as they are invited to step more deeply into God's design for the world.

2. The invitations come in the midst of real life.

Into ordinary life the angel announced "good news" to Mary, which may have sounded at first blush like very bad news.

Joseph struggled with a real dilemma, with a pregnant fiancee' in a culture that had no tolerance unwed mothers.

The work of shepherds was interrupted, first by the angelic birth announcement and then by their decision to leave work in order to "go and see."

3. Only those who have "ears to hear" actually hear the invitations.

I'm struck by the number of dreams and angel visits in these birth narratives. Extraordinary voices are speaking and inviting, but not everyone has ears to hear them. Mary hears, as does Joseph. So do the angels and the Magi. Herod hears, but his hearing is too much clouded by his own self-preservation.

I'm challenged to live in a world that does not encourage me to hear deep voices . . . and to not lose touch with those deeper voices that speak from within me and from outside me. I'm challenged to recognize them and to act on those which offer healing and wholeness to the world, somehow straining the others that invite me to self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.

More and more I'm coming at life invitationally. I lived a long time out of compulsion and duty, out of obligation and "have-to." I see more than ever that the way of God with me tends to be the way of invitation.

"What is the invitation of God to me in this situation?"

"How is God inviting my own growth in this situation?"

"How is this situation a God-invitation for the healing of others and the world?"

So in these days of Christmas I'm asking for the grace to continue to hear voices. I'm asking for the courage to live more fully into the invitation that is extended toward me.