Recovery Today / December 2010
For a long time in my own recovery, I left behind the Christmas story. I believed that so much of it was just childhood fantasy that I needed to let go of and get on with the more serious work of spiritual recovery. The Program told me I needed to establish conscious contact with a God of my own understanding – a God who, above all, was real. There seemed little room in my life for choirs of angels and wise men following some distant star. Virgin births and manger scenes simply had to go the way of the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. I needed a God who was accessible, if not exactly understood. So off I went exploring New Age writers and Eastern mystics in my search for spiritual experience.
But after twenty years of following my own star and stepping in my share of camel dung along the way, I returned to my Christian roots and eventually to the Christmas story as well. And while the story hadn’t changed in my long absence – I had. I returned a little wiser, maybe not unlike those fellas from the east - and I returned a little poorer, maybe like those shepherds in the fields. The words from T.S. Elliott’s poem now became my own: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
When I was a kid and first heard these Christmas stories – I heard them through a child’s ears – and, of course, I thought they were all real facts and historical events that I was being told. I had no way of separating historical fact from sacred story. But I later discovered that this was never how the gospel writers meant for their stories to be heard. The Native American storytellers have a beautiful way of introducing their people to an important story that conveys some great spiritual truth. They often start out by saying: “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.”
The story of Jesus’ birth that the gospel writers tell is meant to be read with our religious imaginations hard at work - and that’s a different kind and even a higher order of truth than we’re used to hearing in our modern world. It’s the kind of truth that takes us beyond our usual world of scientific facts and gives us a peek into the world of Spirit – the reality the Big Book calls: “the fourth dimension of existence.”
This year, let’s try not to ask with our analytical minds, “Is this story historically true and do I believe it?” But instead, let’s try asking if something about these stories doesn’t ring true deep within our souls. Let’s see if we can’t do as the Big Book suggests and suspend our “contempt prior to investigation.” Let’s try to see and hear these Christmas stories again with eyes and ears that we probably haven’t used since we were kids. They may be rusty but they probably still work.
And if we can tap into this fourth dimension of God’s reality, then we might just see and hear what the Christmas storywriters felt and experienced in their own hearts and what they tried to convey to us in their own words. They experienced a man who freed them from the bondage of self, a man who made love and service his absolute code. When they wrote about his birth they wanted us to know that God was up to something really big in what he was doing in the world through this humble servant of his named Jesus. His Step Three reverberated then and now through all of God’s creation. So angels sang with great joy. And wise men bowed to acknowledge the birth of a still wiser king. And poor shepherds got to hear the good news first.
The child born in Bethlehem doesn’t need us to believe in him. He knew who he was. The child who needs to believe this year, like every year, is the child who still lives within us. The spiritual child who lives deep within each and every one of us – the child whose eyes lights up and whose heart warms up when he or she hears stories told about a God who loves us – a God who comes to be with us in a new way at Christmas. Our hearts and souls still remember and still respond to what our minds and grown-up egos would have us each forget.
There’s a verse I found some time ago in a Christmas hymn that says this better than I can say. Please accept it as a small Christmas gift – the first gift of many I hope you’ll be receiving this year:
Christmas comes and Christmas goes
Yet pain and violence sadly grows
We cry and hurt; when will it end?
Is there a savior, a messiah, whom you’ll send?
We pray in hope, please hear our cry
Or is the story just a lie?
We need the child to show the way
Come now, be born in us today!
About the Author:
Fr. Bill W. is Chaplain & Past President at Austin Recovery.
Send comments, questions, speaking requests, or treatment scholarship donations to:
Fr. Bill W. /Austin Recovery / 8402 Cross Park Dr. / Austin, Texas 78754
or email: BillW@AustinRecovery.org