Christmas: the idea that the creator of 200 billion galaxies was born as one of us, a helpless infant on earth, in recent historical times. Needless to say it has inspired millions of songs and works of art. Indeed, it’s fair to say there would be no western art or literature without it. Doctrinal propositions do not suffice. We will never get to the end of it. It is beyond us.
What is the mystical hold this story has upon us?
G. K. Chesterton, with his unique power of insight, meditates upon what makes the birth of this one being unique, until he arrives at its essence.
from The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
No other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in
fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced
on us by the word “Bethlehem.” No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage
seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or
too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too
occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go
to such a scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it
because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical, or any number of
other things in separation; but not because it was itself.
The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend
or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our
minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which
are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero-worship.
It does not exactly work outwards, adventurously, to the wonders to be found at
the ends of the earth. It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from
the hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can some times take
us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor.
It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own
house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if
he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It
is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made
of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us
and pass.
It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that is there made eternal;
all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange
fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the
lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings
fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the
shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over
something more human than humanity.
Mystical Wonder 