“The crazy stable close at hand, with shaking timber and shifting sand…”

(G.K. Chesterton)

When I became a monk, I took the name “Tessa of the Incarnation.” As I live now as a “new monastic” out in the world, this is still my name. The mystery of the Incarnation we celebrate at Christmas continues to captivate me: Spirit becoming matter, God becoming human flesh in Jesus, Emmanuel, “God-with-us.”

The Christmas mystery is so profound, I “understand” it best by meditating on the same poetry and music every Twelve Days of Christmas. Carl Sandberg first:

The vagabond mother of Christ
and the vagabond men of wisdom
all in a barn on a winter night
and a baby there in swaddling clothes on hay
Why does this story never wear out?

That’s our first question: Why does this story never wear out? It never does for me. I come back again and again every year to that “crazy stable” with “shaking timber and shifting sand.”

The House of Christmas

The image is from G.K. Chesterton’s poem, “The House of Christmas.” He says that we tend to be “homesick” in our own homes and such “strangers under the sun” that when we lay our heads down at night, it’s as if we lay them in a foreign land. Why are we strangers to ourselves? War! Within and without: “battle and blazing eyes… hands that fashion and heads that know,/ But our hearts we lost – how long ago!”

The Christmas story is about finding our hearts as we find “a Child in a foul stable,/ where the beasts feed and foam.” Chesterton claims that only there where Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were homeless are we truly at home. I get all choked up by his concluding stanza:

To an open house in the evening
Home shall [everyone] come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things than cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And [everyone is] at home.

“To the things that cannot be and that are” – this line really gets to me. These things cannot be – and yet they are.

“How Can It Be True?”

This brings me to one of my favorite Christmas songs, “Emmanuel,” written by the St. Louis Jesuits. We used to sing this in my monastic community with exquisite harmonies. It moved me so deeply, I had to fight back tears of joy and wonder. The line that always affects me here is: “How can it be true, this world grown so old now, how can it be new?”

That’s why the story never wears out for me. No matter how old it is, the story becomes new again every December. No matter how homesick and heartsick we become, no matter how war-torn and world-weary, Christmas comes, Christ comes. Jesus is born again not only in the “crazy stable” but in our hearts, and through our hearts into our culture. It’s “true” – and a dream come true – if we have the strength and courage, the faith and love, the “holy daring,” as St. Teresa called it, to make it true. Christmas is about the birth of limitless possibilities: the birth of “things that cannot be” but will be if we make them so.

The Christ-child made the crazy stable “an open house” where everyone is welcome and at home. Do I dare do the same and make the “foul stable” of our broken world an open house? The House of Christmas?