The Second Tuesday in Advent -- Emmy Arnold

A Reflection on Emmy Arnold’s A Christmas Joy (pp. 127-31)

Do you have special memories of Christmas from your childhood? I certainly do. For many years when I was a child, our family would always go to my grandparents’ house for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. My brother and I would help our grandpa go out to get firewood, and then we’d bring it inside and he’d show us how to light it. We’d hang our stockings on the mantle (not too close to the flames!) and we’d always leave milk and cookies for Santa. We would spend the evening singing Christmas carols, talking, and enjoying some of my grandmother’s various baked pies, cakes, and cookies.

What I remember most vividly, however, was just how hard it was to fall asleep amidst all the excitement of waiting until morning. (We were a family who opened gifts on Christmas Day.) Indeed, if Advent is a season of waiting, waiting for Santa was my first experience of it!

I realize, of course, that this is a highly romanticized and idealized view of Christmas, and that all our gift-buying, decorating, and jollification around Christmas sort of misses the real point of God becoming human. And many of our prior readings during Advent have made just this point. And Emmy Arnold acknowledges the truth in these critiques.

But Arnold also insists that there is something beautifully right about letting one’s self be a child again during Christmas. By becoming a child again during Christmas, we can rediscover the simple joy of gazing at Mary holding the infant Jesus in the manger, and feeling the intensity of God’s love as he shares His Son with all humanity, even as we don’t deserve it.

And we shouldn’t feel in the least guilty about such a return to our childhood, for after all, let’s remember that Jesus taught his disciples that “unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:3. And earlier in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus prays to His Father, thanking him for withholding certain truths from “the wise and the intelligent” and revealing them instead “to infants.” Matthew 11:25. 

Becoming a child again may be the best thing we can do this Advent! As Arnold concludes: “Only those who are reborn as children shall become children of the light. Wherever the Christmas Child is born in a heart, wherever Jesus begins his earthly life anew – that is where the life of God’s love and of God’s peace dawns again.” (131)


Emmy Arnold (1884-1980) started the Bruderhof Christian community with her husband, Eberhard. Her best known book is her memoir, My Joyful Pilgrimage: My Life in Community.

Comments

  1. graceDecember 13, 2017 at 4:01 PM

    Perhaps to love at all, we must become as children, and as vulnerable as children....

    ReplyDelete

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