Friends,
We are fast approaching the Feast of the Nativity. While Christmas comes every year, for most people there’s something special about it. While completely familiar to us, it nevertheless loses nothing of its wonder and charm despite its familiarity.
Of all the holidays, Christmas tugs most on the heartstrings of people’s nostalgia. There’s something about the gifts under the tree, the traditions cultivated from years of habit, and the comfort of Christmas carols, creches, and customs that one experiences when young that lasts down through the years.
However, to borrow from Christian writer C S Lewis for a moment, we might ask what is the end of our nostalgia? Is cultivating nostalgia something we do for its own sake, or does it serve a different purpose?
What, after all, is nostalgia? It can be defined as “a feeling of wistful longing for a time in the past,” or a place or a certain mixture of people – relatives or friends - that holds happy personal associations.
What does nostalgia say about us? Are we not in fact looking for something complete in the midst of our own incompleteness? This led C S Lewis to think theologically about yearning and desire, emotional responses built into each person. To describe this yearning, Lewis borrowed a German word and concept – Sehnsucht, which translates roughly longing or yearning for something inexpressible.
He describes it as a “desire for our own far-off country” . . . “that unnamable something, the desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead … the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”
For Christians, Christmas - the Incarnation of God’s Son – points to our yearning and serves as a signpost to a truer completeness that is, even now, coming toward us.
Wherever you may be this year spiritually, we are glad you are here. May this final Sunday of Advent, and our services throughout Christmastide, fill your heart with joy and maybe a little more completeness.
And may God give you the fullness of heart that is the end of all our yearnings through his Son, the newborn King.
Happy Christmas!
Fr. Chris