Regardless of the many positive and negative views of Christmas the central metaphor and the many symbols of the faith narrative is a wake-up call to humanity.
In every era humanity has tried to settle things into the equilibrium of what we have thought was the final ideal state of being. Today Western culture looks more complex, but we still live to achieve goals of comfort, control, and self-possession. We are frustrated by the competition, variables, and interferences of everyone else striving in their own ways to achieve the same ideal. The freedom we might have gotten a glimpse of as children quickly dissipates and we put it behind us in our pursuit of the vision that is so elusive.
In the audio theater piece above the Kid coming in the night is that True Self which we wish we could be. When he knocks on our door and disturbs our privacy we resist, though we still have a yearning for that “something” calling us outside of our safe boundaries. This is the story of the Christ Child, inconvenient and disruptive, but representing the vast unknown possibilities beyond our finite constructs.
The faith narrative of Christmas is about that coming, knocking in the night, and calling us out to a destiny so much more than our current state of being that it is the Mystery of Goodness. When we wake up and risk stepping out into that Mystery we become the signs, the symbols that Goodness is really incarnating humanity.
