Choose Life, Choose Laziness

                                                    



Advent Blog Day 15

Let me paint you a picture. A big family house, filled with noise and laughter, people in every room. A large Christmas gathering is underway. There are immediate family, extended family and friends of the family all absorbed in engaging conversation. There are gifts being exchanged, much food and drink are being voraciously consumed, as voraciously as they consume one another's company.  The laughter spills out of their mouths as the people spill out of the many rooms. People bustle about clearing away plates, bringing more drinks. Kids run in and out making occasional demands on their preoccupied parents.
There is a new arrival in one room, a baby that's a few months old. Although it is Christmas this baby is the excuse the family have given for having such a big do this year. The baby was being passed around for cuddles but one woman in her late twenties is hanging on to the baby like a kid hangs onto the parcel when the music is about to stop. She's gaga over this kid. She's making cooing noises and playing peekaboo and the baby is gurgling happily and dribbling and making such faces at the woman that she is oblivious to everyone else. The truth be known, she's a bit broody and from the moment she set eyes on this little chap all her sense of obligation to the rest of the family have gone out the window. She hasn't washed up, she hasn't cooked, she hasn't cleared away, she hasn't caught up with her cousin (like she promised). She is just vegging out with the baby.

Into the room comes a slightly older woman, arms full of a pile of crockery, a teetering tower of plates and dishes. She enters the room with her bottom leading as she pushes the door open with it and backs into the room holding the plates. She looks quite comical as she peers over a dish, scouring the room for something, and then she sees it. The woman with the baby has a mug, now drained of tea, balanced on the chair next to her. The second, older woman waddles over to the chair, bends her knees and carefully hooks a little finger through the handle of the mug. She motions to the door with her eyebrows  and a series of scowls to the woman on the floor, as if to say "We need to talk, OUTSIDE" but the younger woman is oblivious. The older woman gives up, momentarily and retreats to the kitchen, nearly dropping everything at the door on the way.

The older woman has been pretty much running the show all day. It's her house and she shares it with her sister. It was she who fetched the tree, it was she who sent out the invitations, via email, social networks and snail mail. It was she who bought the food and the presents, even her own present from her sister. She had decorated, cooked and cleaned. In short, without her, this party would not have happened. She has arbitrated in arguments, researched the tastes of her guests, organised games. Without her there would be no Christmas.

The older woman's name, if you haven't guessed (and if you have) is Martha and the woman playing with the baby, her younger sister, Mary. I have just shifted the story over to the right a little, to give us a better picture.

Who is the party for? Its for the baby.  What is it about? Its about the baby. Martha is wonderful but she has lost sight of the purpose of the celebration. She is so concerned with the wrapping she has forgotten the present. She has forgotten to be present.

In the story of Martha and Mary in the new testament, Martha asks the adult Jesus to rebuke her sister for her idleness. If we are honest most of us have our natural sympathies with Martha. Mary has spent the whole time sat at Jesus' feet, listening to him talk and asking questions. Jesus says to Martha that Mary "has chosen the better part".

I don't think for a second that Jesus was ungrateful to Martha for all the work she put in, I don't think for a moment that he didn't recognise that some activities are facilitating ones, that we need "Martha's". I am sure that (off camera) he thanked her for all her efforts. But Martha had lost sight of the wood for the trees.

It's so easy to get sidetracked into the performance of Christmas. To be overwhelmed by all that "needs" to be done. To feel the need to spend vast amounts to impress loved ones. One thing that I discovered in my "first" Noel (see the 1st advent Blog) is that it is the very simplicity of Christmas that carries its rawest power of all. The hopes and fears of all the years met in a small baby that night.

I love Christmas. The rich foods, the tacky lights, the garishness of it, the presents and  ALL the trimmings. But, I think, if we cant have our Mary moments we haven't really experienced it. We need still, lazy moments with our bibles and our thoughts, where we sit and stare in wonder at the contents of that manger and simply soak it in. Do it. Take a quiet half hour, alone in an armchair, perhaps with some carols on, perhaps a glass of wine or a cup of tea and just ponder the wonder of it. This child came for me.

In "The Last Battle" C. S. Lewis finishes his Narnian chronicles with all the loyal Narnians being kettled into a stable to be burned. The stable turns out to be a portal, a doorway out of the shadow lands and into the next world. Once inside, in a tardis like way, the children see that the stable is in fact bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, (incidentally how I see Christmas). Queen Lucy comes out with the words that cause the hairs on my neck to rise nearly every time I hear them.

"In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world."
 

Amen. Lets sit at the feet of the Christmas child and get lost in the sheer awe of it all, lets choose the better part. Choose life, choose "laziness".