Life Interrupted: Lessons from Christmas

I was calling from Texas, so it was going to be very early for the person in California I was trying to reach. But it couldn’t be helped. I had been told by the emergency room physician that I had only a few hours to live, and so I had some urgent things to do. I was trying to reach Gary, the vice president I reported to where I worked. The call went something like this:

Gary (sleepy voice): Hello?
Keith: Hi Gary. This is Keith. Sorry to call so early. I wanted to let you know I won’t be working today. Actually I’m sorry to say - there’s really no other way to put this - I may not be working ever again. The doctor is telling me I’m probably going to die.
Gary: What!!?!

Life throws you unexpected curve balls. Sometimes all of your plans - all of them - go right up in smoke. I’ve written about these events before, so I won’t go into them in detail again. I did survive to tell the tale, but I mention this story because I have had, for my taste, far too much familiarity with uninvited, whiplash changes to the course of my life.

I made the phone call described above as I lay on a gurney awaiting a CareFlite transport to another hospital. Alas, it was only going to be a rolling ambulance and not a helicopter, which would have lent so much more adventure to the life-threatening drama. But as long as I had my phone, I did something that my kids tease me about to this day: I logged onto E-Trade and sold a bunch of stock. (That I survived these events meant that I was around to pay the elevated capital gains taxes that were the result of the sale of this stock. Alas, nothing is certain but death and taxes.)

Now you may be like my kids, wondering why on earth I was trading stocks while lying on a gurney dying. People who wonder that have probably never laid on a gurney dying. In fact, what was going on was that I was thinking past my own death, and it occurred to me that my wife would benefit from having more readily accessible cash after I died. More cash would give her the opportunity to navigate the complexities of life insurance, wills, etc. under less pressure. More cash would mean she would have less urgency about financial matters in the days immediately following my death. So I thought: here’s something I can do for the person I love above all others.

There are many life-lessons you can draw from nearly dying, but one of the things that happens is that you feel a kind of desperation to use every remaining moment to be useful to those whom you love.

But I digress.

I have found that after very nearly dying — it was a close-run thing before it was over — I am far more aware and observant of how people react to unexpected changes to their plans. My own experience has, in that way, I suppose, added a coating to the lens through which I see the world around me.

I have concluded that the way we react to these events is entirely related (and revealing of) the way we conceive of the nature of our existence. One of the practical signs of someone’s conception of the world is the rapidity with which a person can accept unforeseen changes.

Which brings me to Christmas.

Given the time of year, I have lately been reflecting on the events surrounding the birth of Jesus. This year, I have really been struck by the reaction that the principal participants in those events had to the total usurpation of their plans. Their lives were completely repurposed in service to God’s plans for His own project in the world. Their own projects took a back seat to His.

Whatever they thought their lives were going to be before the angel appeared, they were not going to be that anymore.

Mary, a mid-to-late teenager, was living a life which was proceeding in ways that she probably expected. No doubt the path she was on was common for young women in the ancient near east. She was betrothed to an honorable fellow, and was anticipating an impending marriage with all that would follow.

But before consummating her marriage, she was confronted by an angelic being. This is how these startling events are described:

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.

Talk about unexpected. Mary was informed by the angel that God was going to commandeer her womb for the gestation of his own son, derailing, for all she knew, her existing marriage plans. This unexpected turn of events also put her in the perilous position of needing to convince her friends and family that, after hundreds of years of apparent silence, God had suddenly singled her out, of all people; perhaps the most unlikely of possibilities. Furthermore, she must convince her family and neighbors that her shocking teenage pregnancy was, despite all appearances, the result of the miraculous and the holy.

Good luck with that.

And yet, notwithstanding all of this, Mary reacted in the most shocking way imaginable, especially considering the immediacy of her response:

“I am a servant of the Lord. Let this happen to me according to your word.”

Her willing conclusion, “Let this happen to me according to your word”, would certainly have been impossible, I suspect, without her premise: “I am a servant of the Lord.” Her ability to adapt to this whiplash of expectations was really only made possible by the assumptions she held concerning her place in the world. One almost gets the sense that, in the middle of her response, she is thinking out loud. Kind of working it through, real-time reasoning from first principles or something like.

Mary’s grounded understanding of her place emerges as an astonishing anti-fragility. Everything she had previously thought about how her life would proceed was being turned upside down, and yet she was able to accept, and ultimately embrace, the detour of her prior hopes and dreams.

“I am a servant of the Lord”.

One suspects this overarching assumption is the key that unlocks her impressive resilience. The reaction which follows is first informed by this perception that her life, and apparently even her body, was the possession of the Lord. She knew, somehow, that it was she who was caught up in God’s project — it wasn’t God who was caught up in hers.

Or to put it another way, she understood and accepted her creatureliness, and what having been created implied about her expectations of the world.

Do we moderns understand our own creatureliness? Does our cultural intuition nudge us to think of ourselves as being for His use and without any real bounds? Or, to the extent we think of Him at all, do we think of Him as sort of a kindly valet, perhaps a little too eager to please, standing by ready to act on a moment’s notice in service to our whims and emotional needs?

Much of the modern societal upheaval, which is regularly on display, amounts to a tantrum in response to the imposition of reality itself. Trans-humanism, in all of its forms, is very much a petulant rejection of the way the circumstances of our existence have been arranged. Moderns feel imposed upon by reality. Were you created as a man? Well, surgical and hormonal interventions can remedy that. No need to live with the constraints that reality has imposed. Does the healthy human body operate in the direction of fertility and reproduction? That can be remedied too.

The idea that reality might intrude and dictate our understanding of ourselves, thereby constraining our actions, is something many moderns simply cannot tolerate. We are living at a time of peak “follow your heart”. The easiest thing in the world, experience has shown, is to find entire communities of people who are eager to believe that self-absorption is actually a virtue. The fact that unrestrained self-absorption is indistinguishable from madness is something that we have decided to simply…forget.

In a more general sense, the tension in the culture this Christmas is a conflict over whether it is psychological comfort, or aligning our expectations with reality, that is the thing which truly contributes to human well-being.

This is not a new debate, it's just becoming more pronounced and weirdly deranged. Throughout the 20th century, even among Christians, confusion about where psychological satisfaction sits within the hierarchy of human goods has been a source of contention.

People think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. - Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor was writing way back in the 1950’s, and even then she perceived the tension between self-pampering faith and the meaning of the cross. Many Christians used to conceive of their commitment to Christ as a kind of enlistment in a cause greater than themselves; choosing a side, aligning with the truth. But notice how even the phrase “cause of Christ” had largely disappeared from published literature by the 20th century.

In The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis took pains to make the point that we are not brought to spiritual life merely to bask in our rehabilitated selves, but to take up arms in an ancient spiritual conflict. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, at the climax of the book, when the followers of Aslan are fighting a battle against the forces of the white witch, Aslan races to the witch’s castle, which he finds empty except for statues of all of the Narnians who had been turned into stone during the witch’s reign. Aslan moves through the castle, breathing on the statues, bringing each of them back to life. Once revived, Lewis doesn’t have them simply lolling about, luxuriating in their restoration. Instead, the Narnians immediately take up arms and run to battle in Aslan’s cause.

Whether our faith is supposed to primarily function in service to our psycho-therapeutic comfort, or whether it instead points us toward becoming useful in a cause greater than ourselves, finds its answer, I think, in Mary’s gritty and determined response to the angel Gabriel. It is hard to imagine such humility and courage being possible apart from her belief that her creator was within his rights to do with her — His own creation — just as He pleased.

And what was it that pleased Him? Why, it pleased Him to come to our rescue. To parachute in behind enemy lines. To become one of us. It pleased Him to use Mary’s body to knit His body together. It pleased Him for Mary to serve, in that way, as the mother of the resistance; for her to become the new “mother of all the living”, at the turning of the tide.

It pleased Him to be with us. God…with us. Immanuel.

And what could be less self-absorbed than that?