Christmas Post #5

The story I'm posting today is a story that really brings into focus for me how many times I spin God's character to reflect my own fears, doubts and insecurites. Sometimes it can be so easy to make him over in some other image. Oh, he's still God for the most part but with a few significant tweaks tacked on. Sometimes on closer inspection I can see my add ons for what they are: my fear of rejection, my worries about never being good enough, hazy misprints of many of the men who have influenced my life. But in large part I'm still trying to see through lots of layers, lies and mis-interpretations about my Heavenly Father. And I think he's okay with that. He knows who he is, obviously. I don't think he's offened if I don't get it all the time.

I think because I a grown man in his twenties sometimes I forget that to God I'm still a little child. Learning, growing, trying. It would be ridiculous for an earthly father to be angry with his little son because he didn't know everything about him. The thought to be accusatory to his son would never even cross his mind. And yet that's just another thing I pin on God sometimes--that He might be upset with me because I don't really understand him, and then my mind worries that maybe if I don't really understand him I don't really know him. But I think that that is one of the great mysteries about God and thinking about Christmas about the incarnation: we don't have to be able to totally wrap our minds around it for us to fully enter in to it's significance, power or beauty. In fact the reality that God became a tiny baby was born on earth and then died for me is something I'm going to be trying to get my head around for the rest of my life. But that doesn't mean that the reality of it is not fully mine live in.

Here's the story that started me thinking about this. I love it for lots of reasons but an added bonus is that it reminds me of Jacqui who read it the first time I heard it.

God in the Doorway
by Annie Dillard

One cold Christmas eve Iwas up unnaturally late because we had all gone out to dinner - my parents, my baby sister and I. We had come home to a warm living room, and Christmas Eve. Our stockings drooped from the mantel; beside them, a special table bore a bottle of ginger ale and a plate of cookies.

I had taken off my fancy winter coat and was standing on the heat register to bake my shoe soles and warm my bare legs. There was a commotion at the front door; it opened, and cold wind blew around my dress. Everyone was calling me. "Look who's here! Look who's here!" I looked. It was Santa Claus. Whom I never - ever - wanted to meet. Santa Claus was looming in the doorway and looking around for me. My mother's voice was thrilled: "Look
who's here!" I ran upstairs.

Like everyone in their right mind, I feared Santa Claus, thinking he was God. Santa Claus was an old man whom you never saw, but who nevertheless saw you; he knew when you'd been bad or good. And I had been bad.

My mother called and called, enthusiastic, pleading; I wouldn't come down. My father encouraged me; my sister howled. I wouldn't come down, but I could bend over the stairwell and see: Santa Claus stood in the doorway with night over his shoulder, letting in all the cold air of the sky; Santa Claus stood in the doorway monstrous and bright, powerless, ringing a loud bell and repeating Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. I never came down. I don't know who ate the cookies.

For so many years now I have known that this Santa Claus was actually a rigged-up Miss White, who lived across the street, that I confused the dramatis personae in my mind, making of Santa Claus, God and Miss White an awesome, vulnerable trinity. This is really a story about Miss White.

Miss White was old; she lived alone in the big house across the street. She liked having me around; she plied me with cookies, taught me things about the world, and tried to interest me in finger painting, in which she herself took great pleasure. She would set up easels in her kitchen, tack enormous slick soaking papers to their frames, and paint undulating undersea scenes: horizontal smears of color sparked by occasional vertical streaks which were understood to be fixed kelp. I liked her. She meant no harm on earth, and yet half a year after her failed visit as Santa Claus, I ran from her again.

That day, a day of the following summer, Miss White and I knelt in her yard while she showed me a magnifying glass. It was a large, strong hand lens. She lifted my hand and, holding it very still, focused a dab of sunshine on my palm. The glowing crescent wobbled, spread, and finally contracted to a point. It burned; I was burned; I ripped my hand away and ran home crying. Miss White called after me, sorry, explaining, but I didn't look
back.

Even now I wonder: if I meet God, will he take and hold my bare hand in his and focus his eye on my palm, and kindle that spot and let me burn?

But no. It is I who misunderstood everything and let everybody down. Miss White, God, I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.