Hold Your Breath—Taking in the Spirit of Christmas

Every Advent season, I tell myself I’ll slow down and truly take in the mystery surrounding the birth of Jesus. Typically, though, it isn’t until Christmas Eve, when I find myself alone in the quiet, that I’m able to let everything else fall away. On that one night, I rest in peaceful moments of remembrance. And when I wake on Christmas morning, I find myself wanting more of that.

It seems as soon as Thanksgiving is over, our busy lives go into hyper-speed and the dangerously fast pace at which we usually live only increases. We accept this as a fact of life. It just happens, right?

Or maybe we allow it to happen and then act like it’s someone else’s fault - family, society, Wal-Mart. In truth, if we find ourselves aching for more on the 26th—we have no one to blame but ourselves.

It’s easy to show the ways we rush through Christmas. The more important (and difficult) part is redefining our celebration in a way that changes us as people. Perhaps one way to engage this season is simply to breathe it in.

Diving Dirt

Then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.

It’s a mysterious thing that takes place in Genesis 2:7. When the dirt of the ground meets the breath of God, a human being comes into existence. The most celebrated piece of all creation is an intimate combination of the spiritual and the physical. One could say that humans are, to put it simply, divine dirt.

This breath of God (ruach in Hebrew) enables non-living stuff to take form and exist as a being. It is literally the breath that gives life.

Breathing is a fascinating thing. We take in the oxygen our bodies need to repair and continue living, and we breathe out the carbon dioxide that poisons us. It’s like giving our bodies a bath from the inside out. (Humans are of a most brilliant design.)

The people of the Old Testament understood the breath of a living being to be synonymous with the spirit of that being—its life. Ruach means both breath and spirit. They are tied to each other. So when God breathes into the dust of the ground, it isn’t simply oxygen that He exhales. It is life. It is spirit.

Big Babies

This whole journey of life began with a breath, and as babies, we breathed easily. We breathed from our bellies and relaxed our little bodies. But as we grow older, stress mounts, and our minds are weighed down with the things of the world.

I remember what it was like to be held as a child. It was one of the best things about being small. I could crawl onto my grandma’s lap, curl up, and lie there—body limp, breathing easily, resting from the adventures of that day. Something happens when we get older, though. We forget to rest. We forget to trust. We forget that we can breathe easily.

Jesus said, “Come to Me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). We believe Him, and it makes us feel good, for a moment. But what if we could live there?

Not only can we live there, but we must. It’s part of our design. When kids are held close by one who loves them, they trust, rest, and breathe. Jesus beckons us to come to Him as children. And His lap is large enough to hold the biggest of babies.

Time to Remember

The original purpose of festivals was to carve out a time to celebrate pivotal events in the history of a people. The ability to remember in a vivid way the happenings of the past is unique to the human experience. In the Old Testament, the Israelites held festivals to remember times when God met them, saved them, and led them. It was important that God’s people remember Him; otherwise, they would forget and become like the surrounding cultures who didn’t know the only true God.

The observation of Advent is a period of preparation, but it’s also a time set aside to remember. That’s not often our reality, though. In stretching ourselves in every direction possible, we have forgotten the way. But the One whose mysteries and life we are celebrating doesn’t care about the cultural status quo. He cares deeply about us and wants us to remember His vast love, which at one point in history came to us in the form of a person named Jesus.

Lawrence Kushner, a Jewish rabbi, says that “spirituality is that dimension of living in which we are aware of God’s presence.” This season, could we take the opportunity to become more aware of God’s presence?

In Orthodox Judaism, dedicated Jews stop for prayer three times a day. Orthodox Muslims stop for prayer five times a day. Usually I stop to pray at five ‘til bedtime and fall asleep in the middle of “Dear Lord.” I don’t have a ritual. I don’t have reminders set in place so that I can take time during the day to recognize my Source, to breathe and to remember. And so, I forget.

The beauty of human choice is that things don’t have to be as they have always been, and the small choices we determine to make redefine our lives. We can start now to create time and space and practices that help us become more aware of the One who is over all and in all and through all. From recognizing when we take in our first breath of the day to making time to ponder the wonder of the season, we have before us (as we always do) an opportunity to change.

So while everything is moving fast and missing the point, here’s to breathing deep and resting easy. Here’s to remembering who God is and remembering who we are.