The church we attend in Tucson, St. Philip’s in the Hills (don’t you love church names with directions in them), includes in its weekly worship schedule a choral evensong service. The short service, based on the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and almost entirely sung by one of St Philip’s choirs, attracts only a handful of worshipers, but for Adria and me it has become a wonderful way to conclude our Sundays with prayer and praise.

This past Sunday, Fourth Advent, the service ended with one of my favorite Advent songs, “Creator of the Stars of Night.” The text and chant tune are early, perhaps 7th century. The first verse as found in the 1982 Hymnal asks Christ to hear his people “as we call,” but I pray it, “as we fall.”

Creator of the stars of night, your people’s everlasting light,

O Christ, Redeemer of us all, we pray you hear us when we [fall].

The third verse strikes the theme of Christ’s humble coming:

When this old world drew on toward night, you came; but not in splendor bright,

not as a monarch, but the child of Mary, blameless mother mild.

The old world is still drawing on toward night, but it’s in the darkness of night that we see the stars. 

As it happens in this season I have been reading Richard Power’s 2021 novel, Bewilderment, a novel that is about both earth and stars. You may know Powers from the bestselling The Overstory (2018), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. As in Overstory, Bewilderment is about our relationship to all that is around us. It’s about seeing, noticing, taking account the world in which we live. In a New York Times interview, Powers asks, “How did we lose our sense of living here on earth?” “How did we become so alienated and estranged from everything else alive?” (New York Times, September 15, 2021; accessed here) It’s grief for everything that has been and is being lost that drives the novel.

The novel is set in the not distant future. The political world is as we currently know it, but it has become cruder, incrementally worse. At the center of the book is a grieving husband and father, the astrophysicist Theo Byrne, and his troubled son, Robin. They are mourning the loss of Theo’s wife and Robin’s mother Aly in a car accident. They seek grace and solace by camping in the Smoky Mountains. It doesn’t entirely work until they become involved in an experiment.

The experiment is called “Decoded Neurofeedback.” The subject is strapped in a fMRI machine, which maps brain activity. In the experiment, subjects are prompted to match their brain activity with that of people in known states of mind. Think of it as an empathy process. If you are a subject, your mind and the mind of whoever’s brain scan you are matching begin to merge. You think and feel what they were thinking and feeling. All very science fictiony. 

Robin turns out to have a talent for merging his brain with the target scans. In this way he learns to manage his emotions. This takes a turn, when for the earlier anonymous brain scans, a scan of his dead mother’s brain is substituted. In uncanny ways his mind merges with the mind of his mother.

But it’s not just empathy with his mother that he learns. For a season he becomes empathetic with all living things—with nature itself. He sees what others don’t see. He cares in ways that others don’t care both for other humans and for the wild. He becomes, in a second sense of the world, “bewildered.”

I’ll leave it there so as not to spoil more of the book for you than I already have. As Powers says in the New York Times interview I cited earlier, in Overstory he had “asked a very hard question, which is why are we so lost and how can we possibly get back?”

It’s this question that is at the heart of the Christmas story. The story is of our alienation not only from God—which is what preachers mostly talk about in Advent—but from the earth, from all life. It’s old question. We meet it already in the Gilgamesh story from the early 2^nd millennium BCE. We meet it in the Eden story. We meet it in contemporary politics. Does being human inevitably lead to estrangement from the earth?

Christmas proposes a way back for the human race. “The Word became flesh,” says the prologue of the Gospel of John. Not just human but flesh. The stuff of the earth itself. Christmas—the incarnation—is a celebration of flesh: all that is particular and concrete and contingent and earthly. It is the dwelling of God with us, Immanuel. 

Christmas should turn us not just to heaven but to earth. After the angels have sung to the shepherds in Luke 2, the shepherds decide to “go and see.” And when they come to the place where the child is, they find the child lying in a feeding trough, surrounded not only by human family but by other creatures. The stable is the earth writ small. Go and see: see the divine in the human. See the divine in all creation. 

Powers Bewildering book begs us to see the particular, what he calls in the last line of the book, “a changing world that every calculation should not have been.” He says that there is “such a small difference between forever and once. Christmas is a meditation on forever and once. In the incarnation forever and once come together. We see the forever in the once, the particular, what lies before us.

I don’t know if Powers is Christian or religious in any sense at all, but he has the question right: Why are we so lost and how can we possibly get back? Getting back means, if Christmas means anything at all, embracing both the divine and the earthly. Or better, embracing the divine in the midst of creation, the mystery of incarnation.

We discover this mystery not by putting a wall between us and the earth, as many Christians seem to want to do. They have the idea that what matters is only a bit of the divine in us, our souls. The rest, our bodies, our connection to the earth, is dispensable, mere baggage to be jettisoned at death. Christ, the Word made flesh, suggests the opposite. For God, flesh matters. God knows us because God knows our flesh. Like the “decoded neurofeedback” machine, God feels what we feel. 

There is more to be said about this. It’s this idea of the divinity inhabiting humanity that is at the heart of what Paul teaches about the Spirit, for example. But this is enough for now. It should, I think, turn us, as it turned the shepherds, to go and see: see the earth in which we live. See all that lives among us. 

On Christmas Day, take a hike. Look around. It’s all this that God embraces in the Christmas story. Say thank you.

Turn to the stars. Pray again:

Creator of the stars of night, your people’s everlasting light,

O Christ, Redeemer of us all, we pray you hear us when we fall.

Merry Christmas,

Clay