Untold histories, Wild possibilties

The late theologian and spiritual writer, Rachel Held Evans, would often begin a sermon or story with the words, “on the days when I believe it’s true…” I resonate with her words although I might change the language a bit to say, “On the days when I believe it actually happened this way…”

Christmas is no exception.

I’m not sure what to do about a lot of the details from the Christmas story in the gospels, and I am not that stuck on whether it all actually happened that way or not. What I believe is that this story is true, and at its essence it offers us a crucial message in history.

One of my favorite writers is Rebecca Solnit and she wrote a book that really influenced me more than a decade ago. I had been involved in some movement and activist work, and I think I found myself flirting with despair about the world (still sometimes do but not nearly as often). I found her book Hope in the Dark and it really helped me. It was the subtitle of her book, however, that really caught my attention: Untold histories, Wild possibilities. And it is the subtitle that I think of when I reflect on the Christmas story.

In the 2015 introduction to the book, she says that “the unimaginable is ordinary, [and] the way forward is almost never a straight line…but a convoluted path of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.” 

This sounds a lot like the Advent story to me.

God unimaginably comes into the everyday, ordinary circumstances of people’s lives – people unrecognized by the world around them – people without power or social status – and uses them to introduce wild possibilities into the mix – possibilities that will fulfill ancient promises of liberation, freedom and joy. 

Just pause there for a minute and take that in. God shows up in the everyday, ordinary circumstances of people’s lives and sets in motion unimaginable change. What is more, the people at the center of the story likely do not fully appreciate (or maybe even recognize) what they are setting in motion. They are just trying to live faithfully in the moment.

What is more, the actions that we witness happening in the story ALWAYS have antecedents – meaning that they do not come out of nowehere. Solnit says that “even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.”

I truly believe that all of the characters in the Advent story had seeds sown into them. Someone told them about God’s promise. Someone helped them to trust their dreams and inner experience. Someone helped them believe in a God of wild possibilities. Someone had shown them that a “change is gonna come.” Someone taught them to hope.

We never hear the “untold histories” that enabled Mary to say “yes” to the angel or encouraged Joseph to listen to his dream. We don’t know who taught Elizabeth to trust God or mentored the shepherds’ so they’d be prepared to receive the angel’s words. But someone did. And so when each was finally recruited to be part of that incredible change in history, they moved into the uncertainty because someone had prepared them to do so. Someone we never hear about or see as connected to their story.

What this suggests to me is that we never know what we are going to set in motion when we try to live a faithful life.

Solnit says that because we don’t ultimately know how things will work out or what will emerge in life, this uncertainty represents an opportunity. Hope locates itself in this space giving us what she calls a “spaciousness to act.” She goes on to say that, “when you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”

And this is where I tend to need the Christmas story more and more each year.

It’s no secret that we live in a world of uncertainty. On some days, things seem pretty messed up, and it’s hard to envision what an alternative future could look like. And yet it is the very act of stepping into that uncertainty that might actually introduce a wild possibility that no one expected that changes everything.

Paul Goodman who was a writer and social critic in the 1960’s wrote, “Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!”

I think God did that in a unique way at the first “Christmas” and recruited others to make that reality a possibility. God started living the revolution in the person of Jesus, and that baby Jesus would then go on to grow up and show us more fully what that looked like. And then we would be asked to do the same in our lifetime. 

So no matter what you are going through these days, remember that there are untold histories and wild possibilities at work. This does not promise that all will “get better” or go as you want it to. But it does promise that while uncertainty still exists, room to act remains available to us. We are all involved in stories with storylines that are much bigger than our individual lives and that we live in the storylines of others who went before us not knowing if they had made a difference (and making it possible for us to do what we have done).

What was set in motion on that first Christmas is still moving – in you, in me and in this world. Nothing could be more true to me. 

Merry Christmas!

If you would like to read Solnit’s introduction to the 2015 edition of Hope in the Dark, click here.