On Christmas

What is Christmas?

Thousands of words have been written, hundreds of songs sung—the centuries are full of hope, longing for the day when all sad things will become untrue, Tolkiens’ words speaking for everyone everywhere. In a world where Fate is the first and last word, where things are as they are because they always have been and always will be, Christmas is nonsense. Bah, humbug, again and again and again.

But if Christmas has moral meaning, if it is about a true story of a moment in time when heaven came to earth, when transcendence touches immanence, where tears of sorrow are indelibly mixed with tears of joy, where ora et labora is the stuff of life, then it is grace, a great grace. As U2 put it so poetically and profoundly, it is not only the name of a girl but its reality has changed the world.

If you are like my wife Meg and me, at all, often wondering if the vast universe of television programming might have something worthy of your heart and mind, then please let me tell you, again perhaps, of the most unusual show ever, the BBC’s Call the Midwife. When it first appeared 12 years ago, I was intrigued, wondering why and where this show had come from? Who imagined it? Who wanted it enough to jump through the hoops to move it from storyboard to screen?

We watched the first few seasons, enjoying them very much, and then became weary of the post-modernizing of the storyline, groaning again at the insistence that every story be the same story. But this week, Christmas being Christmas, we found our way to the first season again, and its “Christmas Special,” certain that in every way that mattered we would be nourished, that the days of this week would have deeper meaning for us if we listened in, lingering with the Nonnatus House and its nuns.

Set in the East End of London in the late 1950s, the series is located in the neighborhood of docks and dockworkers, of ships and sailors, where the Nonnatus House offers midwifery service to the host of women who need help bringing their babies into being. The Anglican nuns eat together, play together, work together, and worship together, weaving a tapestry of very ordinary life among very ordinary people. And into their common life a group of midwives join in, apprenticing themselves to the wise and good, aging and sometimes cranky sisters of charity who have given their lives to the needs of the world.

Desperate husbands call out, women with bursting bellies cry out, and tiny babies eventually join the chorus. Sometimes the stories are of the deepest gladness, and sometimes the most heart-wrenching grief—as it is in the world that is ours. And then, surprise of surprises, right in the very midst of the push-come-to-shove of literal life, we begin to hear the nuns singing their psalms, threading their confession of the meaning of the universe into one more day at the Nonnatus House, full of glories and ruins as all days are.

All this and Christmas too. The special for the first season is both profound and tender, offering a story of women wrestling with the vocation of of their lives, pondering the possibility of a calling from God to love the world, with people laughing and crying about things that matter, where humility bumps up against arrogance, as it does in every human heart—and of course, a baby being born. All of this threaded through with the meaning of Christmas, of heaven coming to earth in and through the lives of women who saw themselves called by God to care, incarnating in the hours of their days and nights honest faith, honest hope, honest love.

Born of her own longing to make sense of making sense, caring for the world but wanting reasons to care that were formed by the truest truths of the universe—for her, a slow pilgrimage, coming to believe in the God who has tears, incarnate in Christ—the French philosopher Simone Weil called this a sacramental life, a life in which we remember to remember that all of life is lived before the God of heaven and earth, weaving worship together with work, a life of ora et labora as it is and as it must be.

In a word, this is Christmas.