Jessica Coblentz

In an excerpt from her recently published diaries, Dorothy Day recalled a friend who, exactly 9 months before Christmas day, celebrated the Annunciation by getting on his knees, leaning over, and kissing the ground.  This is the day that God entered Mary’s womb, he would exclaim.  He delighted in the fact that Christ Christened the earth with divine incarnation on that day. With that day, the earth became sacred in the most tangible, significant event of Christian history.

While Christians think of the Annunciation and Christmas as distinct, Day’s memory of the Annunciation is a challenging Christmas memory for me. I so often think of Christmas day as the annual celebration of the Incarnation. However, this man’s celebration of the Annunciation challenges me to think of the Incarnation of God in the world as something that occurred not in a single day like Christmas, but rather, through an unfolding process–quite literally, though the season of Mary’s pregnancy.

And, really, the Incarnation did not reach its pinnacle with the birth of Christ in a manger. The Incarnation continued throughout Jesus’ childhood, adult life, crucifixion, and resurrection.  And I think the Incarnation, the unfolding of the divine in temporal life, it continues today.  It is my regular witness of it in ordinary life that compels me to believe this paradoxical religious claim with such devotion.

What if I lived each day like it was Christmas–the celebration of divine Incarnation in this broken, messed up world?  I don’t mean to pose this question in some sort of sappy Coca-cola Christmas commercial kind of way.  I mean it.  What if I lived with the type of reverence for the goodness in this world that would compel me to kneel down and kiss the dirt?  What if I took the time to recognize the continuous unfolding of the Incarnation like that?

Come to think of it, what if I simply lived Christmas day–one day a year–like that?  Perhaps that’s a start to a new way of living out the whole year.