“A Sky Full of Children”

For my birthday, I bought Madeleine L’Engle’s Bright Evening Star, a series of essays on the “Mystery of the Incarnation.” The first of these is “A Sky Full of Children”; the title refers to the stars, each one created and named by God. L’Engle offers some things to think about:

My parents taught me a God of love, yet a demanding God who expected me to be honorable and truthful but who also allowed me to ask questions.

The story of Jesus’ birth has been oversentimentalized until it no longer has the ring of truth, and once we’d sentimentalized it we could commercialize it and so forget what Christmas is really about. It should be a time of awed silence, but it has become a season so frantic with stress that the suicide rate mounts alarmingly, and for some people death seems preferable to the loneliness and alienation of Christmas.

But my most favorite story was Mary Magdalene seeing Jesus after the Resurrection and hearing him call her by name and then knowing who he was. And I knew that Jesus calls us all by name. And Jesus was the God we call by name.

Tagged as: Bright Evening Star, Christmas, incarnation, Jesus, love, Madeleine-LEngle, questions