“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace,

good will toward men”

(Luke 2:14)

That philosophizing stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town says at the opening of the play’s last act: “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars … everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings…. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

And this something way down deep in every human being that is eternal is what the Christmas story is all about.

Perhaps as you’ve read the Christmas story you’ve been struck with its strange mixture of the temporal and the eternal. The details of the temporal are clear and rough and tough enough. A government order is issued con­cerning the payment of taxes on a specified date. Payment must be made, not just by mailing a check to the revenue official, but by making a trip to one’s hometown and there enrolling for taxing. And the journey must be made on a given date, no matter if it inconveniently coincides with the anticipated delivery date of a child. And shepherds are working the night shift on the designated date. And at the crowded inn, where no reservations have been made, there is no more room. And the baby is born, from harsh necessity, in a stable.

And suddenly the eternal breaks through into the temporal. In the midst of the mother’s birth pains, and on the fields where the cold, uninteresting night watch of the shepherds takes place, and in the unpleasant circumstances of the tax-paying pilgrimage, the heavenly chorus sounds forth triumphantly: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” And the eternal enters time. And God becomes man.

Certainly from the Christmas story it is clear enough that on that night at least the eternal is not something far off and removed from the temporal, but rather all mixed up with it.

But what is the nature of this something way down deep in human beings that is eternal? Christian theologians across the centuries have given an oversimple and much less than satisfying answer by simply calling this something the immortal soul of man. But what is the soul? What are the distinctive functions of the soul apart from the activities of the body, the mind, and the emotions?

Is the soul that which makes men and women capable of reverence, of feeling awe before the presence of beauty and greatness? For Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, and the ever-increasing number of environmentalists in our time, the human capacity for reverence for all of life is manifestation enough of this eternity set in human nature.

Some students of the works of Andrew Wyeth trace the secret of his greatness — his capacity to thrust through to the soul, to move the viewers of his paintings — to the overwhelming reverence he has for the simplicities of life. “You almost have to be on your knees before the thing you are painting,” says Wyeth, “or the thing just doesn’t come off.” Is reverence the charac­teristic motion of that something that is eternal in human beings?

Or is the characteristic motion of the soul the outgoing of love toward others? Is this what transforms the temporal into the eternal? Is this the open sesame to throw wide the dark gates of our earthly prison so that the heavenly light may burst in?

The probation officer for young Lee Harvey Oswald when he was a chronic truant from school in New York said of the boy, “I get the feeling that his mother was so wrapped up in her own problems she never saw her son’s problems…. I got the feeling that what the boy needed most was someone who cared. He was just a small, lonely, withdrawn kid who looked to me like he was heading for trouble.”

Can it be that this thing that is eternal, way down deep in human beings, is that endowment in human nature that needs both to express and to receive love? Saint Paul must have thought so, or he would not have written as he did in 1 Cor. 13. And George Macdonald, the Scottish poet and novelist, has defined the very essence of temporality as being “always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another.” And if this is the essence of temporality, surely the nature of the eternal is just the opposite — to be delivered from self-centered passions by outgoing love.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevski pictures the rich and pampered woman coming with troubled soul to the holy man and asking how she can regain her faith in God and her belief in life beyond death. And the holy man tells her that if she would regain her faith in God and immortality, she must perform an act of unselfish love.

And if we have become so mixed up in the temporal that we have lost touch with the eternal and can’t find it, the Christmas directive for each one of us is to look where the gospel story points for the eternal in the midst of the temporal.

The first focal point is, of course, the newborn babe. In a letter to his brother, Vincent van Gogh told of making studies to paint the portrait of the Roulin baby, the child of his friend the postman. And in the letter van Gogh observed, “A child in the cradle, if you watch it at leisure, has the infinite in its eyes.”

That something which is eternal and deep in human beings is nearest the surface in children, even in their eyes; and busy bishops and business moguls and great ladies, if they are truly great, know this and warm their hearts at the altar fires of children’s prayers. And one glory of the Christmas season is that it brings us all close again to the eternal in the heart of childhood. Phillips Brooks, the beloved Episcopal bishop, has in one of his Christmas poems this couplet:

The world has grown old with its burden of care
But at Christmas it always is young.

Then again, if we would find the eternal in the midst of the temporal, the Christmas story directs us to recapture the glory of the family circle. The gospel story reveals the holy family as each member is loyal to his or her relationship responsibilities.

A Dallas, Texas, minister told about asking people he encountered in the Christmas season, “What do you want most for Christmas?” He got some amazing answers. While everyone was making Christmas lists and buying jackets and toys and perfumes to give, here are some of the things people said they most wanted to receive: One woman said that more than anything else in the world she wanted a word from her husband that he still loved her and that he would give up the other woman. A boy told him that he wanted a chance to talk with his father, but his father was always too busy. A husband said that more than anything else he wanted to see a smile on his wife’s face and to hear her laugh again.

Marshall Fishwick, in a December 21, 1963, article in the Saturday Review, observed that the real service of the existentialist philosophers in our American culture a few years ago was that they were pointing out that the real enemy in life is inauthenticity, pomposity, abstractions. The threat to our life is our deep involvement with the temporalities and our imperviousness to the eternal in the midst of time. “We are serious about trivialities (electric toothbrushes, sports cars, hair-dos), trivial about reality (life, encounter, death)…. We accord ultimate meaning to the useful, but refuse to ask: useful for what?” Fishwick writes.

And the darkest depth of our existentialist tragedy is that we can become so remote and inauthentic in our most intimate relationships as to lose the eternal in the midst of time.

But, of course, the greatest glory of the Christmas story is that it links the past, the present, and the future — the near and the far — in this eternal soul stuff of reverential love. The babe born in Bethlehem is the long-expected King who has come to establish his rule of love in human hearts and who will come at the end of time to judge the world in righteousness. And the canon of his judgment is just the question, “Have you loved all your fellow men, my brethren, with the same love with which I have loved you?”