Advent Meditations - Week 1

I’m trying to remember how a younger me felt about It’s a Wonderful Life. Did I hate it? That’s my first impulse. But I’m not sure that’s right. I seem to remember sort of liking it once. But there was an aura around it, a moralistic halo as if I ought to appreciate it deeply. Maybe that’s what I disliked. The annual showing was a ritual along with the candlelight Christmas Eve service. But it was long and the middle bits didn’t hold my attention. I didn’t mind the black and white of I Love Lucy and The Andy Griffith Show, but those were short and funny. I wanted It’s a Wonderful Life to be more like a pilgrimage than an annual ritual. I did it once and it was fine. Now let’s move on to the fun stuff: you know … bad guys getting their faces smashed in by neglected youths. 

But now that I’m in my 40s, I very deeply appreciate the movie. Watching it is an annual ritual that I greet warmly. I know I will cry, especially in the years since I’ve lost my grandparents and my dad. But I also know that every year George Bailey and the gang will take me by the hand and usher me to a familiar place, a place where nostalgia and raw emotion mingle with reflection and ambition. The movie prompts me to ponder questions like, What is the story of my life? Does my life honor the legacy of my Pappy? Am I becoming the kind of man my Nanny would like to know? (She loved this movie.) What about my dad? Am I faithfully stewarding all that he gave me? And as I watch George losing his mind, shouting at his daughter and her teacher and his wife, shaking his little girl and scaring her to death, I ask, How often have I played this part since I watched this last year? Why am I so easily annoyed by the things that I know I will miss so much some day? And every year George and Mary and little Zuzu lead me from reflection and back to a place of love, at least the ambition to love. As George runs through flawed and broken Bedford Falls, shouting, “Merry Christmas,” I think, That’s right! Life is a miracle; it’s all a gift! I want to live every day like George Bailey with a bloody lip. 

It’s a Wonderful Life, along with that Charles Dickens classic, The Muppet Christmas Carol, have birthed a theme common to Christmas storytelling. Let’s just call it:  The Existential Crisis. Like George and Scrooge, characters who undergo this crisis are confronted—usually by some magic—with their own mortality or the contingency and fragility of their lives. They see where they have gone wrong or how little they have appreciated the simple things that make life good: family, friends, warm meals, love, and fidelity. They come to a point of repentance in which they realize that living for money or power or comfort or whatever it is has cost them too much. They have gained the world but lost their souls—as one rabbi put it. Think how many Christmas stories have this theme: The Family Man, Elf, The Santa Clause, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Maybe you can think of others. 

These Christmas stories of existential crisis are good for us, especially if we let them lead us to our own places of reflection and repentance. But without the gospel, they can only confront us with our failure. At best we get a shot of good guy adrenaline that might get us through the night. However, if we let these stories invite us into the heart of Advent, then they can, indeed, become annual rituals of renewal. 

Advent is all about existential crises. It’s about an encounter with someone who transcends our humanity—the Word made flesh. And this person, Jesus of Nazareth, has come to put our existence into question, to call us to repentance. You may think of repentance as a harsh word; you may picture TV preachers shouting about ear piercings and rock and roll. But true repentance is what warms our hearts at the climax of every one of these movies. It’s when the character says, I’ve made a mistake and it’s time to turn back now to what is true and good and beautiful. It’s George Bailey frolicking through town. It’s Ebenezer Scrooge shouting, “Boy! What day is it?” It’s the Grinch’s small heart growing three sizes. This is what repentance looks like, and Advent is a season of repentance. 

An old hymn describes the crisis like this: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining/

Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth.” It’s the collision between sin and holiness, between God and humanity, between darkness and light. It’s good news because the Word made flesh is also the light and life and humanity. It’s good news because he makes a way for us to repent, to be restored to our source of life. From a gospel perspective, It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t an annual pep talk about how we ought to spend more time with family or cook more meals at home. It’s a call to “apprenticeship with Jesus toward recovering our humanity and, through his Spirit, helping our neighbors do the same” (Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor).

This Advent, I want to invite you into this existential crisis. Place your whole life before the Redeemer; let the Spirit take you by the hand and lead you back to abundant life. Carve out space this week and in the weeks to come, and, like a character in a great Christmas movie,  let your false self be exposed. Consider where you have gone wrong, where sin has pulled you off course and into a story that leads away from life. 

In these movies, the crisis begins with a destabilizing or disruptive event: a visit from the ghost of an old business partner, $5,000 goes missing, you accidentally hear someone say you’re a human. For us, too, repentance starts with a destabilizing collision. It is the light shining into our darkness. But unlike these stories, our destabilizing event can be as simple as sitting quietly and asking God to change your heart or opening scripture and submitting to its probing light. 

Here’s one suggestion to help you on this advent journey. Set aside two hours this week to watch your favorite existential crisis Christmas movie. Don’t put it on while doing other things. Sit with friends and family. Make popcorn and wassail. Put your phone in timeout and just watch the movie. 

Afterward, spend some time meditating on your life. The true meaning of Christmas isn’t friends and family and lights. It’s Emmanuel; the Word made flesh who lived among us! Let that Christmas gospel call you away from sin and back to life in Christ. Imagine that you are the main character in an existential crisis Christmas movie, but a gospel-centered one. As that crisis leads to epiphany and repentance, what are the things that Advent would shine a light on in your life? What are you called away from and what are you called toward? 

I hope that by thinking about these movie tropes, we can reframe how we think about sin and repentance. These movies clearly display for the audience how the main character misses the mark, how they are blind to what is really meaningful in life, how they are hurting those around them. Their repentance is a relief, a return to a life worth living. I’m not sure how often we think about sin and repentance in this way, but we should. Repentance from sin is about turning away from death and toward life. It’s about becoming more like Jesus and therefore more fully human. 

I’ll share a few lines from my favorite 20th century monk, Thomas Merton. As you reflect on your life, consider how Merton’s categories of the true and false selves overlap with our conversation about the existential crisis and repentance from sin. 

“To say I was born in sin is to say I came into the world with a false self. I was born in a mask. I came into existence under a sign of contradiction, being someone that I was never intended to be and therefore a denial of what I am supposed to be … [A]s long as I am no longer anybody else than the thing that was born of my mother, I am so far short of being the person I ought to be that I might as well not exist at all. In fact, it were better for me that I had not been born.”