“It is possible to move right through the middle of a great mystery and not even notice it,” begins a Sunday school story told being told throughout the Diocese of California at this time of year.  Guilty as charged, thinks the storyteller (who happens to be me) with chagrin. Just when my attention seemed utterly absorbed by the next thing on my “to do” list, an Advent narrative rendered in the deceptively simple language of Godly play upends my assumptions and leaves me breathless with wonder.

I should have expected this — God’s shameless trafficking in surprise has caught me unaware plenty of times before. Just a few weeks earlier, in the midst of a season dedicated to remembering the dead, I had been given a new understanding of living community. At a retreat sponsored by the Department of Missions, a group of mission clergy dressed the altar at the Bishop’s Ranch chapel with the traditional symbols of the Mexican Day of the Dead. After the vicars placed their own photos and mementos of remembered loved ones on the altar, the collection of sacred objects continued to multiply day by day. We had no idea where this abundance was coming from, as we were the only group in residence at the Ranch that week. It wasn’t until most retreatants had departed that a member of the housekeeping staff shyly approached me and asked if ours was the group that had created the altar. “Era muy hermosa” — it was very beautiful, she said. “We were so surprised when we went into the chapel and saw it set up that way,” she said, “that we all went home and brought our own mementos to place on it.”

The prolific altar itself was not itself the miracle; rather it was the cross-cultural community of devotion it engendered. Nevertheless, the setting reminded me that objects have particular power to draw community together and invite our heartfelt stories. And nowhere is this truer in the life of the church than the season of Advent, its rich array of traditional sights and symbols and sounds.

How does your household get ready for the mystery of Christmas? A recent query of parents yielded suggestions both traditional and surprising. Light the Advent wreath and say a prayer before dinner — but don’t stop there. Set the table with purple napkins, suggested one mother, to remember that we are preparing for the coming of a king. Or borrow a Jewish Sabbath tradition and set the table without any knives to express your faith in the coming of God’s reign of peace. 

And then there are those traditional domestic symbols of Christmas. Many families mentioned crèche figures — the holy family and the three kings, especially — that they move deliberately around the house in purposeful journey towards a designated Bethlehem. Myself, I might actually have gotten my act together to do that last year, but a funny thing happened on the way to setting up Bethlehem. A group of neighbor children visiting our home for our annual Christmas tree decorating party found the box where I keep my various crèche sets. These were not children who attended church or had any formal Christian education, but they were happy to play with the figurines, and I was happy to watch them out of the corner of my eye.

Like children anywhere, they used the figures to act out the social dramas they knew best, grouping and regrouping them by size and color and gender. And the segregation and stratification might have continued all evening, but for the ministry of one soft-spoken 7-year-old, who had learned the rudiments of the nativity story from her grandmother. Gently pointing out the smallest infant figurine, she began to tell of a vulnerable family on an arduous journey towards the place where a long-awaited child might be born. And as her narrative unfolded, the clusters of figures spontaneously desegregated. Other children moved their characters into a circle surrounding the baby at the center of Clara’s story. The result was an aesthetic  mess — animals and parents and kings and angels of different sets and sizes clustered haphazardly around the smallest of three available babies. Jesus had several siblings and lots of odd looking aunts and uncles present at his birth that year — and I didn’t have the heart to move a thing.

We are walking right through the middle of a great mystery. Let us pause for a moment this Advent season and notice it.