On Wonder

The Spirit of Christmas (Pt. 2): Erémos and the Miraculous

[Greetings, friends, from Austin! Last week saw the official release and launch party of my third book. I have dreams of one day giving lectures around the world and touring with a band and some artists, and the evening of my launch party was a (very) small step in that direction—with a jazz band playing a set before a short discussion of the book followed. I called it “A Night of Beauty,” centered around an idea I wrote about in On Beauty:

In [Beauty], we find the antidote to our modern malaise. Even as society creeps toward a cynical reliance on a rationality which continues to make the case that it’s all meaningless and there is nothing beyond what our eyes can see, Beauty always finds a way to pierce through and object. Even as our species flirts with suicide at the hands of a nihilism darkening the horizon, Beauty can bring us back from the brink—delivering doses of the divine and the meaningful in a way that mere intellect cannot deny. Perhaps that’s what Dostoevsky meant when he placed the words “beauty will save the world” in the mouth of his Prince Myshkin.

That’s why, in a world that keeps spinning faster, where our screens make it easy to get sucked into the whirlpool of self-absorbed stress, self-doubt, and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, Beauty is our beacon. It is our way back and our way forward. Our way inward and our way upward.

Which is why we must find a way to keep its company as often as we’re able.

In nature.

In art.

In other people.

In all things, seek Beauty. It will fill your life and feed your soul as it does every time I return to it. And in doing so, it will feed the flame of a world that might benefit from more people coming alive.

If you have not yet bought the book and would like to, it can be purchased here. If you want the book and promise to leave a review, respond to this message, and I will send you a digital copy for free! (Side note: the most helpful and valuable thing for self-published authors is for genuine fans to leave reviews on Amazon.)

Part of the reason I picked “Beauty” as the theme of my launch is because I think it belongs to that category of endangered concepts we are always in danger of losing touch with. It is one of the qualitative aspects of life that often gets dismissed or devalued in a Post-Enlightenment age as “modernity peers over its shoulder with contempt on the ignorant, unenlightened ages of the past.”¹

Also in that category of endangered concepts is something the Christmas season begs us remember: Wonder. Everything about our (Western) winter traditions gestures in its direction. It is the season of miracles and imagination (see On the Spirit of Christmas for my thoughts on how Christmas inspires a sense of childlike wonder and invites us and our imaginations to come alive).

Over the next two weeks, I will publish a three-part Christmas series celebrating the spirit(s) of the season. Wonder, Divine Instruction, and Hope. Like all great traditions, Christmas belongs to that order of ideas that never really perish… returning to us every year on the calendar as a reminder to revisit its spirit in our hearts.

In the first part of this three-part series (four-part if you count last year’s On the Spirit of Christmas), we look at the Wonder and enchantment that the spirit of Christmas brings to our doorstep.

It is to that Wonder, and how we might invite it into our lives this winter, that we devote the rest of today’s essay.]

Figure: The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds by Thomas Cole (1833)

Every year, the Christmas season and its celebration come with a nudge, asking us to see the world around us with a twinkle… begging us to notice things we are blind to in other parts of the year. Enchantment enters our lungs with the cold winter air, and the fires of our imagination are stoked.

We wonder what it might be like if a fluffy man known as jolly old Saint Nick could fly through the night sky pulled by flying reindeer to deliver presents to all the good boys and girls across the globe in one evening. Christianity contemplates the story of a virgin giving birth to the Word made flesh… an embodiment of Heaven meeting Earth, fully man and fully divine. Even if we think one is true and the other is not, both belong to a class of ideas called miracles—phenomena that Nature says are impossible.

But isn’t that precisely the point of Christmas? To open us back up to the idea that there are things beyond our understanding at work in the world. To give enchantment entry into our hearts and souls as a reminder that something larger than us is at play.

In January of 1945, C.S. Lewis published an essay titled Religion and Science that touches on the topic of miracles and the Virgin Birth. The essay takes the form of a conversation with a friend and begins this way:

‘Miracles,’ said my friend. ‘Oh come. Science has knocked the bottom out of all that. We know that Nature is governed by fixed laws.’ ‘Didn’t people always know that?’ said I.

‘Good Lord, no,’ said he. ‘For instance, take a story like the Virgin Birth. We know now that such a thing couldn’t happen. We know there must be a male spermatozoon.’

‘But look here’, said I, ‘St Joseph –’

‘Who’s he?’ asked my friend.

‘He was the husband of the Virgin Mary. If you’ll read the story in the Bible you’ll find that when he saw his fiancée was going to have a baby he decided to cry off the marriage. Why did he do that?’

‘Wouldn’t most men?’

‘Any man would’, said I, ‘provided he knew the laws of Nature – in other words, provided he knew that a girl doesn’t ordinarily have a baby unless she’s been sleeping with a man. But according to your theory people in the old days didn’t know that Nature was governed by fixed laws. I’m pointing out that the story shows that St. Joseph knew that law just as well as you do.’ ‘But he came to believe in the Virgin Birth afterwards, didn’t he?’

‘Quite. But he didn’t do so because he was under any illusion as to where babies came from in the ordinary courses of Nature. He believed in the Virgin Birth as something supernatural. He knew Nature works in fixed, regular ways: but he also believed that there existed something beyond Nature which could interfere with her workings – from outside, so to speak.’

‘But modern science has shown there’s no such thing.’

‘Really,’ said I. ‘Which of the sciences?’

‘Oh, well, that’s a matter of detail,’ said my friend. ‘I can’t give you chapter and verse from memory.’

‘But, don’t you see’, said I, ‘that science never could show anything of the sort?’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Because science studies Nature. And the question is whether anything besides Nature exists – anything “outside”. How could you find that out by studying simply Nature?²

The something outside Nature is precisely the thing that Christmas wants to invite into our lives. Whether it’s Christ or Santa or the Christmas Truce of 1914, the spirit of Christmas opens us up to the possibility of miracles. And the question becomes whether we will have the eyes to see them.

Looking for Miracles in the Erémos

The irony of the Supernatural is that the Natural is so often the window. The signs from beyond Nature, in many instances, come to us through Nature. The Greek word erémos—which describes an uninhabited, barren, or deserted place—and its use in the New Testament helps illustrate my point.

As used in the New Testament, erémos often refers to physical locations (e.g., deserts or wilderness areas) where people go for prayer or reflection, but it also metaphorically describes an inner state of quietness or solitude. In either case, it is in the erémos where people have their encounters with God. It is the New Testament description of the places where the significant encounters of the Old Testament occur (the wilderness where Moses meets the burning bush and the mountaintop where he hears the voice of God… it is the road where Jacob sees his ladder with angels ascending and descending). It is a place where the veil between Heaven and Earth is thin.

To the erémos is where Jesus goes to pray and to fast for 40 days and nights. It is where John preaches his inspired Word. It’s also like the fields where the shepherds encounter an angel announcing Christ’s arrival.³ And like the clear night sky where the Magi saw the celestial flare signaling Jesus’ birth.⁴

In today’s world, it’s easy to edge the erémos out of our lives with all the distractions available. We can’t go on a walk without having the voice of someone else in our headphones. We can’t enjoy our evenings in silence without filling every moment with something we consider “productive.” We can’t disconnect from technology for more than a few moments without worrying that we’re missing something important.

But this addiction to distraction turns out to be spiritually corrosive. The same tendencies and habits that edge out the erémos also threaten to eliminate encounters with the divine from our lives entirely. The cost of receiving the guidance and insights we crave are the very things we so readily avoid—silence, solitude, boredom, and space.

So this winter, here is the invitation: Seek erémos and keep your eyes peeled for miracles. Be intentional about taking time alone. Walk under a clear night sky and allow the light of the stars to dazzle you. Go lay in the snow, close your eyes, and imagine yourself in Narnia or Hogwarts for the holidays. Find a cozy room… preferably one where the only sound you can hear is one of fire crackling in a fireplace. Leave your phone at home for a few hours and explore. Sit still and stare out the window at a winter landscape, and let your mind wander. Stand outside and listen to what the sounds of the natural world want to tell you. Smell, see, feel everything real around you. Focus on your breathing. Relax your muscles. Be still. Listen.

You may be bored and uncomfortable initially, but that’s the point. Boredom is the cost of creativity and true inspiration. It is the cost of true insight… the magnet of miracles. We all say we want a sign, but we refuse to remove the distractions necessary to see them. We all say we want clarity but refuse to silence the outside voices required to hear it. We think that these things—signs and clarity—are things that we find… in the next podcast, next book, next conversation, next swipe. Maybe, instead, they are things that find us in the quiet moments of our lives when we are still… in the erémos.

Whether we make space for such miracles to arrive, as always, is up to us.

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P.S. Make sure you take an opportunity to be silly this Christmas.

This Christmas season, give yourself permission to stop being sensible for a change and start being silly. Take a walk. Take a break. Smile, for heaven’s sake. Find something to laugh about (preferably yourself). Recover the vitality of youth. Practice the “eternal appetite of infancy.” Expand your capacity for wonder. Expand your capacity for pudding. Step outside and look at the stars. Follow one and see where it leads you. Go ice-skating on a frozen lake. Go sledding on a frozen backside. Drink hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and sprinkles. Roast marshmallows over an open fire. Sing a carol with gusto. Tell jokes (even bad ones). Shed some weight. Shed some worry. Get buoyant. After all, how else will you grow young enough to enter the kingdom of heaven? How else will you whole-heartedly embrace the joys of Christmas?⁵

1. Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton (“Winter Fire”), p. 32.

2. C.S. Lewis, Religion and Science (an essay that appears in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics).

3. I use like here because the Bible doesn’t use the word erémos to describe the fields that the shepherds were in; but there is a clear thru-line as a place of solitude (and, in this case, stewardship in the act of “keeping watch”) where divine encounters occur. Some scholars even use erémos to refer to the “Star of Bethlehem” due to its association with the desert landscape where the shepherds would be. Luke 2:8-14: “In the same region there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock at night. And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood near them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. And so the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army of angels praising God and saying,

Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace among people [k]with whom He is pleased.

4. The Bible doesn’t use the word erémos in this instance either. We don’t know where exactly the Magi were when they saw the star, but it’s easy to imagine that they would have been somewhere very dark and isolated… somewhere the night sky would be visible to them. “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we saw His star in the east and have come to worship Him.’” (Matthew 2:1-2.)

5. Winter Fire, p. 37.