Playing a Part in Advent

Did you ever star in the nativity? As we enter advent, children across the country will be wondering - if they don't already know - if they'll get to play Mary or Joseph this year, or be relegated to the back end of a donkey. Me, I was the narrator.

But remember that visceral sense of excitement as you prepared! Remember that thrill, as you rehearsed the play, and parents arrived to crouch like giants on infant benches and watch the Christmas story unfold, once more!

We were part of the story. Characters, participating in the sheer wonder of it all.

Sadly, as we grow up, it gets harder (for some reason) to use our imagination and enter the fray. If we're not careful, or indeed if we're too careful, we can turn the greatest story ever told into a set of dry propositions, instead of the flesh-and-blood-and-donkey-dung opening scenes of a plot that is set to run and run.

As for playing our part within it, many of us struggle, if we're honest, to believe we truly have a role to play at all, aside from the good-for-nothing who is saved from hell and must now try to keep out of mischief until they reach glory. Either that, or we become so infatuated with the story of 'me' - of climbing my ladder, making my way, achieving my goals - that we struggle to connect our smaller narrative, of which we are the hero, to anything meaningful beyond it.

The theologian and writer Eugene Peterson has a delightful way of seeing our role in the Story, which might help us to play our part more authentically, this advent. 'We get included', he says, 'by means of a few prepositions: God with us (Matthew 1:23), Christ in me (Galatians 2:20), God for us (Romans 8:31). With... in... for...; powerful, connecting, relation-forming words, but none of them making us either subject or predicate.'

Those humble words, those simple prepositions, are the ways and means of us entering into, and accepting the invitation to participate in, something intriguingly and powerfully and necessarily beyond our selves: the story of Immanuel.

Imagine. The curtain's rising.

Brian Draper

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It's not too late to join Brian Draper's e-mail series, Advent 20 - visit http://www.spiritualintelligence.co.uk/ for details. Brian runs Echosounder, a small enterprise which helps people to nurture their spiritual intelligence.

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