The Transcendental Importance of Christmas

Unlike most people, I do not feel much Dickensian nostalgia at Christmastime. The holiday fell just a few days after my father died early in my childhood, and all my memories of the season are darkened by the shadow of that sadness.

In Christmas, the worlds of secular and spiritual come together.

In Christmas, the worlds of secular and spiritual come together.


The Transcendental Importance of Christmas | Devotional

Unlike most people, I do not feel much Dickensian nostalgia at Christmastime. The holiday fell just a few days after my father died early in my childhood, and all my memories of the season are darkened by the shadow of that sadness.

For this reason, perhaps, I am rarely stirred by the sight of manger scenes and tinseled trees. Yet, more and more, Christmas has enlarged in meaning for me, primarily as an answer to my doubts, an antidote to my forgetfulness.

In Christmas, the worlds of secular and spiritual come together. If you read the Bible alongside a Civilization 101 textbook, you will see how seldom that happens.

The textbook dwells on the glories of ancient Egypt and the pyramids; the book of Exodus mentions the names of two Hebrew midwives but neglects to identify the pharaoh.

The textbook honors the contributions from Greece and Rome; the Bible contains a few scant references, mostly negative, and treats great civilizations as mere background static for God’s work among the Jews.


Yet on Jesus the two books agree. I switched on my computer this morning and Microsoft Windows flashed the date, implicitly acknowledging what the Gospels and the history book both affirm: whatever you may believe about it, the birth of Jesus was so important that it split history into two parts.

Everything that has ever happened on this planet falls into a category of before Christ or after Christ.

In the cold, in the dark, among the wrinkled hills of Bethlehem, God who knows no before or after entered time and space.

One who knows no boundaries at all took them on: the shocking confines of a baby’s skin, the ominous restraints of mortality.

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” an apostle would later say; “he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

But the few eyewitnesses on Christmas night saw none of that. They saw an infant struggling to work never-before-used lungs.

Image of Philip Yancey

He currently has more than 17 million books in print, published in over 50 languages worldwide. In his new memoir, Where the Light Fell, Yancey recalls his lifelong journey from strict fundamentalism to a life dedicated to a search for grace and meaning, thus providing a type of prequel to all his other books.