When Comes the Child: Love Actually and the Post 9/11 Advent

I posted this on xanga and myspace a year ago, but since I have this snazzy new "blogger" account so I can randomly read Kerri's musings on adolescent make-outs and spitting cobras, I decided to re-post it here this year. I could've edited it and all of that, I'm sure. But I didn't. Also, I still think about it in pretty much the same terms after a year. Hope Advent finds you living in the Peace.
-d
Advent 2007

I started this a few nights ago, and just finished it. It feels choppy and incomplete, but I was trying to keep it "blogging" length, and finish it tonight. It's still a bit long so you'll have to forgive that. I'll want to re-write it at some point, so feel free to critique. Oh, and I think I owe credit for different wordings to John Shelby Spong and Dick Cheney respectively.
Merry Christmas.
-d

I sit in the stillness of a house inhabited by one. There is a candle burning on the stove and a candle burning on the end-table next to me. A C.D. rendition of Handel's "Messiah" plays and I've just finished reading an Advent reflection by Kathleen Norris from Watch for the Light: Reading for Advent and Christmas. Outside the weather drops still after a day of a "blue norther". Christmas begs to be let in. I try, and yet as I meditate on the reality of God's coming to the world, I am struck not by trees, wreaths, or primarily by the music or burning candles, but by the movie Love Actually.

From most angles the story amounts to nothing more than an anglophile's Christmas movie extraordinaire -- it actually includes a scene with Hugh Grant caroling "Good King Wenceslas" outside a London "flat".

I consider this movie to be holiday tradition in the same vein White Christmas is that great 1940's New England postcard fare holiday tradition. Only this movie has ownership of the season's actual grace. Where Bing Crosby sings the emotion of the season, Richard Curtis gracefully extrapolates the reality of it. He doesn't shy from the hurts of life, from the witty nuance of English Comedy, or even from the overly sensitive romance of chance. But in all that, the movie is primarily about the coming of, well, love actually. And love finds its beginning and completion (both teleological and narratival) in the coming and going of a post 9/11 airport.

The movie opens in a busy holiday ridden Heathrow airport. It takes care to point out the setting as after the twin towers fell, and the security testifies in its own right to the historical placement. As the multiple stories begin to intertwine, the 9/11 reference becomes obscured, but it is important as the final scenes reflect the reality of the "Magnificant" in a way that my many church experiences have failed to do.

1^st century Palestine bares few resemblances to 21^st century airports – or 21^st century anywhere for that matter. The changes are obvious at the most casual of glances, but the similarities in life are quite real. We live in a world that is dominated. We are dominated by many ideologies, faiths, rulers, etc. But for those in the western world, those of us who wake to death tolls of a "war on terror", the domination is certain and full.

The domination of the 1^st century is well documented and the high school student should give at least a knowing nod to the names of Greece and Rome. Rome's domination and rulership was absolute and unswerving. They brought peace at the cost of the sword, and safety at the cost of life. Caesar was the lord of the world. (You can read more about this from any decent book – John Howard Yoder or N.T. Wright would be good places to start)

Jesus' birth, in short, changed the order of everything. What was weak is strong, what was strong is weak, and the poor have God as their friend. That peace was proclaimed in the angelically lit skies, according to Luke's story, is no small detail or Hallmark greeting to be passed blithely down through time. But, rather the proclamation/gospel/good-news of a new order in the world, an order marked by the self-giving of God (even to the point of a radical's death) in what someone has called "loving wastefully" – this is now the "new normalcy".

So when a few days after the towers of New York fell, and the world (by world I of course mean what every good white person means: the western world dominated by leftover "manifest destiny") scrambled to find meaning again, we became prisoners of violence and hate and exclusion. We are dominated still by rhetoric of "calling" and "freedom" (a word I believe to have absolutely no meaning left in it). We are prisoners of our own "safety", in airports, and football games, and even telephone lines, and of course in Guantanamo Bay.

Dynasties love to make the jokes (he who laughs last, etc.) They even tolerate Saturday Night Live skits that play off of their blunders. But dynasties hate to be mocked, and to have their rules flaunted. Jesus did that. Actually, as a baby Jesus just had the potential to do that, and they tried to kill him.

In the movie, after two hours of story and story convergence, the little boy's story is the final part of the dénouement. He openly and with only slight hesitation, and with a little prodding from his stepfather, flaunts national security. He takes on the empire with nothing but a running start – and wins. He does it all for a last ditch attempt to (what he knows is) love wastefully. The girl is getting on the plane. She's as good as gone. His words just can't stay unspoken; his love has to come out. Damn the police: love, not security brings freedom. For the little child with eyes, the emperor is either lying or has been lied to: he's naked and so are his subjects, and the he's still crying out loud about how great the clothes are. The child looks at the naked futility of violence and risks the "security" of a world in fear just to love, actually.

In Jesus story, Luke takes time to make a real case study of the "compare and contrast" concept. It is always the weak, the poor, the hurt, the oppressed who are protagonists, and Jesus is the "firstborn among many brethren" here. He dies to bring life, and what an idiot that makes him, the whole world thinks – and rightfully so, because the world is blinded by its claim to ownership and power. Jesus dies, and anything that dies is a failure, especially to die as a fledgling zealot leader. But Jesus' coming in obscurity, his loving wastefully, his monotonous commitment to peace in a world of oppressive violence, these things bring life when poured out.

An overweight servant to the Prime Minster, a cleaning lady who can't speak the dominate language, and little boy who has just lost his mother, but is too struck by the "total agony of being in love" to be confined by the empire, all point to the gospel of God in Jesus: "he has filled the hungry with good things, but sent the rich away empty".

The coming of Jesus and the wasteful loving of a little boy in the face of empire both show the revolution that Yoder writes about: "a new order in which men may live together in love. In his time, therefore, as in ours, the question of revolution, the judgment of God upon the present order and the imminent promise of another one, is the language in which the gospel must speak". And so I say that the story(ies) of the movie do tell us that God has come into a world of injustice and hate. But when God comes, God comes as a child. God comes and the empires of the world cleave desperately to their power, and all for nothing. God has come. God has come as a child. The world is different. A little Child will lead them. God has come as Love actually.