Walter Wangerin
Double W for one of my favorite authors. One of my favorite humans (not that I’ve met him). A man who writes in breathtaking ways about two of my favorite things: grace and Christmas.
I don’t know what to think of this, but a lot of times when I look around at other Christians I think, “I have almost nothing in common with you. How can we be in a family?” But with Walter Wangerin I feel at home. Reading him always reaches in and touches the best parts of me. The real-est parts of me. That’s so important for someone whose imagination is enlarged (see P entry if you need proof of that).
Every year I read Wangerin’s Advent devotional. And every year I’m caught up again in the beautifully torturous anticipation of the season. The way he tells a story…well, it’s just the right fit for me. Especially the Christmas story. Especially that.
He has a book called, “The Manger Is Empty” and in it he tells the whole Christmas story. With stage directions for the storyteller. This isn’t a story you just rattle off, he says (my words though), this is a story you live while telling. You incarnate this tale of incarnation. And when you do, the story is reborn in you AND the one(s) you tell it to. Incarnation. That’s the super secret nougaty center of me. God with us. God here, now.
This is way more Jesus-y than I normally write, but it’s not more than I normally feel…than I normally am. It’s just that words about God can be awfully cheap…and THERE’S JUST SO MANY OF THEM. I’m reticent to add to the mess. But the story is (I hope) alive in me. Something like this:
For this is what the story says: that the Lord made a baby ball of himself and dropped into our hard, material world. God with us. But that is also what the story does: makes a palpable person of the high transcendent Diety, a living and intimate being who strides into the child’s world to love her where she is, just as she had crept into his story to meet him where he was, in infancy incarnate. The Lord and the story, they establish relationship. W. Wangerin “The Christmas Story”
