Christmas: The Festival of Showing Up

By the time Christmas arrives, most of us are exhausted by it. The pressure of the perfect gift, the family gathering that requires emotional preparation weeks in advance, the gap between the Christmas we remember or imagine and the one we're actually living. We have wrapped this holiday in so many layers of expectation that the original event — which was, at its core, scandalously humble — has become almost unrecognizable.

Bob Jones had a different definition.

Christmas, he believed, is not a celebration of abundance. It is a celebration of arrival. Of the staggering, illogical, entirely undeserved willingness of Love to enter the mess — not when things were ready, not when the world was cleaned up and presentable, but right in the middle of the straw and the cold and the people who had no room.

That story, Bob said, is not about two thousand years ago. It is about right now. It is about what Love keeps doing, every year, in every life that believes itself too far gone.

Bob spent many Christmases in places that looked nothing like the holiday card version. He sat with people in jail. He visited homes where the tree, if there was one, had nothing under it. He walked the halls of hospitals on Christmas morning and sat beside people whose families either couldn't come or had chosen not to.

What he found — not every time, but enough times to notice — was that these were often the people most awake to what Christmas actually is. Not the people with the most, but the people who had been stripped down to the essential question: is Love real, and will it find me here?

He believed the answer was yes. He had seen it too many times to believe otherwise.

The Christmas story begins with a census — a bureaucratic inconvenience that forces two people onto a difficult road at the worst possible time. There is no room at the inn. The birth happens in a stable, which is to say: among the animals, in the dirt, with no preparation and no comfort and no audience except a handful of shepherds who were doing the night shift and a few travelers who had been following something they couldn't quite explain.

Bob loved this. He loved that the Incarnation did not wait for ideal conditions. He loved that God, in the Christian understanding, chose the manger over the palace — chose to arrive at the margins, among the overlooked, in the company of the poor.

This, he said, tells you everything you need to know about where Love goes when it's looking for you. It does not go to the put-together places. It goes to the straw.

If you find yourself in the straw this Christmas — in the middle of something hard, something unresolved, something that feels nothing like celebration — you may, in fact, be in exactly the right place for what this holiday is actually about.

Find one person this Christmas who is in the straw. Not a stranger necessarily — someone close enough that you know it's a hard season for them. Don't try to fix the hard season. Just show up in it with them. A visit, a call, a card written by hand, a meal left at the door.

Showing up is the whole theology of Christmas, enacted in small scale.

And for yourself: let go of one expectation this year. Just one. The gift that has to be perfect, the gathering that has to feel a certain way, the Christmas that has to make up for something. Let it be what it actually is. There is grace in the real holiday, even when — especially when — it doesn't match the imagined one.

Love has already found you. That is the news of Christmas. Not that things are fine, not that the year was easy, not that everything worked out — but that you were not left alone in the straw.

That is the whole story. It has always been enough.

Bob ended every letter, every session, every goodbye with the same words: Fair winds and following seas. I'll be seeing you.

— A reflection on the life and work of Robert Kenneth Jones (1950–2020).