For many of us, wearing a mask at Christmas Day services is becoming a fading memory of an unforgiving pandemic. Yet the reality is that we continue to wear masks all the time and we have done all our lives. We will wear a different mask when we are alone with our families than when we are out with our friends or when we are talking to someone we’ve only just met. We wear a mask that suits each occasion, and we only reveal a little bit of the real us each time.
In fact, I sometimes feel that I wear so many different masks in my life that it’s hard to work out who the real “me” really is. As I was growing up, a song by the rock band The Who called “The Real Me” was popular. The singer is desperate to find out who he really is and so he approaches people who he thinks might aid that quest – he talks to his doctor, his mother, and his priest. But he comes away no wiser from his discussions. He is lost and alone, full of anger and hate, unable to work out any meaning or purpose in his life.
The good news for Christians is that, because of the first Christmas, we are not left in such a dark and lost place. The birth of a small, helpless child in a dirty manger 2000 years ago guarantees meaning and purpose in our lives and really does bring, as the carol puts it, “joy to the world”. The early church theologian Athanasius reflected on the incarnation of Christmas by suggesting that God became human so we can become God. In other words, the birth of Jesus opens up a direct line to God’s love.
As such, all that Jesus was, all that he taught and all that he did, allows God’s love to flow into our lives. This both gives us an inner peace and inspires us to reach out to those in need around us. And so, we can find in Christmas the secret of finding our “real me”. Our “real me” is not our fiercely-independent selves, trying desperately to mould the world into how we think it should function and work. Instead, we come into harmony with our “real me” when we allow God’s love to permeate everything in our lives – all that we say and all that we do.
As a teenager, I used to attend a Christian youth group called JAM, which stood for “Jesus and Me”. It was a phrase I used to cringe at as an oh-so-cool adolescent, but those words “Jesus and Me” have stayed with me as they sum up what our faith is all about. To be a Christian means our lives becomes a duet, not a solo. Because of that first Christmas, because God became a person, the “real me” becomes “Jesus and Me”. This duet keeps our egocentrism in check and helps us focus on the important things in life, those things that are at the heart of our faith – compassion, hope, love, and peace on earth and goodwill to all.
And so the doctor, mother, and priest didn’t have any answers to life’s big questions for The Who – they couldn’t help the singer find his “real me”. But if we open our hearts this Christmas, then God’s love will start flowing through us and into the new year; it will flow into our relationships and will profoundly impact how we view others and how we treat the world around us. And when that happens, we are singing a beautiful duet and we will have found our “real me”.
Trystan Owain Hughes 