For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also - Matthew 6:21
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Like father, like son.
An old tree is not easily uprooted.
Roots run deep.
I grew up in a part of the US where I heard sayings like this on a regular basis. Everyone where I lived understood how important it was to not only learn where you came from, but be where you came from.
One of my favorite film directors says it like this. In the opening scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice, a father and son are planting a tree. The father then says this to his young son:
“If every single day, at exactly the same stroke of the clock, one were to perform the same single act, like a ritual, unchanging, systematic, every day at the same time, the world would be changed. Yes, something would change. It would have to.”
Yes, he is absolutely correct. It is not very different than Christ telling us “I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” (Matthew 17:20 KJV)
Nothing shall be impossible for us? God blesses us this much in our lives? This can be difficult to grasp in our speed of light modern lifestyles. The great irony is that the Christmas season, one of the best times all year for us to truly experience what Christ, Tarkovsky, and countless others from our past have pointed toward, is often so hectic it actually becomes a time that distracts us more than any other part of the year. This is a tragedy in the truest sense.
I have so many powerful memories of celebrating Christmas. I grew up in a rural community, and my grandmother moved to the US from Germany when she was in her 20s. She and many members of her family relocated from a small German town to a small Iowa town. Every Christmas they longed for their homeland. As a young child, I benefited from their homesickness. They put out beautiful Christmas ornaments, served German delicacies and prepared German comfort food, sang German carols and Christmas music (in German, of course!), told German stories, and worshiped in their German Christian tradition. To this day, these memories are incredibly vivid in my middle-aged memory.
As a husband and father of four young children who has now been blessed to be a part of the Orthodox faith for two decades, I am continually drawn in by all of the beauty our faith offers us. All Orthodox culture from Divine Liturgies to praying in our homes can give us access to this beauty. However, there are some specific moments within the Orthodox liturgical year which provide especially powerful opportunities to connect to God through both our senses and our souls. Wonderful foods, beautiful liturgical music, lovely incense, colorful icons and many other local traditions combine to produce for our children a lifetime of memories and experience of being where they came from. As adults, it’s important for us to understand how these memories build faith through identity. We have this special gift to offer our young people. But it must be offered. It isn’t enough to simply know about these traditions. We must live them, and we must live them frequently. It is this lived experience of Christ that brings Him close to our children in a way that they can find themselves in His church.
My family and I recently started celebrating the entire 12 days of Christmas. We are now starting the celebration with a traditional Christmas Eve fasting meal that incorporates symbolic dishes and prayers that different family members say at specific points throughout the meal. We then enter into the feasts for the twelve days of Christmas.
When I first started this tradition, I did it as an experiment. I wasn’t even sure if my kids would like it. I thought to myself “This is probably going to be too difficult to do. I mean, who has time today to celebrate Christmas for 12 DAYS?” But I was wrong. I was actually very wrong. It is an absolute joy for our family every year. My kids start planning out the festivities months prior to the season. They are beside themselves with excitement. They love the stories of these saints, the prayers connected to the special feast days, and the time spent with family and friends celebrating Orthodox traditions. These are their traditions. This is their family. I am watching in real time my children discovering where they came from.
Where they come from, of course, is Jesus Christ. They are discovering Christ through dozens of input sources. That is the amazing gift we have inherited from our faith. Christ understands our deep longing for connecting with others and Him because that is how he created us to be. When we bring His story into our lives in ways that connect with each other, we connect to Him.
As president of OYM, I have been blessed with access to data, knowledge, theology, and many other resources that basically all point to this one statement: know Christ, then take Him to everyone else you know. We at OYM will find hundreds of ways to point to this reality. We will release data, create surveys, incorporate research and best practices based on research that comes to us from Orthodox scientists, highlight Scripture quotes and patristic passages based on advice that comes to us from knowledgeable Orthodox clergy, design curriculum, retreats, online content, and a myriad of other actions, all to say one thing: know Christ, then take Him to everyone else you know.
In a way, it’s really so simple. It’s all Christ asks of us. He asks us to place him at the core of everything we are and everything we do.
Our December newsletter is a great start toward bringing some of this Nativity beauty into your family life. We have compiled a great list of resources that would easily help a family start celebrating the Christmas season more deeply. I can tell you that research points to youth staying engaged and in the church when the adults in their lives are engaging in the faith with the children. I can also tell you the many proverbs from our own tradition and others that point to the wisdom of steeping young people in the rituals and holidays of our culture. But most importantly, I can tell you that in my family, my daughters sit on my knee, smile at me with that beautiful, innocent smile of youth and say “Daddy, I can’t wait for the Nativity season!”
May God grant all our families a Nativity filled with memories which will further us in our faith and create a longing to know Him even more.
Yours in Christ, Dr. Christopher Krampe
President of OYM
This Nativity season, please donate to OYM to help us bring young people closer to Christ and to their communities.