Sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne, an influential writer during the French Renaissance, once penned an essay called, “How we weepe and laugh at one selfe-same thing.” In it, Montaigne writes of jubilant generals from ancient wars who, even as they experienced the joy of their hard-earned victories, at the same time also wept over the deaths of their sworn enemies.
Not only are we human beings capable of deeply feeling a variety of emotions, often we feel completely conflicting ones at the same time. This can be tricky to sort out, but it’s part of how we’re wired. “No one characteristic,” Montaigne wrote, “clasps us purely and universally in its embrace.”
Wonder itself—our theme for this Advent season—can be like this. Wonder often delivers to our souls the completely grown-up feeling of staggering awe but at the same time, a curiously child-like innocence, as well. You might have felt both these forms of wonder while watching—even on video—recent footage of enormous rockets taking to the wide open sky above our own Texas coast, then somehow returning to ground, landing almost tenderly back on the earth from whence they’d come.
There’s something similar in the kind of wonder we celebrate at Christmas. Most of us, for instance, feel the excitement, the pure joy of the holidays in December, while at the same time feeling a sadness over the absence of lost family members with whom we experienced Christmas seasons in the past.
But there’s still more to sort out here with the notion of wonder at Christmastime, and it’s this: This is the season that we consider how it is that God, the Creator of the universe, became a human baby, born in poverty, in peril, in a violent land vulnerable to all the things we are vulnerable too and more.
When this idea truly lands tenderly in our hearts—in the midst of our church fellowship, in the lyrics of a carol, or in the wondrous light of candles—it brings at once both joy and a sad, faint stroke to our hearts as we absorb the import and the poetry of it. We almost don’t know what to do with it all, but weepe and laugh at the one selfe-same thing.
