In his book Living the Christian Year, Bobby Gross explores the paradoxes of Christianity:
"Throughout the centuries, beginning with John, writers have explored the mystery and paradox of this divine enfleshment, this incarnation, through the language of poetry. Consider these five excerpts from poems:
Him who dwells beyond the worlds
The Virgin bore today.
Him who bounds the universe,
Earth shelters in a cave.
(St. Romanos, "The Melodist," Syrian, sixth century)
Blessed mother, by God's gift,
the One who is the highest of all powers,
the One who holds the world in his hand,
was cloistered in your womb.
(Hymn from The Prymer, European, fifteenth century)
Today you see in a stable
the Word speechless,
Greatness in smallness,
Immensity in blankets.
Such wonders!...
He who had no beginning,
His being of Time begins;
the Creator, as a creature,
is now subject to our griefs.
Such wonders!
(Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, "Carol 3," Mexican, seventeenth century)
After
The white-hot beam of annunciation
fused heaven with dark earth,
his searing, sharply focused light
went out for a while,
eclipsed in amniotic gloom:
his cool immensity of splendor,
his universal grace,
small-folded in a warm, dim
female space -
the Word stern-sentenced to be
nine months' dumb -
infinity walled in a womb,
until the next enormity -
the Mighty One, after submission
to a woman's pains,
helpless on a barn's bare floor,
first-tasting bitter earth.
(Luci Shaw, "Made Flesh," naturalized American, twentieth century)
(Bobby Gross, Living the Christian Year, 62-64)
Gross sums it up:
"Christmas - not just the single day but the festival of twelve days - offers us anew this gift and draws us again into this mystery: Word-become-flesh, Creator-turned-creature, immensity-contained, fullness-poured-out, power-made-vulnerable, eternity-subject-to-time. All this self-giving by God for our sakes - a gift immeasurable, a love incomprehensible." (Gross 64)
This points to mystery that is less of a cop-out and more of a paradox. For G.K. Chesterton, this helped to explain why people could be made at Christians for seemingly contradictory things:
"...Christianity was reproached with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured. Again Christianity had always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh the Malthusian discovered that it restrained it too little. It is often accused in the same breath of prim respectability and of religious extravagance. Between the covers of the same atheistic pamphlet I have found the faith rebuked for its disunion, "One thinks one thing, and one another," and rebuked also for its union, "It is difference of opinion that prevents the world from going to the dogs." In the same conversation a freethinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity for despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish." (Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 90)
Chesterton discovers the key to this in relating that Christian doctrine embraces two seemingly opposite extremes in one, rather than some sort of mushy middle:
"Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let an idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a heard of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfillment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious...Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless." (Chesterton, 101-102)
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