The shipwrecked at the stable are captivated by joy and wonder. They have found the treasure in the field of Bethlehem. The pearl of great price is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Everything else is cheap, fake, painted fragments of glass.

The question for all of us is what we will really aim at next Christmas. If all we are going for is a placid decency, routine prayer, well-behaved worship and comfortable compassion, then we have effectively parted company with the shipwrecked and have no fellowship with the pearl-finder.

I wonder, if we were to stop people at random in the street on December 24 and ask them what they want most for Christmas, how many would say, “I want to see Jesus?”

I believe that the single most important consideration during the sacred season of Advent is intensity of desire. Paraphrasing the late Rabbi Abraham Heschel, “Jesus Christ is of no importance unless he is of supreme importance.” An intense inner desire is already the sign of his presence in our hearts. The rest is the work of the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps many of us are in the same position as the Greeks in chapter twelve of John’s Gospel who approached Philip and said, “We would like to see Jesus.”

The question addressed to each of us is: How badly?

The shipwrecked at the stable are an indispensable presence in the church. They rescue the Savior from the snare of convention and the clutches of organized religion. They are marginal men and women, not leaders or decision-makers. In their ministry of quiet presence they do not need to win or compete. They may look like losers even to themselves. If they courted the world, the world might respect them; if they rejected the world in sullen disdain, it might respect them even more. But because they take no notice at all of what the world thinks of them, they are mocked and made fun of.

The only explanation of why the little band of shipwrecked exists at all is the personal magnetism of Jesus. As Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, “Only he who has experienced it can believe what the love of Jesus Christ is.” You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net than you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing love of God made present in the manger.

In 1980, the day before Christmas, Richard Ballenger’s mother in Anderson, South Carolina, was busy wrapping packages and asked her young son to shine her shoes. Soon, with the proud smile that only a seven-year-old can muster, he presented the shoes for inspection. His mother was so pleased, she gave him a quarter.

On Christmas morning as she put on the shoes to go to church, she noticed a lump in one shoe. She took it off and found a quarter wrapped in paper. Written on the paper in a child’s scrawl were the words, “I done it for love.”

When the final curtain falls, each of us will be the sum of our choices throughout life, the sum of the appointments we kept and the appointments we didn’t keep. The glory of the shipwrecked will be that they habitually failed to turn up for duty. In their defense they claim they were detained by a baby in swaddling clothes. When interrogated as to why they hung out at a stable, they answer, “We done it for love.”

In their integrity the shipwrecked preserve the meaning of Christmas in its pristine purity- the birthday of the Savior and the eruption of the messianic era into history.

This Christmas, may you belong to their number.

-Brennan Manning