The Christmas story can be read independently of what one believes about Christianity. A familiar narrative becomes suddenly both strange and more meaningful...

The Christmas story is subversive. Contrast the icon of the helpless baby with the idea of God as some great, all-powerful dictator in the sky. The one needs his diaper changed; the other we think should micro-manage all the details of our lives and the nightly news. The Christmas story takes God off his high throne in the firmaments and puts him into a crib, surrounded by animals, wrapped in dirty rags, and in grave danger. The reversal is staggering.

Christmas, of course, is a story about a birth. The incarnate God enters the world as a human baby. From evolution’s perspective, it is all about babies. There must be more babies. And babies must survive long enough to themselves reproduce. Survival and reproduction are paramount, and as such, deeply imprinted in our mind-brain-bodies. More over, human offspring require many years of selfless devotion by adults, as children arrive unfinished, powerless, and vulnerable. The Baby Jesus is an archetype in evolution’s long ascent through an unbroken chain of babies.

Christmas has certainly evolved in part to promote values and behaviors conducive to survival and reproduction. It does so through complex biocultural evolutionary pathways that now also promote retail sales and endless repetition of seasonal songs in the shopping mall nearest you.

But there is more going on than mere survival and reproduction. Jesus is an existential question mark for what we hold most true, good, and beautiful in the human drama. As such the actual story of Christmas is filled with existential terror. There is nothing kitschy and saccharine here. God is born the bastard child of Mary into poverty and oppression. Jesus will soon be the only child to survive the great massacre of Bethlehem.

Like Jesus, we are also survivors. We are the lucky babies who grew up and grew old. Looking backward we see happenstance in our births and in the world. We worked hard to get this far, but our luck won’t last forever. Like Jesus, our death is always a certainty from the day we are born.

And still we expect more. Child-like anticipation overshoots the reality of Christmas morn. The hype inevitably leaves us feeling unsatisfied, looking for more, ready to try again next year. Life is a series of intermittent-rewards with predictable and unpredictable pleasures and pains. As such, life is highly addictive. We should expect no less realism from our religions and our rituals.

Humans display an unreasonable and quite wonderful expectation that life should be better than it is, and that we should also be better people than we actually are. This spiritual hunger for life lived more abundantly is whence we seek and perhaps find God-by-whatever-name.

It turns out, however, that God needs us much more than we need him. God needs us especially in the laboring. Bringing forth many instantiations of good, beautiful, and true things in the world. It is a kind of bottom-up creativity. In order to survive, these little creations will need a lot of help along the way. The newly born need peace in the world. They need good will to all. The angels proclaim – survive, thrive, adapt, evolve!

The Christmas story can be read independently of what one believes about Christianity. A familiar narrative becomes suddenly both strange and more meaningful. It is an unexpected epiphany in the middle of the day. It is another moment of recognition in one’s own evolving story. You find yourself a character in a universal drama. Sacred stories may not be true, not in the sense that history and science are true, but they seem always to be profound.

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William Grassie received his doctorate in religious studies from Temple University and is the founding executive director of the Metanexus Institute. He is author of The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up (Palgrave Macmillan: 2010).