The time that made Advent meaningful, that made the Incarnation come alive, is we had a family tradition where we viewed slides on an old technology called View-Master, and one of the slide sets was the Christmas story. And as we viewed the Christmas story, there was this one picture of the wise men following the star, which covered the wall of the house that we were sitting in, and it was just amazing and mysterious. And what this image did, is it tapped into something that C.S. Lewis often refers to called a sense of the numinous. Numinous means something that is a mysterious spiritual presence felt at an emotional level. And so when we would see this Christmas slide, somehow, in that moment, I knew it was real. This happened. This beautiful time when Jesus was born. That's my Advent incarnational experience that makes it real to me.
