Christmas Eve, 2014
As we approach Christmas, 2014, the words of Joan Chittister are worthy of reflection:
“Christmas isn’t a holiday. Christmas is a way of being alive. “Christmas is not a time nor a season, ” Calvin Coolidge said, “It is a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy is to have the real spirit of Christmas.” Merry Christmas to you all – every day of the year.” says Chittister.
(page 125 in her book, “The Art of Life”)
This wonderfully deep, spiritual writer has also crafted the following words about Christmas*:
The promise has at last been fulfilled. Everything we’ve waited for is with us. The fullness of time has come in our time. Everything we could ever want we finally have. The people rejoice. The angels sing. The truth has come. Everything is perfect. Except….
Except that the stables of the world still house children whom the Christ child came to raise to life. This time it is our doors before whom they stand and beg for shelter. We are the people being asked to take them into our minds and hearts and souls.
Christmas moves us to recommit ourselves to re-form our minuscule worlds to take in Christ the homeless child, the outcast, the refugee; Christ the other whose strangeness frightens us but whose otherness will teach us a great deal more about the world than we know at the present time.
Christmas calls us to take our lives and break them open at the crib where Jesus waits for us today.
Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem because they were from the “tribe of Judah.” They had to leave home to go home, in other words. It may be a Christmas lesson for all of us. Tied up in our own little worlds, we may be missing the one Jesus came to save through us unless we reach out to the “other.” Christmas will come to us in its fullness when we welcome into the human race all those we persistently see as lesser, and cry, “Peace to God’s people on earth.”
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
allanbaker 