My Christmas Wish

The birth of Jesus is really a story of being Other.  Strangers arrive in a town too full, so the God who humbled himself enough to be born a helpless infant was humbled more in being born in shelter with the animals, the dirt, the dung.  This was the plight of the Other from Nazareth in Bethlehem that night.

God humbled himself to be Other in the form of Jesus as he knows that’s where each of us feels they are.  If we’re quiet enough in our souls and we contemplate ourselves deeply, we know that loneliness that is being Other.  Separate.  Alone.  We all have one great need and one great fear.  We need to be loved wholly and perfectly.  And we fear that if you really knew us, all of us, you could never want to love us.  This is the plight that leaves us as the Other.

The good news of the birth of Jesus was that God can and does love us in a way that only One who has lived as an Other can.  He loves that God sized piece of Himself that He imprinted on your body and your soul.  And if we are audacious enough to believe Him, we can deconstruct the artifice the ego has built to protect us from our one great fear, but denies us our one great need.  Only in allowing God’s perfect love in can we see God in us and then God in Others.

As Thomas Merton writes,

 “You and I and all men were made to find our identity in the One Mystical Christ, in whom we all complete one another ‘unto a perfect man’, unto the measure  of the age of the fullness of Christ.”   

When we allow that reality to sink in and we explore the depths of our soul, our Otherness begins to melt away.  We see God’s image in Others and magically, mystically we are no longer strangers, no longer Others but different parts of one whole.  One whole God.

So as we celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth today, let us use how he was born, that we was born as fuel to look deeply inside.  Shed the façade and confront our fear head on and celebrate the love God has for us and we for each other.