We were wondering: what is Christmas, this time?
… in the end it is about longing and yearning for our homeland – that homeland of our true self, not the psychological exile we habituate and not a territorial country, but the selves we were born to become, partaking of a common, joyful up-welling of being. In the texts it appears as waiting for a saviour, an Emanuel (‘God-with-us’), yet the thing we can discover is that God-with-us is now-and-ever at the junction of here and now, and there it is God-as-us. The dark of winter is the cover in which this discovery waits within us; the light shining in the darkness is life itself and the promise, the possibility that that light become known to us and we accept it as our guiding light.
The Christmas story tells of exile, which belongs to the human condition. Our current public obsession with either welcoming or repelling refugees stems from our own condition, precariously hidden from us by relative material comfort. Our homeland, here named the Christ (but not limited to people who identify as Christians), is our pre-natal and quintessential being and it is pure, untrammelled, unmolested, undivided, undistracted, unforgotten, unblemished, unlimited, unconditional joy. A joy not contingent on success, superiority, feeling loved, a good upbringing, star charts, merit, outcome, position, wealth, relationships, favourable world events, shelter from climate change, luck or anything else we could think of (nor the lack of these; it is not a reward for hardship).
But what use a heap of words? They can but lead the horse to water. The impact is in the recognition for oneself, where words fail before reconfiguring. The joy is the discovery, and the discovery never ends as we move in and out of vision. Again, it is being, undivided, without qualification. What being, whose being, I ask myself? Leap, and he takes you in his arms: so we become born.
Be_flummoxed 