It's almost a new year.  For many of us, this is a time for resolution, aspiration, goal, vision, and intention, a time that our hearts, if only for a moment, spur us to consider aiming for new heights of accomplishment, new levels of achievement, new pictures of who we think we ought to be.
     As it should.  We are creatures made to long to become something better than what we are at the moment, what we are today.  It is part of being human.  We all want improvement, we all want renewal.  Indeed, pity the person who supposes that she needs neither.
     Yet does not the writer of Ecclesiastes point out that, "There is nothing new under the sun"?  Absolutely.  But he also urges us to "do whatever our hand finds to do."  These are wise words.  Yes, life is a merry go round of routine and repetition (after all, 2014 is but one more year), but life is also a voyage of wonder.  It is a journey through our brokenness and sin, but it is also a journey through the inexhaustibility of God.  We and our planet may be changing, aging, even, unfortunately, deteriorating, but God remains new, unspeakably new for us and our world.  Always.  His infinite presence guarantees it.
      As the New Year dawns, walk in this newness.  Walk in the grace of the new, the freedom of God's more, his uncompromising abundance toward us.  Enjoy the magnificent promise he embodied, in his son Jesus, for our world.
      As tomorrow I will be traveling West again, this time for a backpacking expedition in the depths of the mountain winter, I will not be posting for a week or two or so.  I look forward to resuming our conversation at that time.
     Thanks for reading!

     Al Goldstein died last week.  Who was Al Goldstein?  Al Goldstein was the publisher of Screw, perhaps one of the most unabashedly pornographic magazines every produced in the United States.  As famous litigator Alan Dershowitz observed, "[Although] Hugh Hefner [publisher of Playboy] did it with taste, Goldstein's contribution was to be utterly tasteless."  Or as Goldstein himself put it, "We will be the Consumer Reports of sex."
     I've never read Screw, nor do I ever intend to.  So why do I mention Al Goldstein?  I mention him because as I read his obituary, I kept thinking  of how he spent his life, what he devoted his days to doing:  shocking and offending people with explicitly lurid and perverted depictions of sex.  Was this really the best use of his 77 years?  Not that sex isn't good or necessary for human perpetuation, enjoyment, and fulfillment, but surely it is not the most important thing about existence.
     "All is vanity," says the writer of Ecclesiastes, "all is vanity."  Indeed.  We all pursue useless and irremediable things; however, most of us are aware that they are in, the long run, exactly that:  not the most important things.  Maybe Al Goldstein knew he was pursuing vanity; maybe he never thought about it.  Maybe it was both.  Nonetheless, here he was, a highly creative mind, endowed with abundance and life, a person made in the image of God, devoted to something that will fade away the moment we cease breathing.
     Is this really why we are here?

     Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.
     Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If God has really come, if God has really visited his creation, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and I, has irrecoverably changed.
     Enjoy the moment, enjoy the day.  Enjoy existence.  Enjoy them, rejoicing, fully aware that they now mean more than you can possibly imagine.  The light of eternity, the word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time has entered our world.
     God has come.

     "Joy to the world," the famous hymn goes, "the Lord is come."  And so he has.  And the joy he has brought is a joy that is more than a joy of human delight, more than a joy of material satisfaction or vocational achievement.  It is a joy that exceeds all others, a joy that is the ground of what makes joy possible, a joy that defines and enables and expresses what makes life meaningful and real.  It is the joy of life itself:  the joy of God.
     As you move about this morning, think about joy.  Think about God being joyful, about God delighting, delighting in you, me, and everything we are.  Think about God's happiness, his kindness, his grace:  the joy that changed the world.  Think about the joy of finding the greatest joy of all.
     God is here, God is there, God is among us, now and forever.  The Lord is come.

     Merry Christmas!

     After months of, for the children among us, waiting, and for the parents and other adults among us, pondering, shopping, scurrying, and worrying, the big night is upon us:  Christmas Eve.  For some, it will be just another night; for others, a time of deep familial connections; for still others, a night of profound religiosity; and for some, perhaps a combination of the two or three.  Whatever the case may be, Christmas Eve is a night that resonates in our inner and cultural imaginations.  It's a night apart.
     Why?  Consider the words of the old hymn that, "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee [Jesus] tonight."  We all have hopes, we all have fears.  Some delight us, some overwhelm us.  Some amaze us.  Christmas Eve remembers and commemorates a night in which God, the loving and transcendent God, in the person of Jesus, enveloped, reconciled, conquered, and resolved them.  Whatever we hope for, and whatever we fear, in Jesus we find their meaning, trajectory, and resolution.  There is nothing more we need.
     Of course, we will continue to nurture hopes, and we will continue to experience fears.  We're still human.  But Christmas Eve tells us that we need wait no longer to know what life's hopes and fears, with all their challenges, frustrations, wonders, and curiosities, ultimately mean.
     God has come.

     As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event--the incarnation, God's appearance in human flesh--let us ponder the import of its origins.  As the gospel accounts make clear, Jesus was born in Bethlehem (literally, "house of bread"), a town that we might today call a hole in the wall, a little village largely forgotten by the rest of the world.  Few people cared what happened in Bethlehem.
     Nor did few people care when, after God told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee the country to avoid King Herod's deadly predations, Jesus lived for a time in Egypt.  Mary and Joseph were likely viewed as just one more set of refugees, one more group of aliens moving through the flotsam of the Empire, their lives a mirror of countless migrations before:  no big deal.
     But this is precisely God's point.  Though Jesus was an alien and refugee, born in obscurity and forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known to all humanity.  Jesus was the one whom God would use to manifest and reconcile himself to his human creation, the one who whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the poor and forgotten refugee, was the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.
     But isn't that what God is all about?

     There is an old Swedish fable that tells the story of a family that has been told to expect, at a certain hour, the arrival of someone whose presence will change their lives forever.  As the narrative moves along, the family waits and waits, glancing often at the clock, wondering if this person will really come.
     Then the hour comes.  But the person does not appear.  After thinking about this for a few moments, the father remarks, "The hour has come, but not the man."
     So is history, humanity's as well as our own.  How many times has an opportune moment arrived in the global narrative, a moment, a kairos, that could change life forever, and no one is there to seize it?  Oddly, we will never know.  We will never know because if we did, we would have stepped into it ourselves.  We rarely discern a transforming kairos until after it has happened.  All we do is try to keep moving forward.
     For instance, did Albert Einstein know that when he published his Theory of Relativity he was inaugurating a seminal moment in science?  Did Leonardo da Vinci know that when he developed the theory of perspective in art he was changing forever how we do painting?  Did Abraham know when he ventured forth from Haran into Canaan that he was unleashing a torrent of political machinations that endures to this day?  Did Buddha know that his ideas would transform thinking across enormous stretches of Asia?  Did Mary Woolstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein) know that her writings on female freedom would help birth the feminist movement of the nineteenth century?
     In every instance, it is unlikely.  In most cases, it is the "man" who appeared first--and the hour came.  Except once.  "In the fullness of time," Paul writes in Galatians, "God brought forth his Son, born of a virgin . . . "  In Jesus, time and the "man" came together, came together in a singularly unique way:  the "man" (Jesus) was the time.  Jesus was the kairos.  The hour, the time, had come, yes, but the only because the "man" had created it.
     Advent is a time unlike any other, for it creates, in history and time, eternality and destiny, eternality and destiny for you, eternality and destiny for me, embodied in the "man" whose "hour" is overwhelmingly his own.

     Can a story begin in the middle?  The New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923 at the age of 31, was known for writing stories that did not seem to have a beginning.  They seemed to end before they began.  Their first words conveyed a narrative well underway, as if the reader was being let in on it after the fact, as if the reader needed to acquaint herself, on her own, with the details of how the plot arrived at this point.  The reader was suspended, caught between a beginning that never began and an end that did not seem to have a reason to be so.
     Emotionally brazen and intellectually bold, Mansfield startled many writers of her day with her innovative approach to story.  On the other hand, she may well have captured, more than her compatriots, how life really is.  Although our lives are stories in and of themselves, we who live them do not always know how the plot came to be what it is.  We plan, we act, we recall, we remember, but we do not always know how it all comes about.  More often than not, the context in which we live our days determines what happens, so that we often feel as if we have either stepped into a maelstrom of unexpected circumstances or various levels of bliss that we cannot always explain, a serendipity whose origins elude us.  Forward we travel, looking, thinking, but not always knowing where it is all going or what it all means.
     D. H. Lawrence, one of Mansfield's colleagues and best known for his risqué novel Women in Love, said after she died--far too young (she contracted tuberculosis)--that the dead still speak.  In a way, Lawrence was right.  They speak because although they are gone materially, their stories, truncated and confused and glorious though they may be, continue to flow, ebbing into a vast and seemingly endless sea of human adventure and endeavor, a sea whose beginning, middle, and end only have meaning because millennia ago a greater purpose brought them into being.
     Otherwise, middle, beginning, or end do not matter, do not matter at all, for no one, captives of finitude they be, knows how to know and understand what they are.

     Darkness is of course a necessary and natural part of living on this world.  Some of our darkness is natural, that is, the nighttime or the shorter days of winter.  Some is unnatural, for instance, the pains and sorrows of our lives or the various geological and meteorological disasters that afflict the human species.  Either way, we find it--or it finds us.
     In his The End of Night, author Paul Bogard describes his quest for "natural" darkness, a darkness that is away and apart from any semblance of artificial light.  He writes that in this era of ubiquitous and programmable light, such darkness is exceedingly difficult to find.  Most of us, I think, would agree.  We are overwhelmed with light.
     It's odd, isn't it?  We like the ease of light, artificial or not, but in our Western surplus of illumination we may be missing what is more fundamental to our experience.  If there were no darkness, what would it mean to have light?
     "God is light," the apostle John (1 John 1:5) writes, and in him "there is no darkness at all."  Perhaps we should not actively seek intellectual or emotional darkness, but perhaps we should also understand that without such darkness we would not know what light can and could be.  As the first three verses of Genesis note, in the beginning "darkness" was on the face of the deep, the earth--until (and only until) God "spoke" light.
     There's no darkness without light.

     At the suggestion of one of the moderators of the atheist discussion which, as you may recall, I attend once a month, I recently finished reading a book titled A Manual for Creating Atheists.  It's written by Peter Boghossian a professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Oregon.  Its objective is a rather unusual one.  In contrast to the countless books which Christians write offering advice and encouragement to those who wish to tell others about Jesus, A Manual aims to do the opposite.  It intends to provide helps to unbelievers to talk people of faith out of their faith.  We must eliminate, Boghossian says, the "virus" of faith.
     What thing that struck me about the book was a chapter in which the author writes very honestly about the lack of comfort, as he sees it, that unbelief provides in the face of death.  Although he asserts that ending one's faith opens one to what he calls the "wonder" of existence, what he terms, "the disposition of being comfortable with not knowing, uncertainty, a skeptical and scientific-minded attitude, and the genuine desire to know what's true," he acknowledges that such wonder often isn't enough when a person stands at the door of death.  Faith's greatest appeal, he says, may be "solace--comfort and peace of mind in impossibly difficult times," for as he puts it, "I don't know" what comfort "reality-based reasoning" offers to the ones on the brink of extinction.
     Indeed.  Those who insist that they live by "reality-based reasoning" and this only will indeed face the end of their existence looking at a very dark abyss, an unyielding maw of utter and permanent extinction.  Life may have been thoroughly rational, life may have been fun, but it has failed to answer for the one who has lived it why it even existed.  Why has anyone ever lived and why does anyone who has ever lived one day die?
     Is faith entirely delusional, a hollow but fully felt comfort?  Is the longing for immortality a psychological myth, a mere offshoot of finitude?  Or do we experience and pursue such things because there really is something else besides this material reality, because there really is something more than us in this universe?
     Put another way, do we want to critically think about our lives without really knowing what they mean, or do we want to critically think about our lives knowing that they do indeed have meaning, a meaning that, if it is to be viable, extends beyond the grave?

     Last summer, my son and I backpacked through a portion of the Sierra Nevada, the massive mountain range that cuts through heart of California south of San Francisco.  The morning of the first full day of our trip, we rose extra early to prepare for what we expected to be a lengthy hike to the base of a pass which we intended to surmount the following day.  When we got out of our tent, the sun had not yet risen over the peaks below which we were camped.  The air was still cold, the lake basin by which we had pitched our tent still shrouded in shadow.  So we waited.
     For what did we wait?  We waited for the sunrise, the sun, that brilliant and life giving orb of light to rise over the peaks and bathe our camp in warmth and radiance.  As we waited, we packed up our camp, prepared breakfast, and got ready to go.
      Then it came.  Exploding atop the ridge, the sun burst, popping with rays of brilliance and wonder, its multiple filaments of splendor spreading over and across the waiting land.  We rejoiced:  the light had come.
     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the Christ who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light, how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often Munchian (The Scream:  check my blog on Friday) existence.  It is the light of purpose, the light of meaning, the light that, if we embrace it, embrace it as fervently as we do the warmth of the sunrises, mountain or not, of our lives, will change our lives forever.
     Once we touch this light, we'll never be the same.

     As I continue to contemplate the many layers of Advent and the message it brings to the world, I have thought more than once about Edward Munch's The Scream.  Have you seen it?  Although I've been aware of this frightening piece of art for many years, I found myself thinking about it, as I've pondered Advent, in some new ways.
     

     A piece that has puzzled and cajoled people for decades, The Scream seems to exemplify the alienation that so often characterizes the inhabitants of the West.  Overwhelmed by a world that offers them everything but meaning, countless people in the developing world cry out for help, some help in making sense of what seems to be a pointless reality.  Affluence reigns, yes, but without any foundation other than the assumption that life is worth it, and this only because those who decide this have nowhere else to go.  If the world is a closed system and we are therefore born only to die, then life, however wonderful it may be, ends before it begins.  So we scream:  why must this be?
     Advent, in contrast, says that the world is far from closed.  It is in fact entirely transparent and open, open and streaming into a web of reality vastly larger than we can imagine, a web grounded in a transcendence that has spoken, a transcendence that has made itself known.  Life is more than itself.  And we are more than who we are.  Love is present, ascendant and true.
     So we scream not why must this be, but rather how can this--such wonder--be?

     "True storytellers do not know their own story," observes author James Carse in his Finite and Infinite Games, a curious and likeable meditation about, broadly speaking, how we see the world.  Otherwise, he opines, our lives cease to be tales and are reduced to mere explanations.
     Carse's observation reminds me of a line from the philosopher Richard Rorty, who died in 2005, that, "Explanation, not meaning is what is important."  Carse and Rorty could not be further apart.  As Rorty sees it, it is foolish to seek meaning in our lives; far more critical is that we learn how to live, to cope with this present reality.  Carse would say that although learning how to live is important, if that is all we do, we miss the most crucial point of existence:  the mystery of meaning that is always waiting for us to unfold as we wind our way through the pathways of our lives.  As he sees it, if we can explain all of our lives, we have not really lived; all we have done is exist.  The fullest life is the life whose end and meaning lie ever before the one who lives it, the life whose purpose is the reason we live it, the life whose story we will never know fully until it ends--and maybe not even then.
     Our lives are stories that we do not fully know, but they are stories that we tell.  We live best when we recognize that we are narratives, critically important narratives, but narratives all the same, working themselves out in an infinite story (metanarrative) of experience before an infinite God.  Our time is more than a measure of passage; it is a story with form, import, and purpose.  We mean far more than the dust to which we will one day go.

     Do machines make us who we are?  Judging from the manner in which we in the West are, in a manner of speaking, captives of the technology on which we depend, we might very well draw this conclusion.  We live with the world, we live with each other, we live with ourselves, but we live according to our machines.  Most of us love our machines, most of us appreciate our machines.  Even those of us who do not use machines, or at least try to minimize the use of them, still depend on products that, more often than not, are made by machines.
     Although I dearly wish for those in the developing world to enjoy the benefits of machines sooner rather than later, I also wish for them to do so aware of the ethos, the ethos that has ensnared the West in many debilitating conundrums of mind and heart, with which they come.  I encourage them, as well as us in the West, to ground themselves in things a machine cannot make so that they can, as I would wish for the West to do as well, continue to make them themselves, to keep them in their proper place, material products of a material reality.  There is a bigger picture.  If we sever our connection to the transcendent and immaterial, all we have left is our machines and ourselves, the living and nonliving side by side, unmediated, unconsidered, unknown.
     Machines are only as beneficial to the extent that the people who make them do so aware of and submitted to a presence that reminds them that regardless of what they
may think, they are not their own.

     Should we eat babies?  Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, the delightful satirical tale of a man who travels to a land of very tiny people, a land of giants, and other places, may have thought so.  In his "A Modest Proposal," Swifts observed that perhaps the key to feeding the impoverished Irish of his day was to, as he saw it, eat their babies and subsequently sell their carcasses.
     Most of us would repel from such a suggestion today.  Why?  We believe it does not fit what we consider to be moral, that to kill and/or eat babies is always and everywhere wrong.  Besides, from a more practical standpoint, if the Irish were to kill their babies, there would soon be no one left to perpetuate the Irish people.
     But isn't that often how people tend to do morality?  We frequently made our moral choices on the basis of practicality, that is, what seems fair and what seems to work best at the time.  Although this method often works, it can lead to difficulties:  we are only moral to the extent that our cultural purview allows us to be.  Even if we agree that some things are always and everywhere immoral, morality inevitably becomes relativistic.  We are captives of ourselves.
     That's why the human race needs revelation.  As the writer of Proverbs 29:18 remarks, "Without vision, the people perish."  In other words, unless a larger, synoptic, and transcendent moral presence exists, we will always be little moral creatures pursuing our little moral dreams without never really knowing why we exercise morality in the first place.  We're acting in a dream, our vision large and real but never large--and real--enough.
     Otherwise, we may as well eat babies.

      "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  What is Paul saying?  Simply, that as we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can come to understand more fully that in Jesus, God in the flesh (as we observed last week (John 1:14)), we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward us.  In Jesus we see the fullest possible picture of God's benevolence, his intentions to grant us favor and compassion.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God is gracious and loves us, and he provides us with a way to know him, fully and intimately.  Jesus is the grace of God.
      We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that enables us to see and do much more, to see and understand that amidst the frequent senselessness of reality and confusing vagaries of the world in which we live, there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see--but which frames and orders what we do.  Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever.  All we need do is accept his invitation, his invitation of his son Jesus, to us.  God's extended the invitation; now he's waiting for us to reply.
     What else do we really need to do?

     Though we often find much with which to be confused or disappointed in this world, we all can be thankful for at least this:  we are here.  We are here to live, to grow, to be.  By God's grace and intention, we are here--and nowhere else--here to find hope, here to find meaning, here to find God.  We are here.
      As we continue to move towards Christmas, pondering, I hope, the remarkable fact (and paradox) of God becoming a human being, I encourage you to rejoice, not just because Christmas (or, if you prefer, the holidays) is near, but because we are indeed here.  Existence for us is a daily reality, one whose end we will never know, fully, regardless of how much we try to predict or dictate it, a beautiful and wonderful experience which we will only get to do once.  This life, this time, is the only existence we will ever have.
     Or is it?  If, as Genesis reminds us, God "created the heavens and earth," and if, as the gospels remind us, who God is and what he does are grounded in eternality, perhaps what we see now is merely a skein over what is ultimately real, and that temporality is therefore just that, temporary.  Our earthly existence is here, yes, but what is here now is far from being what is completely "here."
     Thankfulness says there's always more.  We cannot escape the teleological.

     There is a balance, the late Susan Sontag, the famous cultural critic, often said, between what is moral and what is aesthetic.  What does this mean?
     We usually see what is moral as that which is more right than wrong.  Morality is the examination of right and wrong and what actions constitute each one.  The aesthetic, on the other hand, has more to do with sensibility and feeling, what is more emotionally or artistically pleasing.  Morality is usually a function of the intellect; the aesthetic usually one of the feelings.  Neither, however, is solely its principal constituent.
     That's Sontag's point.  We cannot be moral unless we are aesthetic, for what is right and wrong is more than an intellectual exercise; it is a habit of the heart.  Not only must we believe in our mind that something is more right than wrong, we must also believe it in our heart.  Yet we cannot be aesthetic without being moral; otherwise, art and all of its expressions have no real meaning.
     Life is an aesthetic experience, full of feeling, rapture, and wonder.  Yet it is a highly moral enterprise, too, grounded in ideas of right and wrong, framed in a ethical posture.  Real life must be moral--and ground itself in the fact of a moral structure--if it is to have foundation for its aesthetic expression.
     So did the Jonathan Edwards, the great Puritan preacher, observe that in the end, it is our affections, the aesthetic of our fervor and passion for morality, truth, and God, that make life fully genuine and lasting.

     "The gospels," observes one of the characters in Carlene Bauer's Frances and Bernard, represent "God's faith in our imagination."  If I understand this remark correctly, I note that it says much about God's belief in our human capacities.  As you probably know, the gospels contain a number of first hand and eyewitness accounts of Jesus' short public life on this planet.  These accounts include birth and death and resurrection narratives, various signs and miracles, many sermons and teaching vignettes, and ordinary conversations.  As we read them, we are constantly being invited to ask ourselves one fundamental question:  who is this man Jesus?  In recounting these episodes and pictures of Jesus' life, the gospel writers are asking readers to look not just at the fact of what Jesus said and did, but at their significance and import as well.  Imagine, we are asked, if these stories are true?  Imagine, we are urged, if everything that Jesus said really is the truth, and that everything he did really did happen?  What we would then do?
     We have two choices.  We can reject, categorically, any thought that Jesus' words and deeds are in any way connected to a larger reality or purpose, and come away thinking that he was an extraordinary human being, but nothing more.  He was simply a person who had some good thoughts and stories.  Or we can stretch ourselves; we can reach outside the boundaries of our everyday form and imagination and ask, if Jesus is really who he said he was (that is, God), what does this mean?  What does this mean for how we see ourselves and our world?  What does it mean when everything we think we could have imagined is confronted by something we could never imagine we could have imagined?

     Have you been alone?  Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, is the story of a woman scientist who, due to an accident high above the Earth, finds herself adrift in space, alone, apart, utterly trapped in a vast and unyielding nothingness.  There is no air, no sound, no other human being.  No one knows where she is, no one can tell her where she is, no one can tell her where to go.  She is a person without a place, even, in a way, a person without a face.
     When, in 1972, I was backpacking through Alaska's Brooks Range, the dense and forbidding range of mountains that sweeps majestically across the northern stretches of the state, I was similarly alone.  Dropped off by helicopter by a high mountain lake, hundreds of miles from road, town, radio, and human being, I could have been on another planet.  No one knew where I was, and no one, except my parents, who were thousands of miles away in Southern California, cared.  However, I was still on planet Earth.  I was still in an environment with which I was familiar.  I was still connected to a home.
     Not so in space.  There is no home to be found.  And we wonder:  what is the real nature of home?  Consider, if you will for a moment, that enigmatic thing we call the love of God.  Admitting to the love of God is to bend the apparent and seen.  It is to say that something of profound value and joy lies in the midst of an empty universe, that the universe's darkness is far less powerful than its light.
     Gravity, or the lack of it therefore remains, yes, but the space in which it is acting is not wholly empty.  It's filled with a larger truth:  we 're always home.
     And reality becomes a real friend.

     Running through the theology of the early Christian church was a belief called Gnosticism.  In sum, Gnosticism held that all things pertaining to the flesh, that is, of the body, were harmful and evil, while only that which was spiritual or intellectual, that is, of the mind, were good.  What the Church found most insidious about Gnosticism was that although it elevated God above all else, it at the same time made it impossible to associate God with anything having to do with matter, that is, things of everyday existence on earth.  God was there, but irretrievably distant from the flesh and blood problems and challenges of humanity.  And if God is impossibly distant from us, why should we both with him?
     Here is why we must consider, in this first week of the Advent season, the time of year in which Christianity remembers and celebrates the appearance of Jesus Christ on the earth, just how important Jesus' coming is.  If Gnosticism were true, we would never see God, we would never know God, we would never understand God as a personal presence in our lives.  He would always be infinities apart from us.  But Christianity says that, as John's gospel tells us, "The Word [that is, God] became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).  God, in the person of Jesus, became part of our world, became an integral part of our everyday reality, became a being as flesh and blood as you and me, subject to all its infirmities, hardships, and limitations while, and this is crucial, remaining the omnipotent and creator God.  God became like us.
      Most importantly, God became for us, ready to be our counselor, friend, and greatest joy and meaning forever.  It's the ultimate paradox:  a perfect God in an imperfect world.  But it works.  How can flesh and blood ever be the same?