In a few days, in all corners of the planet, literally billions of people, religious or not, will remember Christmas Eve.  Regardless of how they we view the birth of Jesus, for most of these people, Christmas Eve will be a time of remembrance, generosity, warm familial gatherings, and much more.  It's a night unique in all the year, a night in which countless families around the world make every effort to come together and, for at least a few hours, make peace and enjoy the fact of each other. It's a time in which life, for a moment, seems suspended, captured in a hourglass of human bliss.

     And why not?  The event that birthed Christmas Eve is an event on which all of history hinges, a pivot of time, space, and eternity that transformed the entire span of human challenge and endeavor.  Jesus' birth changed everything, absolutely everything.  In Jesus' coming, we sense and appreciate, definitively, that God can--and does--irrupt into our experience, that God, in ways we cannot always fathom, can, and will, make himself known in our lives.  God will manifest himself in our history.  Christmas Eve tells us that we tread on a very thin skein, a achingly slender layer of moment between time and eternity.  It is the richest possible investment of who we are, the most profoundly possible doorway into who we can be.

     Christmas Eve opens our eyes to the totality, the absolute and unimpeded totality, of God, the one who made all cosmos, space, and time, for us.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!