Christmas Eve.  Tonight--and in some parts of the world tonight is very near--in all corners of the planet, literally billions of people, religious or not, will remember Christmas Eve.  Regardless of how they view the birth of Jesus, they will make Christmas Eve a time of remembrance, generosity, warmth, and much more. It's a night unique in all the year, a night in which people around the world enjoy, for at least a few hours, 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 has manifested himself in history.  Christmas Eve tells us that we tread on a very thin skein, a slender liminality of moment between time and destiny, 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.