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, as the Yukon singer about whom I wrote yesterday says, "the Creator is here," how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.

     What has made has come to what it has made.
     Christmas reminds us that we live in a universe of meaning.  We could not live otherwise.  Christmas tells us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it appeals to the fact of a creator, a visible word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time.  It is only then that it can be.
     The creator has come.