Ah, the New Year approaches . . . . what will we do?  A few days ago, I attended a funeral for the father of a friend of mine.  A devout Christian, my friend's father spent his life pursuing his path with God.  He gave himself completely to the work of his church community, and did his best to reflect the ways of Jesus that he felt bubbling out of him each day.  Now, as the New Testament presents and affirms it, Bill (his name) has stepped into a new life, a life more than the life of a new day, new week, new month, or New Year.  It is a life that will never end.  His family grieves (we think of Ecclesiastes 12's observation that, "A person goes to his eternal home while people mourn in the streets"), but his family also rejoices:  he lives still.
     How do we know?  In Christmas, God is born; on Good Friday, he dies.
     And on Easter, God--Jesus--rises again.
     Shortly before I went to the funeral, I read parts of a memoir, All at Sea.  It's one woman's account of how, in a tale reminiscent of how Mary Shelley watched her husband Percy drown in the Bay of Spiza, she one day a few years ago watched helplessly as her husband drowned in an undertow off the shores of Jamaica.  One minute her husband was here, the next he was gone, never to return.  The author, Decca Aitkenhead, told their two boys repeatedly not to think, in any way, that their father would ever live again, that stories about God, Jesus, and resurrection were just that, stories, fairy tales without credible basis.  Mourn, she said, but realize you'll never ever see your father again.
     So here we are, on the verge of the New Year, looking at two very different ways of seeing the world.  One is rooted in a hope in God; the other is rooted in a hope in the world.
     In no way do I wish to impugn Ms. Aitkenhead's beliefs (or lack thereof).  She is fully entitled to hold them.  Yet as I look across the divide between the old year and new, I wonder:  if Jesus rose, why will we not, too?
     Happy New Year!

     It's a familiar quote, one that has been used in many different contexts, and appropriated in countless sundry ways.  It's from Walden, Henry David Thoreau's perennially popular meditation on the joy of parsing living down to its bare necessities so as to more fully focus on the profound delights of solitude and reflection.

          "If a man does not keep pace with his companions," Thoreau observed as he drew his ruminations to a conclusion, "perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
     Thoreau's words are timeless, snippets of wisdom that have inspired many, many people.  And why not?  Though it's difficult to tell from Thoreau's writings exactly what he believed about God (given that he was a New England Transcendentalist), Walden overflows with assertions about the importance of individuality.  Each person is special, each person is unique, gifted, he seems to suggest, by God.
     I certainly cannot disagree.  As we continue to walk in the afterglow of the Christmas celebration, we note that in Christmas's narrative we see undelible evidence of God's endorsement of human uniqueness.  Jesus came to earth as a unique and one of a kind human being--just like every one of us.  In expressing himself as a man called Jesus, God is telling us that he affirms human worth.  He is saying that he believes in us, that he wants great things for us, and that, as Thoreau rightly observes, he understands that we all have a special path to pursue in this adventure of life and existence.
     Find your place, find your calling.  Find your path, your individual path with God.  Be like God was on earth:  yourself.

     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 me, 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.

     Are you familiar with Orion?  One of the most visible winter constellations, Orion tells a tale of greatness, of power and ambition, a story of quest and journey, a picture of humanity wrestling with itself and the gods.  The mightiest hunter ever to stride across the earth, Orion wandered the globe at will, killing any animals he wished, doing it all, he insisted, to honor the gods.  For one of the gods, Gaia, Mother Earth, however, this was too much:  she did not wish to see her animals, her offspring, perish at the hands of a mere mortal.  So she sent a scorpion after Orion, a scorpion equal to him in stealth and potency.  Bitten by the scorpion, the mighty hunter succumbed.  Seeing this, however, Zeus, the erstwhile "king" of the gods, took steps to honor this magnificent creation, setting him in the sky for
eternity.
     So we see Orion today.  As I continue to ponder the advent of winter and the Christmas celebration two days hence, I think about Orion.  I think about the legends and longing he represents, I think about the hold his stars exercise on our imaginations.  I think about how the Bible speaks so beautifully of the order and rhythms of the universe, and how these rhythms will continue until the cosmos takes its last breath.  And I give thanks for the wonder of story, one of our most gratifying experiences of humanness.
     Like Orion, we live as a story, a story of space, a story of time, a story of life in a world made by God.  Unlike Orion--and happily so--we can live this story forever.
     That's the beauty of the incarnation:  God's story, God's Orion:  God with us.
     Have a wonderful Christmas!

     If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may know that yesterday, December 21, was the winter solstice, the "shortest" day of the year (and conversely, as Robert Frost puts it in his "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "the darkest night of the year"). Commemorated in any number of ways around the world, the winter solstice is the grand turning point of the seasonal year, the day and night on which time, or at least our perception of it, hinges.  It's the end of the light, yet its creation and genesis, too. Though we lose, we win, too, newly moving, ever so imperceptibly, to the greater light to come.
     As winter continues to bear down, most of us see at least some daylight.  Far to the north, however, well beyond the Arctic Circle, people see only darkness.  Yet do we "see" darkness?  Or do we just hear and feel it?  Though darkness seems to descend upon us, a obscuring gloom--in every way--light seems to well from within us, our spirits ineffably connecting with the illumination sparkling around us.  And we "see."
     I love the winter.  I love how it masks and shrouds, I love how it engages reflection, I love how it sends us into places we would not otherwise go.  And I love how winter helps us "see" what sight can be.  As we trek through the darker days and hours, we come to understand that light is not what we think it is, illumination and no more.  Light is rather the underlying rhythm of all creation, a continuity of divine favor, a favor that speaks in gloom as well as joy, a favor that finds its richest expression in Jesus' words in the eighth and ninth chapters of John, "I am the light of the world."
     As someone in my atheist discussion said when I wished her a Merry Christmas, "Sweet Solstice"!

     "More than three thousand two hundred and fifty years after Buddha entered Nirvana, many evil kings were born and caused suffering to all living things.  In order to suppress them, Buddha gave the order and Genghis Khan was born."
     So said Lubsang-Danzin in The Golden Chronicle, which he composed around the year 1651.  One of the remarkable dimensions of the story of Genghis Khan, the Mongolian warlord and king who amassed the greatest land empire the world has ever seen, is the hold he exercised on the global imagination.  For many European Christians of his time, Genghis Khan appeared to be the incarnation of a long prophesied "Christian king of the East" who would come to liberate the world from the grip of Islam.  On the other hand, as we see in this observation from Lubsang-Danzin, Genghis Khan was revered by Buddhists, too, that for some Buddhists, Genghis Khan was born to set the world right.
     Throughout human history, many people have longed for a king who come to save the world as they know it.  Realizing the extent of the world's flaws and problems, they have longed for one who would come to eliminate them altogether.  One of the central tenets of Judaism, one which found its way into Christianity, is that one day, a day no one knows, God will come.  One day, God will come to the earth to restore it to its original wonder, the pristine and unimaginable harmony it enjoyed before human transgression. Though at Christmas we celebrate God's coming to the planet as savior and Messiah, the God-man, God and human being, we do so understanding that one day he will come again, as king, human no more, undisputed God of all creation.
     Although many admired and longed for him, Genghis Khan is but a faint shadow of what real human longing can be, the inescapable longing for and dreaming of God.

     Well, it's almost here:  Christmas.  As I remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event, the incarnation, God's appearance in human flesh, I think frequently about how Christmas plays out across the world.  In the West, it is of course remembered, in spades.  Unless one is living in a dream, he or she cannot miss sit.  In other parts of the world, however, regions dominated by other religious viewpoints, not so much.
     Christmas's seminal moment and foundation, that is, the incarnation, however, came to a world not entirely prepared to believe it.  Very few people were ready to accept that God could become flesh, could become a human being.  Today is no exception.  Although there are roughly 2.3 billion Christians on the planet, this leaves over five billion people who are not, people who likely do not believe that, in Jesus, God came in the flesh, became a person like you and me.
     So why Christmas?  Precisely because it is Christmas.  If God had not become a human being, we would not really know him.  We would not really understand the transcendent, the "great beyond" (to borrow a term from REM's song of the same name).  Without Christmas, we would still be wandering in the dark, a dark of rich and profound spirituality, yes, but a dark still searching for its real meaning.
     At the time it occurred, few people cared about Jesus' birth.  Ironically, now nearly everyone on the globe has difficulty avoiding it.  Though we could, and not without falsity, attribute this to centuries of Western dominance of the international cultural discourse, this only answers the reality in part.  The logic of Christmas is inescapable:  if God had not become human, we would never fully know him.
     And this is precisely God's point.  Though Jesus was a very tiny point in a vast and unyielding global empire, born in obscurity 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 whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the forgotten child, was the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, we really do not.
     Only as God becomes like us can we know him.  As John so wisely observes, "And the Word (God) became flesh" (John 1:14).