With things constantly changing within and around us, we sometimes lose sight of life’s continuities. The chapters and seasons of our lives we easily recognize, and well we know that the characters accompanying us in the drama change from act to act. In a highly mobile society, people come and go. We establish relationships with people who share a common time and place with us before zooming off into another time and space. Children have a way of growing up and establishing lives of their own.
But beneath the flux and change of a dynamic world, there are some constants. We call them enduring realities, like the world itself and our own self-consciousness awareness of participating in it over time.
From love, the cosmic glue that hold people together even when time and place keeps them apart, to the symbols and artifacts that tell the story of where we have been and who we are, we do well to take note of the many continuities that give foundation and direction to our lives.
Over or under or around or within (or all the above) is the constant we call God. God, we say, is ever-present in the world, the Cosmic Lover. Ever-intimate, the Cosmic Lover is at once the Eternal Brooder. As Unbroken Thread and Perpetual Binder, God weaves together the pieces of the creation. God is … well, God is sometimes a little abstract, but how could it be otherwise? Really! Someone once suggested our getting the idea of God was like a slug getting the idea of a human being.
To help us get the hang of things, God gave us a sign, Immanuel, God with us (Isaiah 7.14). Marvel of marvels, the Enduring Reality, Cosmic Lover, Eternal Brooder, Constant Thread and Perpetual Binder, took on flesh and bone and appeared in human history as … a Child.
Not exactly what we expected, a Child, at least not this Child. Why not a Little Bang to complement the Big Bang, just enough to capture our attention and confirm that the Enduring Reality still endures. Maybe because Big Bangs and Little Bangs and other heavenly signs and wonders cannot speak to the human spirit. Heavenly portents can wow us and dwarf us but never convince us that we are important enough to notice, much less love.
Whatever else Christmas may be, it is at least this: the Word of Love speaking in language we can understand, offering one more enduring reality, that we are noticed and loved.
A Child tells us so.