Christmas reflection 2017
The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us ( John 1:14)
I was touched by how the Christmas message has the power and gentleness to touch little children. The other day I was playing with my grand-daughter Jessica. She began to build the Christmas nativity scene, and when it was all created she began singing the Christmas carols. She seemed to know a great many of them.
I was reminded that Christmas speaks simply, even to the very young, and more so to the child in us.
In my services at this time of year I have often played with the babushka doll- how Babushka goes searching for the infant child. You may know the story, if not look it up. Then I begin to open the doll up. The search for the child is the inward search, a return to the child-self in us.
Christmas reminds us that we are loved
That the divine light is within us
Some times we have to make the Journey back
To clear the mud
To find the quiet centre of our lives
Reflect for a moment how the light of Christ
has carried you through the year
Some of us have come through some tough
And hard places
It has not been an easy year for our world
For our country
But we have we have come through to be people of hope!
I am always moved by the following verse of The Servant Song
I will hold the Christ-light for you
In the night-time of your fear;
I will hold my hand out to you,
Speak the peace you long to hear
Rumi, the poet says
I am so small how can this great love
be in me?
Consider your eyes
They are so small
Yet they see amazing things
The meaning of Christmas, of God become human for us in the person of Jesus, of God being present in millions of ways in the world and universe finds expression for me in the love poem of e e cummings
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
We are loved.
Father Ron Rolheiser, the Roman Catholic theologian says
Christmas invites us to be happy, and that demands of us an elemental asceticism, a fasting from adult cynicism,
a discipline of joy that can hold the cross and the crib together
so as to be able to live in a joy that no one, and no tragedy, can take from us.
This will allow us, at Christmas, like children, to plunge headlong into the pudding.
Christmas gives, both children and adults, permission to return to Love, to be happy.
Let the light of Christ in us transform us
And our world
Bob Commin
bobcommin.com 