con carne, con secundinas - Good News of Great Joy - Fragment 5

At the very core of my own personal theological convictions in the story of Christmas.

Yep. Christmas.

The story not simply of the Incarnation or of the “taking on flesh” of God, but, more deeply, of God being born.

That is to say, at the center of my own personal religious expression is the understanding—and my own personal experience—that where two or three or more are gathered: trusting or hoping or hunching or speculating or dreaming or doubting profusely or crying or screaming or protesting or lamenting or whatevering… … when two or three or more gather in solidarity, in the name of God whose name is Love (1 John 4:7, 4:16; Matt 18:20); when folks gather, from one nation or another, from one religion or another. When folks gather, in their sameness and in their difference, in spite of their difference, and so on and so forth, there: in the stench, in the splintered, soiled, stables and and saliva-laden feeding troughs of life… there, God is born.

Among us, within us, (Luke 17:21), in human flesh, in human circumstance, in our neighbors, in the night.

God is there, lying in the "hay" and in the afterbirth.

Born among us.

O Holy Night.

To be continued (yes, one more)…