Hodie

Today Light is born in the world. Today darkness flees and all weariness slinks away to hide and await another discouraged day.

Today heaven and earth are two words only according to punctuation. Today there is no need to seek in the heavens or in the depths of the past or in the intricacies of thought to find Divinity and transcendence and transformation. Today, as Richard Rohr eloquently said, God is perfectly hidden and perfectly revealed, and wholly lovable, in the Child born among us and for us.

The whole world had a Baby by sheer gift and grace.

Last night Saints Peter and Paul, or many of us at least, gathered to stand vigil at that Birth. The new life born was eloquently shown to us by the new life among us, infant Lydia, born to longtime members so that the parish had a baby! What an exquisite even on which to baptize a child, to be reminded without words of the Life given to us poor and vulnerable and a sheer gift in our arms!

Easiest sermon I've ever preached--I only had to hold the child.

And members of the Hispanic community brought food and brought costumes and enacted a brief version of Las Posadas, the rich customary remembrance of the Holy Family asking for shelter and welcome when they were refugees. The homeless and vulnerable among us, in our world, that which is vulnerable and homeless within us, and the incarnate Word born to his people who "received him not"--all were present and asking for "posada", shelter, and the cry of final welcome spoke the Hope that there is by grace a welcome for us and a welcome that will be invoked from our hurting transformed hearts.

And so we welcomed him, with song and silence and word and music and all our glorious, broken, loved humanity, in two languages, on a chilly evening in a church on a gritty urban strip. And so we loved the children and broke pinatas and enjoyed our life with one another. And so we live...as the often-wayward friends of the Friend who mercifully is born daily in our hearts and in our world.