What we celebrate

I decided the other day, amidst the unremitting bad news and sense of loss many of us feel, that living is hard. This sounds like a ridiculous statement. We are born, we live, we die. What's so hard about that? Anyway, I've been taught (and think I've learned) that the next world is more important than this one, so much more important.

But, here, where we are, living right and well is so hard. It's so easy just to slide in and out of each day without thinking, to watch television, listen to the radio, put music on, chat on the phone, never minding what really matters and not even realize what we are building.

It's a daily struggle to focus on matters that are deep and spiritual, rather than the little temptations that surround us more than in any other time in history...time stealers that burrow into our brains and snatch our intelligence and creativity.

The article at this link is meaningful. It hurts a little (truth often does), but it's worth reading and remembering what really matters. The joy isn't in expecting the change in people we help, but rather in ourselves, as we reach out rather than in.

Christmas is the beginning of a new cycle of teaching them, isn’t it? We show them the baby in a cave, and tell them to watch him just as the shepherds watched the miraculous star, and over the months to come we tell them what he did as a man, and we lead them to the tree which he climbed to die, and we fix their eyes there, telling them: watch, watch, see what has happened. Then we take them to his second cave, to the rolled-aside stone and the weeping women, and tell them to fix their eyes on his shoulders walking away, to hear him calling for them to follow, and we pray that this is the voice they remember as we grow feeble, not our own voices even, but the voice of the one they must follow if they are to have the gift we desperately want for them but cannot ourselves give.