CHRISTMAS EVE in 2020

Today the Virgin comes to the cave / to give birth to the Eternal Word. / Hear the glad tidings and rejoice, O universe! / Glorify with the angels and the shepherds / the Eternal God, who is willing to appear as a little child!” (Kontakion-hymn, Forefeast of Nativity)

The “Eternal God” is “willing to appear” into our “today.” He enters into our history, with all its changes and stagnations, and as one of us, with all our vulnerability to the phenomenon called “time,” to which He had not been subjected in His unchanging Being as the eternal Word of God. Now, in Bethlehem, He “suits up and shows up” to us, even when all the doors were shut to Him “at the inn.”

Today as our world appears stagnated by the seeming endlessness of a global pandemic, His Mother shows me the Way out of stagnation and toward productive change. It is His Way, of walking through all of this, in patience; “trampling death” not by evasion or denial, but “by death,” – by walking through it, doing the next right thing, as does she, when she “comes to the cave.” May she be welcomed into all our “caves” this Christmas Eve, even into my little apartment. “O people walking in darkness, behold a great light: you that dwell in the region and shadow of death, a light shall shine upon you.” (Is 9:2) Christ is born! Glorify Him! (Tune into today’s audio-podcast, open to subscribers AND non-subscribers alike: https://www.patreon.com/posts/45390886.)