It is Christmas time again. This holiday has so much emotion involved with it from memories of Christmases past to family memories made & to be made, to the spiritual dimension for which it is really about.
It's the 21st today, first day of winter! We've already had our family Christmas. Saturday our children & 4 of our grandchildren gathered to share the day, eat good food, exchange gifts & reminisce. It was truly wonderful. We had a lot of fun & loving conversation. It was all a family gathering should be. I feel blessed. Our eldest son & 3 grandchildren will be flying east to have Christmas with their other grandparents. Our daughter will be with her inlaws. Our youngest son & his wife will be back to spend the actual day with us. That will be lovely. We created good memories for the Christmas of 2009.
Probably the worst Christmas was 1976. My husband, father of my children, had an aneuyrsm of the major artery in his brain. He was talking to me & dropped. He was brain dead. On New Year's 1977, we turned off the machines & he passed on to his next life. Many miraculous things happened around all of that. I'll share that one day.
Since we had our whole family time already, it will be interesting to be free to focus on the deeply spiritual meanings of Christmas. Tonight we are having friends for dinner, & then we are going to a performance of "The Messiah" done in the original way that Handel had it done. We will be attending several other things at church too. We probably would have done all of that anyway. The special freedom of time allows me to spend contemplative time around the miracles & meanings of Christmas.
Sunday, Charles spoke of the times when it is thin between heaven & earth, times when we see or hear from another realm. I have certainly had those times & deeply cherish them. I understand that life is so much more than the obvious. God gave us a view of who & what he is through Jesus. I suppose God also got a view of humanity in a new way too through Jesus. For God, the emmanuel experience must have been interesting. For us, it was key to our awakening. We got a major thin spot between heaven & earth. Some people's view of God is so limited. They create God in their own emotionally stinted, mean-spirited image. Jesus told us that God is love & then proceeded to show us that love & how it works. He encouraged us to be that love too. Perhaps in our sincere, authentic, agape love, we help create a thin spot. Living from that love, we are more deeply in alignment & communion with God. There is less between us, keeping us apart.
This Christmas, the gift we could bring to the Christ Child is that authentic love, opening up a thin spot between us. In the cradle of our hearts we birth the Light of the Christ by our lovingness & our faith. I am going to spend some time contemplating this.
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