The Sunday before Christmas, and I feel settled in all of it. The tree is lit, the wine is poured. Let the Christmas tunes play at the grocery store, in the elevator, and in the television commercials. Bring it on.
Today, my partner and I lived out the messiness of Christmas. She spent the day with friends watching the Eagles play what I guess was an amazing football game while I went to the cathedral for the day. Her day was a heavily secular celebration, mine an overtly religious obsevance.
Christmas has always been both secular and religious. In defining Christmas, the early Christian church "adopted" the already robust secular solistice celebration as a religious holiday. The party definitely came before the theology.
The secular holiday today celebrates family traditions, treasured recipes, the discipline of giving and the wonder of mystery. All wonderful things to celebrate in and of themselves. Add a bit of wine and too many sweets, some candles, and some songs about Rudolph and Santa Claus and you've got the stuff of memory. God is present. Watching a great football game with dear friends is clearly at home in the secular holiday tradition.
The overtly religious tradition celebrates God's movement in our lives. If Christmas means anything at all to me, it means that God is present in the totality of human life. And I do want to celebrate that presence - with song, and with poetry and with the vigor of thousands of years of tradition. God is present in the mourning; God is there in the gathering; God lives in the celebration. Amen.
There are many roads. God is there among the friends on the couch watching football. God is in the manger. God lives and dwells among us.
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