No time for great thoughts, but that’s okay, because the Gospel provides us all we need know, and, as the Holy Father has said, the best response is silence.

But I’ll only say (hah!) – as we contemplate the knots and paradoxes of Christian theology, and wonder about God and how it all can be, the feast of the Incarnation calls us to the proper stance. We spend a lot of time twisting and turning theological concepts to fit them into The Baby. But that is never the right way to view a baby – to decide who he is, to make pronouncements, to declare his identity before he can even open his eyes. We don’t do this with our own babies. We watch, and listen, and learn.

So it should be with this Baby. Who is God? What does God think of the world? What does God think of you and your life? What does God hope for you? What does God think of your neighbor, your friend, your enemy? What is love? Why are you here?

Be quiet, watch, and listen. You don’t have the answers. The Baby does.

“A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
hat this was folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation,
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky.
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all the way for
Birth or Death ? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Eliot, of course.

Happy Christmas.