Stylin' on Christmas

Christmas! Heart season in the Heartland. Surrounded by snow and colored lights, I am sinking into it like a rich piece of cheesecake, and tonight I ate that too.

Tonight I also listened to a whacked panel of Religious Professionals parsing the New Testament and trying to correct rhetorical inaccuracies. Oh my.

My own faith is an old one, Eastern Orthodoxy, not very inclined to compromise the heart of the story -- shepherds, wise men, virgins, Son of God.

Tonight for the first time I thought it might not be strictly necessary to insist on the fundamentals. I do take them for true but if I didn't have Mary, Joseph and Jesus -- my honored acquaintance! -- to people my faith, then I still think it would be the same. The part of me that believes lives in dangerous terrain where the sense of God-with-us is always at the right hand. I don't know whether I could say that this is "Bigger than Jesus." Who am I to say it, and how could I possibly know?

But whatever it is, it is very, very big; bigger than parsing those ancient stories. Even the best retellings miss the heart-pounding part of the living moment, not to mention much of the most convincing detail. And what is really important is not how God chose to transmit the message -- His choice, not mine, after all -- but whether I am listening.

And when others hear, if they hear it differently, maybe that doesn't matter too much either, as long as they hear it. It's important news: God is Right Here! The parsing is just a reflection of human personality styles; never take it for more than that.

{ In fond memory of Mervin Freedman, who taught so many how to study that quicksilver, "personality" }