‘Tis Christmas. Time for laughter, time for cheer.
Time for all things mushy and sweet.
Time for us all to remember what the world is all about.
And what it is about is the stuff of fiction:
A deity, one proud enough to demand to be the only one, wanted the mortals to understand. But how could they understand if the deity did not understand? He, for lack of a proper pronoun, thought it over and decided the best way would be for him to become one of them, to become mortal, human. But even deities have constraints and actually becoming one himself wasn’t truly possible. So he took a part of himself, a small part that he could just barely spare, and experienced humanity through that. As the child, for lack of a proper noun, he would still feel what they felt–despair, hunger, poopy diapers, a cracked toe on a table leg.
Because even that small part of him was special, because the very act was, to mortal humans, a miracle, it could not pass unnoticed. It is indeed a rare thing to hear a child-deity cry out that first gasp for air, bloody and wrinkled and real. What a shock that must have been! To suddenly feel!
This deity is too large to put into one box, one body, one faith. Is that child, who grew to be a man, the only path? Are the other paths less feeling, less shocking and real?
Christians, Muslims, Jews–we all follow the same deity. None is greater nor smaller nor less real than the others.
In this time of laughter, time of cheer, time for all things mushy and sweet, remember as you open your gift that God isn’t in a box, isn’t wrapped in pretty paper, isn’t written in just one book. That child experienced life as a mortal human, feeling what we all feel. God is as universal as a cracked toe on a table leg.