How Shall We Respond?

 Remembering that it happened once, / We cannot turn away the thought,
As we go out, cold, to our barns / Toward the long night’s end, that we
Ourselves are living in the world / It happened in when it first happened,
That we ourselves, opening a stall / (A latch thrown open countless times
Before), might find them breathing there, / Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him, / The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light / That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning’s light, the air / Around them joyful as a choir.
We stand with one hand on the door, / Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight / Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake, / Our own white frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here / As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place / Holy, although we knew it not.
        —“Remembering that it happened once” by Wendell Berry

There is a tender beauty to the Christmas season. An honesty. An opening. It invites us into a realness that transcends all the decorations and lights of Advent. And it moves us toward greater authenticity, even rawness, like what we hear in the gritty, down-to-earth longing of Mary’s song (Luke 1:46-56): God will cast down the powerful, and lift up the lowly. God will fill the hungry, and send the rich away empty. This tender beauty is grounded in our messy humanness and deepest needs.  It is a gift of Incarnation. And it asks us to imagine what sort of world we hope for— what sort of world we want to be a part of—what sort of world we want to build. The beauty—and the holiness—is already here; we just have to recognize it, allow it to open our hearts, and invite it to move and inspire us.
 

2020 was such a hard year for so many people for so many reasons. It exposed layers of injustice and layers of grief. And while much of this year was incredibly difficult, it also points a way forward for us as a community that strives to love and care for others. In this new year, I hope we will gather our learnings from 2020, the stories of our hardships, the unexpected blessings that found their way to us, and our deepest longings—and create and live into a vision that responds to the sacred call that God places upon us and responds to the human call of the needs of our neighbors. Beauty and possibility are all around us. How shall we respond?

See you in (zoom) church,  
Christy