Birth Cave in Bethlehem

Christmas comes at the end of the year and introduces the New Year to come in a week. Christmas comes on one of the darkest days of the year and brings new light. Christmas celebrates God becoming one of us. Christmas is about a poor family having a baby, in an occupied country, who becomes the savior of the world. Christmas is a religious day and, in the USA, our largest commercial holiday. Christmas day is one we wait and get busy for, children anticipate and some adults find depressing. Christmas, although a Christian holiday, is celebrated by persons of all faiths. Christmas certainly is a paradox.

This Christmas I heard from all four members of the family in India I got to know on the Pilgrimage of Peace, although they are of Hindu faith. My friend in Milwaukee from Sierra Leone, a Muslim, called to wish us a Merry Christmas. What is it about Christmas that it appeals to so many, especially children and young at heart?

My guess is probably because Christmas, like life, is a paradox, celebrating opposites. Some, like children, can balance the tension of a good paradox. Although I believe in a moral right and wrong, I still believe life is a paradox. Like a seed we must die to rise again for new life.

For our Christmas dinner tonight we had a salad which all the greens, lettuce, sunflower sprouts, arugula, basil and parsley were grown in the unheated sun room this winter. Growing food in a room with only a small space heater is a paradox but a delicious one.

Some say “we become what we think” but thinking too much can stop us from living. I encountered a person today, Christmas day, that really believes that something created in the mind is true in reality. I started to tell the person how his thinking did not make sense and then thought it does make sense for that person. Who am I to day it does not make sense?

Today ends my Diary of Worm postings for 2009. I will take some silent time away from the postings and be back January 1, 2010. May the peace of the newborn baby conquer all your fears?

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