My dear friends, here we are again.

May you know love, particularly if love has been distant. Remember that it surrounds us even when we fail to percieve it, because we are all held in the great mercy.

May you know joy, even in the presence of difficult things. May it come to you in tiny parcels, like little laughs.

May you know peace, like the settling of a snowflake in the palm of your open hand.

Every year I have tried to write a poem for Christmas.

Todays poem has a quote from Richard Rohr as an introduction;

“There’s really only one message, and we just have to keep saying it until finally we’re undefended enough to hear it and to believe it: there is no separation between God and creation. That’s the message. But we can’t believe it.

And so this Word, this Eternal Word of God that we read about in the prologue to John’s Gospel, leapt down, as the Book of Wisdom [18:14–15] [1] says, and took its abiding place on Earth, in order to heal every bit of separation and splitness that we experience. That splitness and separation is the sadness of the human race. When we feel separate, when we feel disconnected, when we feel split from our self, from our family, from reality, from the Earth, from God, we will be angry and depressed people. Because we know we weren’t created for that separateness; we were created for union.

So God sent into the world one who would personify that union—who would put human and divine together; who would put spirit and matter together. That’s what we spend our whole life trying to believe: that this ordinary earthly sojourn means something.

Sometimes we wake up in the morning wondering, what does it all mean? What’s it all for? What was I put here for? Where is it all heading?

I believe it’s all a school. And it’s all a school of love.”

From here.

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Light of the world

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The low winter sun takes on power from

Puddles of last nights rain and I turn away

Resonating to a signal sent from distant stars

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Something glints in the top of the bare branches

A flash of wing or a white tooth or maybe

The coming together of a choir of angels

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And in the wet manger of heavy earth, summer

Sleeps, waiting for light to burst out again

In brand-new hallelujahs

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For behold, the light is with us. The light is

In us. The light shines out in the darkness

And all things will be well.