Well, it is officially a new year. Can’t you feel it? I certainly don’t mean: isn’t it grand that everything is finished and perfect and just the way we expected it to be? Aren’t our lives filled with total successes? I REALLY don’t mean: aren’t you glad, that like the end of a season on a television show, all the action is wrapped up, packaged and we can finally start something new? The truth is that Advent and the turning of the year do not wait for things to be wrapped up or perfected. The gift of newness and beginning is that it comes all the time regardless if we are ready for it or not. If renewal waited for us to be ready, or happened the way we thought it should, it would never come. But the great news is that in the midst of your split up with the girlfriend, your seemingly fruitless job search, your inability to make a relationship work or your life work…. The Holy Child is born.
The blessed news pops up in all the Christmas carols. A virgin birth in Bethlehem. Funny, isn’t it, how that one impossible thing is the thing everyone can pretty much believe in about Christmas? No matter how skeptical one is about all of religion, most of us get pretty sentimental about this story. It has nothing to do with how we believe in our heads and everything to do with the knowledge in our hearts. Why? Because our whole lives are a Bethlehem. Because this whole world is a Bethlehem that is waiting. Because the miracle of grace is that God is always waiting to be born, to renew all things. In us. This day. No matter what?
All that matters is that we be ready and willing.

This is the irrational season
When loves blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There’d have been no room for the child.

-- Madeleine L’Engle