The Birth is in YOU
December 2020

+Porter Taylor

“Like Mary we open to the Word. Like Mary, we gestate and give birth to the Word through the actions of our lives. Like Mary, we are involved in the process of bringing God into the world. Like Mary, we are the finite earthen vessels into which divine life is poured…. This God-bearing is neither negligible nor passive. Rather, we are active recipients, persons whose freedom of choice is never violated. The request that we allow the dynamics to be realized through the medium of our lives is a genuine one. We can refuse. Or we can assent and let the most intimate recesses of our lives be inhabited, transformed, made new by God.” The Vigil. Wendy Wright. pp. 103-104.

Christmas is not an event in the past we celebrate. At the heart of things, we are not historians. No, we are called to be God bearers. Christmas is both an historical one-time event and an ongoing radical shift in the connection of the divine and this world. “The Word has become flesh and dwells among us.”

As Anglicans we have always embraced the middle way between both Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Church and the Protestant Reformation. However, even in the early days of the Church of England, the emphasis was more on being Protestant than Orthodox. As a result, the focus was more on our being fallen and sinful than God bearers made in the image of the divine. I am not sure, but I wonder if that contributes to our perception that Christmas is mostly limited to an historical event. God came into the world in the form of Jesus. Done.

The incarnation is ongoing. That doesn’t make us pantheist. It makes us Christians. It means that God is part of this world; part of our lives; part of the movement of the divine will to being done on earth as it is in heaven.

So, amid the presents and whatever else ends up in the stockings, remember the gift is not any thing in a box. The gift is in you. This Christmas the divine spark again glows in your heart and calls you to embrace it that so that the light in you might overcome the darkness around us and through you Christ will manifest in this world right where you are.

According to the mystic Meister Eckhart, Jesus said “I became human for you. If you do not become God for me, you do me wrong.” So, this Christmas let us do more than adore Christ. Let us embrace him and take seriously our call to be “involved in the process of bringing God into the world.” Christmas isn’t merely Merry; it’s deeply holy.

Prayer: Dear God, may the Christ child be born and grow and manifest in us.

Practice: Take seriously your call to be Christ bearer.