A Day Like the Moon

Wow, what a full day. As full as the moon.

Sitting into the situation with the creche has continued to bring richness and depth to my experience of it. I am really grateful for this week, for the need to confront this piece of Advent art we'd created.

As we've continued to talk with folks, we've discovered that the discontent people are very few. This has helped us not to overcompensate for what we thought at first may have been a widespread feeling of resistance. Not at all, it turns out.

But the week has been such a gift to me. I really hadn't known, at the beginning of this project, how it would culminate on Christmas. And this week has forced me to face that question head on, finally. (I don't think I could have known before living with the creche. I believe the process was organic.) I have finally been confronted with asking: what does the Incarnation mean in the face of devastation? What is my faith when it comes to disaster, poverty, alienation?

For me, I've realized over this past week that although I may be overwhelmed by these things at times in my life, God never is. Although sometimes everything seems beyond me, nothing is beyond God. Because this is the God who hovered over the chaos, the toh-hoo-va-boh-hoo, at creation. This is the God who chose to be born to a poor woman in a stable and not in Herod's palace.

One last thing. G talked with one of the folks who had been put off by the creche. She has been experiencing the creche as a sort of guilt-inducer. She felt as though it was demanding of us: "Why do you not do more to end injustice?" But this is not how we intended it at all, and I'm saddened that it's been experienced that way. For me, this creche gathered into itself all the pain of this past year, beginning with the tsunami just a day after Christmas, through the continuing days of war, through the terrorist attacks in London, through the daily tragedies of homelessness, through the hurricanes, the botched evacuations, through the earthquakes. All of this. It gathered all of these things into itself and held them up not before the people, but before God. For me, the creche said, "Here is our need for the Incarnate One. Here is our need."

Today was a full, beautiful day. A day like the moon.