Christmas, Day One, 2014

It's after 2:00am on Christmas Day. I've been home for about half an hour after a very fine Christmas Eve service at St Stephen's Episcopal Church.

I have said, more than once, that I have an incarnational theology. This is the night to ponder this.

Before the service proper, our choir gave us 30 minutes of wonderful music, which I may say more about in the next day or two. When the harpist played a low note, the long string vibrating at that bass frequency, I drifted to a notion that I have about resurrection, that it's like sound, maybe even like music. We like to think that sound is immaterial, and it is, to an extent. It passes through walls like a resurrected Jesus. It will also shatter crystal or rattle the frame of a car.


The Hebrew scriptures tell us God spoke us and everything around us into being. "Let there be!"

And there was. There is.

As I listened to harp and guitar and marimba and mixed voices, I pondered how we're all just the voice of God, the vibrations of God's vocal chords, spoken, maybe sung, into existence.

Of course, we're all solid and we can't pass through walls, but then maybe that's just because the walls are the wrong frequency. Or we are. We're discordant notes, the wall and me. We don't harmonize very well. 

These are fanciful thoughts, or mythological thoughts. It's just a way to think about this existence, this incarnation, this flesh, through which we experience everything. Even "spiritual experiences" have a bodily experience. We feel it in our gut, or in our heart. We tremble or we faint. Everything is experienced in the context of being embodied. We aren't free floating elements.

At Christmas, we pause to think specifically about how God became like us, living on our frequency, sounding like the sound that clashes with walls. Or viruses. Or bullets. Or speeding, crumpling cars.

The higher notes of the harp tonight, they were so delicate and fragile, and therein lay their beauty.

We're like that, you and I. More fragile than we like to think about, so easily overpowered and stopped by louder noises all around us, but still the lyric and song of God's throat.

Let there be. And you are.

Let us sing with God this song of creation. Let us raise our voices so that walls and bullets and viruses and plane crashes and IEDs and more cannot be heard as loudly as the life we have.

Peace, good will to all. People, sing it with the angels!

Peace, good will to all!