Christ Is Born

There is no end to the number and variety of people who are trying to fix the world. A friend recently sent me a link to a lecture which focused on how to convince science deniers of the truth of science. Scrolling down the sidebar on Youtube that is associated with that speech it revealed an endless list of people who are self-mantled to tape and paste and glue and staple society back together. And that there is no end to each of these perspectives and disciplines on how to do so.

At Mass last night I played guitar, which try as I might I only do moderately well with my usual share of mistakes. Christmas hymns, before and during. And a liturgy that included a mixed up medley of readings mistakenly selected by readers from any and each of the three possibilities recounting the birth of the Christ prescribed from sunset Friday to sunrise Saturday. It was lovely. Afterward I was cornered by the priest, a nervous little man, who informed me that I needed to figure out the Gloria because he wanted it sung. This congregation has never sung the Gloria. They do well to simply speak it simply. And after he left I told one of my favourites of my instructions. She just rolled her eyes. And I love these people. They are by no means sheep without a shepherd. They come every week with very real adoration of the sacrament in their Metis hearts, expecting me to pound out the Mass to a fiddle beat. So please explain to me why is it that since I came to roost here twelve years ago that only one priest has been able to love them for who they are? Only one. And we miss him so.

So afterward I locked up the church. We got into our car. The wind was howling. The temperature was -25. And a couple waited in their's until they saw that my car had started and that my car had begun to move. And we drove home through the provincial park - slowing down for a bull moose standing by the side of the highway in the dark grazing on road salt - to this place of great silence and great solitude. Inside we left the lights off. The small, coloured bulbs of our Christmas tree reflected brilliantly in the window. Without speaking we looked out into the dark. A couple of small pinpoints of light shone across the valley in the far distance. And in the shadow of this already dark mountain, there was a falling away of everything else. And suddenly everything opened out onto God. There was no I but only Thou. And nothing else mattered except the sense that history had already been fulfilled long ago. Christ is born. And now? Being jerked clean out of my self. The greatest event in the history of the universe lives in me and simultaneously awaits me yet in some spectacular manner. When a door shall be opened, and I shall step out into the stars, and God will be all-in-all. And that's it.

Eventually rising to go to bed. That all of this other blathering is nothing but blathering.

And he is not mine.

But I am his.