I have found that for most of us, there’s something deep within that needs healing. That “something” is different for each of us: loneliness, self-doubt, a grievance, anger, broken trust, depression, a scary diagnosis, or unfettered anxiety…. Each of us seeks healing and each of us seeks restoration of our relationships, restoration of love lost.

Spotting the unclean spirits in the other, or even obsessing about our own, won't get things very far. We do need to confront what we see as wrong, both at a domestic and a social level. But we do so with the humility that we are all sinners--all more human than not. This kind of radical acceptance can actually liberate us to fall back into God's embrace. The God who knows the whole story.

God long ago threw away the abacus and threw open the holy arms to everyone and everything God had created and is creating. There is enough and more than enough for me, for you, for every single thing God has created and loves passionately, wildly and completely.

Each of us is somewhere along the way in our relationship with the church, with religion, with God, somewhere along the way in our own experience of the holy. But even if there is not a right or wrong way, there is great power to be found through acknowledging and confessing where we are and what it is we believe – if only, at first, to hear our own voice as we seek to give voice to the truth within our own heart.

If we really believe in a God to whom we all belong, if we really see in these waters the perfect completion of a story of creation that begins and ends with Love, then we have to claim everybody. And, especially, the suffering. For, as Jesus says elsewhere, the poor will always be with us. The poor of spirit. The poor of hope. The poor of health. The poor of wealth. The poor of love. The poor of wholeness. The poor of respect. The poor of belonging. The poor will always belong to us. A part of “us.”

Almost as soon as Christmas Day is over, as a culture we move on –all traces of Christmas are quickly eliminated from our malls, our houses. We want to put Jesus back where he belongs –out of sight and out of mind. We don’t want to be reminded what this child asks of us, staring innocently up into our face and making us know deep in our gut that what he will go on to say and demonstrate, that we cannot serve two masters, God and money or God and human power, is deeply true.

Every religion and philosophy teaches the virtue of compassion. Those of us who are Christian, those of us who receive God through this Christmas story of incarnation, those of us who receive God as an infant in vulnerability… our compassion, Christian compassion begins and ends with the realization that in each newborn child, and each full-grown child is the fullness of the presence of God.

Being not the light but pointing to the light often means, first, being silent and listening deeply. Bearing witness to the light of God in that conversation may mean wondering aloud how God may be present with you. Simply ask, “How do we find God’s love in the midst of this situation?”

It is challenging and it is difficult but the only way we will move forward, we will begin to live into God’s dream, into a world where every valley is raised and every mountain laid low, is when we name the truth of our structures and institutions-when we open our eyes to and name the privilege that those of us who are white, who are wealthy, who are male, implicitly hold. When we begin to have those myriad individual and collective truth-filled conversations that we desperately need.

Why are the skies darkened and the heavens shaken? Why do we cry to the potter who shaped us? Why this loud lamentation? We cry out because, despite our greatest human aspirations and efforts, the world in which we live is not just; the world in which we live is not just.