Have yourself a prophetic Christmas

There is a drawer in our home that houses plastic and paper bags we get from the store when we forget to bring our own.  This drawer is opened and bags are placed into it and then we close it, with intentions of using those bags one day.  Classic "junk drawer" behavior.

The other day I put a bag into that drawer only to discover that the drawer is very full.  Not wanting to deal with this at all, but identifying I must, I pulled the drawer out and saw there were not only bags housed in the drawer but also a good number of carpenter ants.  So, after seeing this, and not wanting the ants to eat out parts of my home like termites, I had to act.

This is what the light does.  It exposes things that we may not see even when we look at something with regularity.

Christmas is that time in which the Light of God comes into the world.  And much like the drawer in my home, the Light of Christmas exposes things that we might not want to see or deal with at that time (war, rape, LGBT, etc.)

Macy's is great at redirecting light in order to show you only what they want you to see.  Sales, Santa, Smiles.  The Church's mission is to work with the Light to expel darkness.  This is the role of the prophet.

The great thing about Christmas is there is an opportunity to see things that we have not seen before.  That is, thanks to the Light, we are able to see more than just bags, we can see the ants.  This is why when Jesus begins his ministry he begins with calling people to repent.  That is to say, that when the Light shines it is easy to see where we have failed and since we can now see our failings we have an opportunity to do something about it.

I wish you the very best Christmas.  I hope that we are all moved not only to deal with cleaning out the 'baggage' in our personal drawers, but also have the courage to deal with the other issues of the world that have been in the dark.

The closer I get, the larger my shadow

There is a great number of writings in the world of religion, and perhaps elsewhere, about light.  In Christian circles Light is often a metaphor for the Triune God, which may not be difficult to see the connection if you are a Christian:

Light gives life and without it we would be in the dark and dead.

One of the things we Christians strive for is to move toward the Light.  It is also a common teaching that Christians are not the light, but that we are to live in a way that we reflect the Light into the dark places.  There is a Jewish teaching that Jews are called to be repairers of the light because when the world was created light was scattered around the world.  Jews are to look for the shards of light and return those shards to the source in order to help repair the world.

But one of the things we often forget about God as Light is that the closer we get to the Light the larger our shadow becomes.

Sometimes those who believe they are closest to God forget that they cast a large shadow and unintentionally keep others from seeing the light.

Sometimes when we get so close to the Light we have a greater awareness of just how large our own darkness can be.

So may we become aware of the greatness it is to move closer to the Light so that we might see with greater clarity, but may we also be careful that the closer we move toward the light we can often see our own darkness easier and keep others from seeing the Light.