Merry Christmas from Late in the Day

I'm struck by a phenomenon I've seen in the last few days: a number of my favorite pundits stating candidly that their personal lives are fraught with challenges. Examples I've seen have ranged from job loss to cancer to postpartum depression to regret for youthful foolishness. One tends to think that, at a certain level of success, there's not much to plying this trade but turning in great copy, engaging those who follow your work, keeping an eye out for more opportunities, and prospering thereby.

But it's not like that. Not for pundits or anyone else. Life's challenges come in two main categories: stuff that comes out of nowhere, such as illness or natural disasters, and circumstances resulting from successions of decisions of our own making. There are both in every life.

In every last human heart there's a yearning for completion. There is a plethora of models for dealing with it, from ancient to modern. Buddhists have the Noble Eightfold Path that ostensibly addresses the suffering caused by attachment to this realm. Muslims have a set of practices, including memorization of the Quran, fasting and pilgrimage. Recent decades have brought us Westerners various programs including Transactional Analysis, est, and Primal Scream Therapy, in addition to psychotropic drugs.

But once, for a thirty-three-year period beginning with the events we're celebrating this month, there walked on this earth a man who told us in no uncertain terms that it was his person that was the answer. Yes, he gave us parables and analogies. He healed the blind and lame, fed thousands with a few fishes and loaves of bread, and challenged the Pharisaic structure of the Judaism of his day.

But it's time for us to give up the purely reason-based arguments along the lines of, "I don't get what he meant by saying he himself was the wellspring of the living water, the bread, the vine in which we all are to abide."

You incline your heart toward him, and then you get it. He is beckoning you to recognize his uniqueness, his holiness. That was God shivering in that manger, and it was God thirty-three years later heaving and groaning on that cross.

He is the answer to everything, because he created it all. He is present in the eternity that is the backdrop to the successive moments of our temporal lives.

This vast universe, running as it does on utterly reliable laws of physics, chemistry and biology, answers to him. And, if you want to talk in evolutionary terms, it culminates in his knocking at the door of your very own soul.

It's a perfect universe in every way, save one: your decision to use your free will to say yes to him.

Let's say yes today. Let's acknowledge that he is king and all will be well if we proceed according to his plan.

That plan  not a bullet-point list of things to do, not a formula or a program. It's merely looking him straight in the eye and saying, "Here I am, Lord. Make me whole."

We'd be so lost without that.

But we're not lost.

It may be late in the day, but, in the words of someone who knew him personally, spoke with him, travelled with him, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."