Dirt is Here to Stay: A Christmas Meditation
I mean… Happy Holidays and Merry Everything!!! Yes. But how about we talk about the sanctity of dirt? For is that not what the Christmas season is about? No? Well, yes—actually it kinda is. The dirty fact about the Incarnation is that the Earth—including the dirt—matters. God comes to dwell in the dirt and in our dirt. (We are made of dirt.) Dirt and God are forever intertwined. Which, sigh… includes the dirt of the stranger. Our dirt equals. I know… God dwells also in the ones we fear the most. Say it’s not so!!! I don’t like the implications of the Christmas story either.
Nevertheless, this is why in this nativity story, Jesus is born in a strange, stinky manger in Podunk Bethlehem, not in the likes of the Inn at Trump Tower on 5th Ave. (Oops… did I just say that?) God is born in the dirt—in the stinky places, the hellish places, the unchosen places. I’d say that that’s probably because we might be tempted to believe that it is power and winning—oops, did I say that too?—that we are made all better. Every ill healed. Well, the manger delves quite a blow to that fantasy every year.
Every.
Friggin’.
Year.
Sigh.
So for those of us who contemplate the manger during the Christmas season, we are reminded that it is the power of love which makes all things new, not the love of power. And just to be clear, it’s the kind of love that gets vulnerable—like a baby—stinky, dirty, unknowing, without pretense or fear, intertwining with the stranger. Every. Friggin’. Day. Again and again. After all, is this not who God is? And God is here to stay.