[todaysdate]
By Ernesto Tinajero
On Sunday, my 5-year-old was a sheep in the annual Millwood Christmas pageant. Of course I found a deep joy in watching him belt out at the top of his voice. God was with us in the moment of pure joy. The rest of the children sang and acted out the Gospel as we proud parents snapped pictures in a vain attempt to capture that which remains elusive. My was son filled with love as he belted out the ancient Christmas hymns as well as the new ones the play demanded. I know this moment will float away soon in the wisp of breeze of time.
There have been so many children playing the roles of sheep, Mary, Joesph, Wise Men and shepherds just in my 100-year-old church. Think of all the children in all the pageants throughout the 2000 years. There have been so many shepherds flubbing their lines, stage fright becoming cute photos and all the proud Marys’ hold a baby doll. There will be millions, if not billions more. What is one more in the vast span of space and time. Do I have a right to claim the moment as unique and special when it will fade away? After all, think of the all of the kids who were sheep throughout the years. Many of them are now parents, grandparents, and some have passed to be with the Lord. Soon there will be a new crop of sheep as my son will quickly be too old to be in the pageant. The movement of time makes all of life light. Lite life may sound like a diet drink, but it can be oppressive if thought about too long. What do we matter in the long course of history.
Life without mass flies away in the winds of time. When the preacher in Ecessaisties say vanity of vanity, it actually should be translated literally as vapor or vapors all is vapor. That our lives will dissipate quickly and matter very little. So, if life is massless and matters little and we find can’t we bear a life without mass.
The novelist Milan Kundrea raises this point in his novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” If our lives matter little, how are we to proceed. Even in events that seem vastly important, like the battle for Freedom in Prague Spring of 1966, life is light. In his novel, the characters betray each other, brush with history and yet life is feather like and blows away in the tick of a tock. They aim to matter to each other and to the whole of life.
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I have been looking at the glory of God. My insight here comes from one of the Hebrew words the Bible uses for glory, which means weight. It answers the unbearable lightness of being with the idea of God’s presence adding mass to our lives. The so called God particle or the Higgs boson is a very good analogy for then idea of the Glory of God adding mass to ones life. Higgs is the particle that attracted mass to a material. We have all had the experience of thinking our lives a light and featherless, as if we matter little or nothing.
The reality of the Christmas story or the whole of Jesus is his being with us. The Glory of God means the presence of God within our lives. Jesus’ presence adds, like the Higgs boson, the right amount of mass to our lives, giving our lives weight it needs to matter, but not too much as to crush us.
Christmas means that my son’s joy at singing matters.
