A Merry Christmas to thee

My Christmas prayers to those who come to this blog. May the Christ Child bypass all our defenses, facades, habitual sins; may we encounter Him anew with our interior being; may we find Him there and be docile to Him who is Himself the most docile.

I wonder what the waking up was like for the three wise men when they came to the Star of Bethlehem, and knew that their physical journey was a small thing. T.S. Eliot visualizes their journey and homage of the Child as something that impacts them mainly in retrospect, while the journey itself - both the 'there and the back again' - bears every semblance of the ordinary, with weariness and discomfort. I concur with with his inner vision, yet I think there was a moment, when they were with the Christ Child, that they knew - like a private apocalypse, a moment of fearful respite - that their old lives were gone, that their journey had carried them to a blissful point of no return. And they dwelt deep in glorious peace, far from home.

Oh, but that's for the Epiphany Feast isn't it? All aspects of the same single Christmas, pondered in the heart.

Of course, I couldn't post this without some Roger Whittaker, in memory of my mom. (Mourning, though not like the sort immediately surrounding her death, does go on, in tandem with so many things, equally interior, often hardly even apparent, but there, like the Christ Child.)