Saturday, December 24, 2011

Christ's Onkos

Like Origen, that brilliant theologian of the 3rd century Alexandrine church, I'm not much enamoured of a 'birth day' for the baby Jesus. Saying that only sinners like Herod and Pharoah celebrated their nativity is perhaps a little too harsh, and when Christianity went calling in Rome it could perhaps not escape one of the more innocuous facets of pagan culture - the Natal Day. The Emperor had his games, and we have ours. Pin the tail on the donkey, or dress the Christian in a deerskin and release the lions. You get the picture. Perhaps this why I always preferred the just-the-(disputed)facts Gospel of Mark and the majestic Heraclitian Logos of John to the Nativity scenes of Matthew and Luke. Lest I risk being called a heretic, this preference is purely aesthetical. To my eternal shame I never was much of a diaper changer.



The Comet Lovejoy appeared in the East yester-eve like some latterday Star of Bethlehem. It is itself a miracle which should have been vaporized in its close passage to our Sun (which it passed within less than half the distance to our moon). Astronomers were amazed when it resumed its trajectory towards the outlands of the solar system, probably quite smaller in it's mass but no less spectacular in it's tail. Proofed by the refiner's fire, it endures - a symbol perhaps of a remnant Christianity and its founder death and resurrection. Soon, Christ will be a Christmas day black hole whose existence can only be discerned only by observing the bodies that have fallen into his intense gravitational pull until even their light cannot escape. Perhaps that is the way it was meant to be.

Folks increasingly seem unable to get beyond the natural and moral theodicies that run interference between them and God. But the Light that came into the world was always in a Superposition in which the humanity and divinity of the Crucified were there all along. Like the two-slit experiment in quantum mechanics, there is always interference, but the light always shines somewhere.

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