Christmas Gold

God’s love for us was revealed when God sent into the world his only Son 
so that we could have life through him.
                                                                          John 1 4:9

At the Christmas Eve Vigil Mass,
my youngest daughter falling asleep against me
like disheveling shadows against flickering flames;
sweet sleep picking her up and laying her down in the cadences of the sacred;
God speaking in Liturgy;
weaving her waking and dreaming through gloria's and alleluias.

How are we asleep so often to the infant Christ birthing before us in our frozen solstice?
Blazing our depths stretching like wombs with the promise of Him:
the radical and revolutionary rending our undoing
in the guise of an infant;
the most vulnerable
in a dangerous,
half-spent night.

But see how He is born again and again.
He is unfurling from the womb of Divinity
in the cradle of our palms receiving His Host:
gathering all the stellar scattering
of our beaded hearts:
waking our still sleeping.

He comes, even now, in-breaking God almighty,
molting us in flames of gold
he came to light
in our deepest night.

"O come let us adore Him,
 O come let us adore Him,
 Christ our Lord!"