Present God

One of the reasons I like Christmas is that it-like Easter-concentrates our attention on the incarnate God, which is a welcome antidote to our tendency toward overspiritualization. For example, I recall slogging my way through a popular Christian book on relationships and running across the author's recounting of Moses' encounter with God. The author proceeded to turn the guts of the story-about the effect of God's physical presence and Moses being allowed to see only his backside-into some kind of metaphor because "God is a spirit," he explained, and hence doesn't have a physical presence. As if the choices are flesh or ghost, as if God is governed by some pre-existing forms of existence and is not the author of all that exists.

God, of course, is not just ether, though many are tempted to make him that, to turn him into either some ghostly variant of Casper the friendly one or Hamlet the vengeful one. He answered, when queried by Moses as to his name, "Yahweh," which is to say, "I AM," which is to say further, when you think about it, "I am before you and after you and more than you, and all this around you that you think to be what is-these things you call creation-are pale reflections of me." This creation, Paul went on to write, testifies to the "Is" of God.

In Christ he became the permanent Is of God married mysteriously to the fleeting flesh of man, that we might be joined once again to the Creator from whom we are ever divorcing ourselves. Creation, Christ, and for many Christians, the Host, all bear witness to a God who is more than ghost. And what I like about Christmas is that, for a little while at least, he once again haunts the world so set on forgetting him, so determined to pretend that it is God who is vapor and rumor, and that we in our failing and flawed bodies are what constitutes the real.