A few days remain before Christmas.  At this juncture in life, I am able to call to memory past Christmas seasons.  Christmas is the high point of a year, is it not?  A season of ending, as well as a season of anticipation. Something is about to begin.  The ending and the beginning are connected, linked in many ways.

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I retrieve The Christian Life New Testament which belonged to my father from the bookshelf.  Each year at this time I pickup the little volume and read the Christmas story.  I desire to feel in my hands the connection to my father.  The cover is creased and worn.  For years he carried the book every day to his job at the American Tobacco Company.  I hold the book in my hand and interpret the Christmas story afresh in the light of my life, over the past twelve months.

The essence of the story is simple according to Luke’s Gospel:

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. ² (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) ³ And everyone went to their own town to register.

⁴ So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. ⁵ He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. ⁶ While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, ⁷ and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

Inevitably the Roman imperium is mentioned to anchor the story.  The time and place are registration for tax purposes, a return to a hometown for a working class couple expecting a child.  The child is born in unpropitious circumstance — away from home, without proper accommodation.  Mother and child both survive the hazard of birth.  The child is received with love and laid to sleep in what circumstance happens to afford.

And the infant, what does the infant do?  Nothing.  The infant does what all infants do if they are fed and warm.  They sleep.  They have no worries, no plans, no ambitions, no contention, nothing to rage about, nothing for Fox News to report about…  The job, the task of an infant is to sleep, to just “be.”

This is the point of the Christmas story, the shining star if you will that marks the location of a stable tacked onto the side of an nondescript inn, in a small town, in the backwater of the empire. I am compelled to simply stand quietly for a moment, and consider the infant, — not worship him because he was no more and no less than any infant.  An infant just is, — a responsive recipient of solicitude and care that is natural for a mother or a father to offer without condition.  Should we not stand in mute dialog with the infant in the manager?  To think, to consider, to allow one’s body to absorb the lesson is the possible catalysis for a new beginning.

Put another way:

This dialogue
is based upon refrains of
nonattachment,
and it emancipates us
from the fear of not being.

Getting freed from the will to live
is the condition for being alive at last.

— excerpt BREATHING, Chaos and Poetry by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, p. 145