New and reminders

Efficiency is excellent in its place, but though with a short brush I can efficiently scratch any itch on my back, it is more fun when the lady I love does it for me, even if it takes longer and misses a spot or two. We were made to give and receive and not to hold, and to serve each other. How far this service should have gone is an interesting field for speculation, but not very likely to be fruitful; our broken souls are too eager to take advantage of any hint that someone else should be doing for us. It's too easy to conclude we're entitled to the gifts and excused from the giving, and pass from there to trying to demand or compel (fueling a love of power?) the gifts. Someone wrote that everyone knocking on a brothel door was looking for Jesus; perhaps similarly those hungry for power are too.

A week from now, plus or minus a day, traditionally commemorates the "Holy Innocents", when men reacted with evil to good news and hope. Newtown is an obvious reminder of that, but the newspaper tells of many more innocent lives ruined, sometimes more horribly, day after day until the heart is sick of news of "Rachel"s weeping for or abusing their children.

Jesus was born one of us, which means he lived in a body that was always partly growing and partly dying, and which was symbiotic with mere bacteria. He didn't just need Mary's milk to keep him alive, but also a host of the lowest of the low. The author of life came not just to die but to start dying from the get-go, and to depend on the most primitive things in his creation to stay alive: the more we see the more amazing the divine condescension was.