Facebook Publication Date: 12/24/2018 14:12

During my convalescence, I am using significant parts of this time for contemplation and reflection, particularly today when some of us are celebrating anticipating the arrival of something big.

This adaptation below that shows how God is found in dirty rags used to wipe up Slurpees and those awful 7-Eleven hot dog juices stopped me short.

This birth was not in a pristine birthing room at Scripps La Jolla. Nor was it in a warm home with a midwife and a doula and scented candles enchanting, with loved ones present to receive the Blessed child.

Their donkey was a feral dog, their sheep were rats.

Mary wore jeans she hadn’t been able to zip up in months. Joseph’s tattoos, visible through his stained white T-shirt and plaid Pendleton,
trembled as he held this baby–so very tiny, but he was consumed and aware with the weight of the gift Mary had birthed.

The shepherds, the custodians who cleaned the office building next door came, and the prostitutes all three of them in their gaudy finery, who spouted wisdom in the dirty Denny’s down the street after their work was done for the night, brought bearing gifts, their favorite gold earrings, the perfume they sometimes used to cover what the world would call shame, and glitter in all the colors iridescent silver purple for the royalty green for New Beginning red for fire.

The assistant night manager of the 7-Eleven brought out pizza and big gulps for everyone and they communed together.

And the poor people in the Forgotten part of University Avenue that had not yet been gentrified, not yet filled with $10 tacos and single malt scotch and shared workspaces and trendy salons; the poor people who were coming home from the third shift oh, the poor people waiting for the bus outside the 7-Eleven, they all felt a shift in the air and the brightness of a star above them and they were both chilled and warmed and knew to their marrow that there was a Presence that loved them too.

That night, they also received a taste of the pizza and the Big Gulp. And they were fed and filled.

And then the bus came and they went home, back to the two bedroom apartment they shared with the 10 people, back to the Johns and the hecklers, back to dumping the trash and cleaning the elevators for the workers who would come tomorrow completely unaware of the miracle that had happened behind the dumpster right below their cubicles.

Nothing changed.

But everything changed.

Merry Christmas.

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