The word became flesh and dwelt among us. Fr. Ron Rolhesier says we should see this as a wild and unbelievable statement! The infinite heart, center, creator, and sustainer of the universe is born as a baby and lives as a human person on this earth, and through that, we are given God’s power to save. We’ve domesticated the incarnation, but the real Christmas story staggers the mind. How’s this a Christmas story? Imagine the universe: Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Hence, light traveling to the earth from the moon already takes more than a second to get here. Light traveling from the sun takes more than 8 minutes to reach Earth. But those bodies are close to us. The distance from the sun to the Earth is immense, but it is minuscule in terms of the universe. If one looks up at the stars at night, of those stars visible to the naked eye, the ones nearest to us are so far away that light traveling from them to Earth takes more than 4 years to get here. Those farthest away but still visible to the naked eye are so distant that light traveling at 186,000 miles per second takes 800,000 years to get here. That’s unimaginable. More incredulous still: Science today, using X-ray telescopes, has sighted planets whose light has not yet reached Earth. These planets are so distant that light traveling from them to Earth will take 6 trillion light years to get here. The human mind cannot stretch to imagine that. Yet this is just the universe we know. There may be, in fact, billions of galaxies and universes. Imagine this story: Given that there are perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies with trillions of light years separating them, and given that on each of the planets within these galaxies, there are hundreds of trillions of phenomena every second, can we imagine that at the center of all of this, there is one heart, one creator, one sustainer, one God who made all of this and who right now watches over it so that every individual and every detail is passionately cared about, so that “no hair falls from a human head and no sparrow from the sky” without this God knowing and caring? And most incredulous of all: Can we imagine and believe that this heart, this God, this center of everything, was carried for nine months by a peasant woman in Palestine and born into our world as a baby and then lived here, taught us, and gave us, his believers, all the powers he, himself, had as God? The word became flesh. That’s true, even for 2024. So, let’s have kisses and drinks all around.