You Can Go Home Again. Ho, Ho, Ho!

What "going home" usually refers to is a return to childhood. Culturally it means a return to the collective childhood of earlier times. You can't recapture the innocence of childhood but you can recapture the absence of responsibility and worry.

At only the cost of your soul. Christ gets us out if this dilemma by extending family feeling, love, to all of humanity and, I would say, to all of creation. It's the best we can hope to do. We accept a new father, God, and get a large, new family in the deal.

We get a diffuse sense of belonging and security. But we also have to accept and own our lives and independence, grow up, and quit trying to withdraw into the aboriginal past, the lure of tribalism, the loss of individual liberty and identity to group affiliation. 

That, tribalism, is the antithesis of Christianity. The challenge for everyone is not to sell your soul for the false security of tribal membership. Faith, Hope and Charity: it isn't all that hard. The greatest of these is the last, the uniting force of God's love.

We celebrate love at Christmas by believing that we are an expression of God's love and more than our matter, more than a meaningless accumulation of atoms, and by hoping to be deserving and to be better. At Christmas we go home.

We go home to our truest selves, our best selves, when we are most aware that we are all in it together, as children of God. May the force of God's love be with you. Merry Christmas. Ho, Ho, Ho!