December 26

The day after they marveled at the manger, the shepherds must have wondered what had changed. They returned to the quotidian details and demands of shepherding, for the sheep remained sheep. A child had been born, a child had been given to them, to the world. A glory usually perceived only occasionally and fleetingly, if at all, had blazed across the dark of their sky and irradiated sense, mind, and heart. Existence glowed as it had not since the first bang of genesis itself. Then the day after. Sunrise and sunset, day and night again, much as before. For this day and for who knew how many days ahead? Meanwhile that small family left for a far country; and the child slowly grew through the years, not to be heard from again until another blaze across the landscape of their life, followed by cruel extinction of that light. What had changed? They, touching and touched by God incarnate, had changed. Exposed outwardly to and infused inwardly with divine glory made quotidian companion, flesh and blood, they rose the day after, in the mystery of faith, to life both strangely the same and strangely, utterly new. In that mystery, in the time given them, they began to learn to tend their fields and days toward a second genesis, a renovation to come of unending light and life, abounding in glory. And so they must have continued to marvel.