He started out as a baby
without self-awareness –
the great I AM –
and needing to put the pieces together
as he grew, to figure out his purpose
and learn about his Father.
He needed to learn a skill and trade
and work in the context of difficult
family relationships.
He began each day with no awareness
of what that day would bring, or where
it would take him.
He needed to learn how to surrender
his human will to the will of God
and then
how to keep doing it day after day
in the context of an ordinary life –
a tradesman in a nowhere town
among a people beaten down.
He needed to learn
to see God
with human eyes
and live for God, with God
in a human life.
The Jesus we saw at the end –
his few short years of publicity
and long hours of pain on a cross
was the final result – He learned
how to live God’s life
as a human.
Which is what we need to learn,
and at Christmas, when we try to remember
a long ago event in a faraway place
and to somehow piece it together with our
ordinary lives – so that it has the meaning
we know it should have –
We can remind ourselves
that he learned, and he knows
how to learn
and how to teach us,
and that though for us it is long ago
and far away
it is not for him.
To God, whose mind
is never dimmed by time,
the experience of being human
is fresh and vivid and utterly now.
He is still learning
as a master learns,
for and with each one of us
how to live his life
in ours.
Lorrie Spinney 