Cry out with joy and gladness: for among you is the great and Holy One of Israel.

A Reflection on today's psalm:

God is among you. God is among us. Now what does this mean? As we approach the remembering of the birth of Jesus, God is among us.
God is in my wife, as she struggles to balance the demands of being the mother of an Asperger’s child with the very rigorous standards she has for herself as a composition professor. Maria will not turn in a second best effort. She always gives her all. Perhaps too much of her all. She gives her students her all times three, but she does so because she firmly believes that educated people should write well.
God is even in me. Now what does this mean? In my heart, in the most real place I know, there is a gentleness and an attentiveness to what is wonderful in life. When things get really noisy and I am pulled in two directions, trying to satisfy others needs (or is it their wants?), I can slip out of my heart and into the psychic structure of anxiety. But when I let go and return by looking my three year old in the eye, or by listening attentively when my father speaks of the pain in his legs, there is that attentiveness to the human, the tender, and there is wonder in that.
God is in my three year old Emilie as she invents words, dresses herself with her clothes inside out, and lays down her various laws. She takes such delight in a Robek’s Smoothie and in the rides at the Summit Mall. She smiles and I am real.

God is in my nine year old son. He can spell any dinosaur name. He has a very full laugh. At times, he is a bit of a trial. He demands a lot of attention and does not seem to be able to quietly negotiate household diplomacy with Emilie, but when I can walk with him and tell him an amusing story, his noisy distractions fade. Perhaps God’s presence is there most powerfully when I cannot figure John out because at that moment he is so much a mystery. I cannot figure out how to encourage him to sit quietly during his older sister’s performance. I cannot figure out how to encourage him to stop panicking because the three year old imitates him. I just don’t understand why at nine years of age, he has once again jumped back into the world of Thomas the Tank Engine. John is beautiful. There is no doubt about that, but, and it is not easy for me to write this, I mean no harm by it, John is very different, so different from so many other kids and so different from the way I was as a kid. It is hard for me to admit, but in many ways, I just don’t get him. I used to feel guilty about that. I don’t any more. He is different. He has Asperger’s Syndrome. He is simultaneously brilliant and weird. I love him, but he is a mystery to me and so, as mystery, in him stands the Holy One of Israel.
God dwells in Luisa. She is just a very stable, very great kid. Few surprises. A wonderful dancer and a good student. A nice kid. Very helpful with the other two. Very accepting of her brother with whom she shares a room. He will give her a dissertation about trains or dinosaurs on any given night and she will just listen until she falls asleep. Yes, at times, she reaches her limit. I’m just surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. She is a gift.
All my kids are gifts. At times, when Emilie bites the dog, followed by John’s yelling at Emilie, followed by my correcting both of them, followed by John’s pained grimace screaming that Emilie has broken a rule, followed by the dog peeing on the floor, followed by my wife whining that I am not acting quickly enough to get the dog outside, I will think for just a moment “What the heck have I gotten myself into?”. And then my humor returns—another moment over which I have had very little control, another moment like 99.999999999999% of human existence. We don’t have control over much. The great and Holy One of Israel has control and look at what he did—he let go of all of it. He became a completely vulnerable child. He trusted himself with us in the most delicate, powerless and gentle of ways: he became a child. And so my task is to create as he creates—from my vulnerability, from my humanity.
God is among us in our humanity. I know most certainly that the divinity of Jesus is revealed in his humanity, that he is divine because he is the most authentic human who has ever lived. This is perhaps Christianity’s most difficult secret. We like what Roland Flint called “all the stunting with Lazarus and the lepers,” and no doubt it must have been amazing to witness those signs of God’s presence, those works of power. Nevertheless, I have witnessed God’s presence in the powerless--in the homeless who do not smell powerful and proper, in the death of a fourteen year old boy when I was a volunteer in South Africa, in the tears of the twelve year old child of a drug addict, in the suffering of my wife as Luisa’s head got stuck and she had to undergo a C-Section. Never have I sensed God’s presence more than when I have been with people who had no power at all and, who in their helpless condition, looked to me to just listen, to hold a hand, to just say “I’m here.”
I am here, I exist now, I am here with the crucified and risen Christ, in the miracle of his world, in the power of faith, as a sign of God’s love myself. I am here and I know this gentle Jesus, revealed as most human—as a child—powerless and vulnerable. He just is—human—and, as a powerless human, he is divine.