L’amour et la fumee ne peuvent se cacher.

Heschel liked to stand at the podium and get an impish grin as he asked, rhetorically, ‘And what is the most anti-Semitic book in the world?’ He’d look around to gauge the dramatic effect and then light with a huge smile before announcing, ‘The Hebrew Bible!’ This would bring the house down.

At Union, but not across the street.

When the heart is devoid of anger, where is the need for a doctor? In a successful medical practice, the patients are healthy and the doctor is otherwise engaged.

When the heart is devoid of hatred, where is the need for a lawyer? In a successful legal practice, the clients are neither harming nor being harmed and the lawyer is otherwise engaged.

When the heart is devoid of lust, where is the need for a priest? In a successful church, the members are out on station, the Sanctuary is enveloped in Primordial Silence and the priest goes to blue collar or other employment.

The three professions exist in order to eliminate the need for their existence.

I’m tempted to add something about not minimizing the importance of a child, of children, in the Kingdom of God, but I’ll let it pass….

The context of the Nativity Story as given by the Gospels and Prophets makes hope significant. Count its very tangible negativities. They are numerous and vivid, in principle countless and blinding.

To include hunting and slaughter of children — indeed proto-genocide. Hardly giving them stockings and presents.

Estranged from that context hope is sentimentality, which is anti-spiritual, driving away from God.

The context is emphasized to highlight the improbable importance and important improbability of the Nativity. It should be still.

Hard on the context, soft on the hope.

Hope is a very little, frail, helpless, tenuous, even uncertain thing in the context of life and history.

Rather like a physician facing the taxonomy of disease, a theologian the taxonomy of estrangement, a virus the primordial furnace.

Hope has not a hope in hell. Is not that the Gospel?

The literature of culture would be improved by your discourses on significance of elements of the Christian Liturgical Year.

I do not find such in the archive. Perhaps they are under titles or themes my pedantic mind does not recognize.

Christmas belongs with Good Friday in recognizing the negativities of life and history that make the Transfiguration and Easter meaningful.

I trust you had a great Christmas…and thank you for a great, great Christmas post.