Being with

(We have a white Christmas, and it is gorgeous and fat fluffy flakes, and my aunt saw a cardinal in a bush and it was lovely.)

All this was a long time ago, I remember
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

-T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi, lines 32-43


Lord Jesus, in our doubt and pride and wounds, in our laugh and wonder and joys, in the earthy grit of our inescapable humanness,

give us Thy death that we may live

O Christ

give us Thyself.