Midlife Meditation

"And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn." (Luke 2:7) In less than a week, we will celebrate the birth of a homeless savior. To be fair, only Luke's gospel places the birth of Jesus in a borrowed barn, and that only because his parents were traveling in a town with inadequate hotel facilities at the time of the blessed event. It is the life of Jesus once he began his ministry that is rootless, roofless, without any fixed address, a traveling man relying upon the kindness of strangers for shelter. I once got in hot water for describing Jesus as "homeless" at a men's prayer breakfast. It was 22 years ago, and one of the men hearing me speak was deeply offended by the thought. It could just have been that one man; after all, many churches operate soup kitchens, food pantries, and shelters for the homeless, and pastors' emergency funds are freq...

Up is relative. We live on a ball spinning in, and moving through, empty space. The direction we call "down" is toward the center of the earth, while "up" is away from the center of the earth, and toward space. Pictures of the earth, whether photographs or maps, seem to have a top and bottom, and up and down, because, as beings whose perceptions have evolved in a world in which gravity affects everything, they are as fundamental as any concepts can be, and as such we apply them to everything we look at. Had we evolved in free fall, up/down and top/bottom would be meaningless. So every map has a "top" and "bottom," even though the reality is that, for every human being located anywhere on that map, "up" would mean "above the map" and "down" would mean "under the map." Our culture, evolving as it has in the northern hemisphere, has tended to think of north as up, south as down, even though to any human...