I’m stealing this title from the daily meditation in my email from Richard Rohr, a Catholic Priest who sends these out as part of his work at the Center for Action and Contemplation. Today he is writing about the Christmas story and the meaning of Jesus being born to a person living under oppression. I recommend reading his short piece/meditation on this no matter your religious/spiritual inclination (link at the end of this post).

I’m going to write about my thoughts and reaction to this from my position as a non-believing participant in a Christian church. First, that label I’m putting on myself. I’m not able to come to grips with the idea of an intercessory god having a direct hand in actions on earth, responding to prayers, causing miracles of mystic/magic origin or result, the virgin birth, and so on. Things fall apart for me when I pull at those threads. So, I quit pulling at those threads. I quit trying or needing to “know.” I still participate in a Methodist church because I like what the pastor says, the church does in the community, and the people there. Call me a hypocrite, confused, simple, whatever.

God? I don’t know. I like the idea of a Great Mystery and an emergence of something more from through the interaction and community of all humans and all life making life on earth life living life. But through all my efforts of the past, that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Anyway, that’s the perspective from which I come to Rohr’s meditations and lens through which I found value in what he had to say today, the day after Christmas, and I hope you’ll find some value too, whether a conservative, literal-biblical Christian, a progressive Christian, follower of another faith tradition, agnostic, or atheist.

Rohr is pulling from others’ ideas here when he shares his meditation including that Jesus was born into occupied territory. Through Jesus God is “entering the human frame.”

I don’t know about God in that sense, but I read this as an opportunity for empathy for humans born into “excruciating reality of empires and economics from the position of the weak and powerless…”

We can have empathy for them.

I find power in the advent story in this context. The all powerful giving itself over to being completely powerless to the empire of the time and through this story allowing the oppressor to develop empathy and the oppressed to feel strength. Forgetting this context, “Jesus becomes an abstraction, a symbol, a cipher…”

To me then, Jesus’ story is more powerful without the supernatural element. A human just like any other human not only as a symbol. Jesus was a rebel. Jesus was a peacemaker. Jesus was a leader. This is the power of this story as a human story, written by humans to understand the socioeconomic and political situation of the time. And apparently, it’s a universal story that has as much place in today’s socioeconomics and politics.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s the Great Mystery–the constancy of human nature, or humans in nature.

I recommend reading Rohr’s original meditation here.