Christmas is the story of God happening in history. It tells me a story. A real story. The story of Jesus, this story of an ordinary birth, a birth so ordinary that he is denied a place to be born. An outcaste, out of the boarders of handsome living. His happening grips my mind, it is a matter of my mind as well. What does it tell my consciousness? My consciousness is what I am. Thinking takes seriously the oracular pronouncement, “Know thyself!” I come to know myself by becoming a question to myself, “quaestio mihi factus sum.” In questioning myself as did Augustine, I become aware of my own inconsistencies, failings, talents, gifts and utter dependence, for I know I am not all that is and I will die. My existence is not mine, I got it. Why got it is not known. A gift? Or a curse? To be a gift, it must happen outside of the horizon of self-interested desire. To be a gift, a donee is necessary. The gift puts the other in debt. This simple recognition of the gift as gift, as such, is to annul the gift as gift even before recognition becomes gratitude. As we are always drawn forth by grace to give the other who is separated by a rift of obligation, the gift will begin to seem impossible.
We are continuously telling our own stories by which we give ourselves an identity. We recognize ourselves in the stories we tell about ourselves, it makes little difference whether these stories are true or false; fiction as well as verifiable history provides us with an identity. I am not answering a question, in the sense of solving a problem that is posed; but I am caught up with quite another to respond to a call which is the happening to which I am confronted. God’s happening in history is for me a revelation. It is a light which lights up my consciousness, very different from the light of the sun or the moon. It is the primordial light of God that represents the first act of creation. It displays a world which we are invited to inhabit, a world which breaks open and extends our own possibilities that are otherwise unimaginable. It is life affirming power. It becomes a grace and a gift. Revelation happening to me. Revelation is not a lifting of the veil, nor a paralysing theophany, nor a blinding experience, but rather an encounter which engages the imagination and invites response. It is the response which provides a clue to the authenticity of the revelation. That revelation occurred within me. I am no more a thing, in the economy of gift I am the recipient. My life is in no sense an object. A genuine Transcendence is more than a limited concept. It is a presence which brings revolution in the theory of subjectivity. It introduces a radical new dimension a poetic dimension. As one who receives, I have the consciousness of being gifted. I am the image of the ‘who am.’ I have faith in life. It is of much worth, not worthless. I name the Divine. I read the Scripture, it is looking at a mirror of the Divine. How does the self understand itself in contemplating itself in the mirror held out to it by this book? I see lot of idols of god around, so many things of the world are made gods. When you break the idols it creates scandal, they inevitably make the symbols speak. The reading calls me to “chose life” in all its fullness. It is no more a fate but a calling. Radical evil is ‘thought defying,’ because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots. Think of being caught by the interior self, the Other of me. I can invent. This inventing of the course of history suddenly begins anew. The individual has a faculty to begin something new. Not only can I invent but I also can gain weight, not in the balance of measurement but in the measure of value, which is height. I may not become famous, but can become honourable. Love is the “weight of the soul”, its law of gravitation. This call resounds within, the call of divinization as the Russian will say. God becomes the story of Jesus and it tells me to become story of Jesus in me.