Merry Christmas!

It’s just after midnight, which means that it’s Christmas! Merry Christmas to everyone, whether for you it’s a religious celebration, a time of seasonal contemplation and renewal, or just a few days off work!

It’s a slightly anomalous Christmas, in that an hour ago, it was both the Fourth Sunday of Advent… and Christmas Eve! (Well, this is the sort of thing that will happen now and then when you go setting dates according to a lunar calendar…)

However, this holy trinity of dates does in fact have a common root: Love.

The fourth candle in an Advent calendar is often called the “Love” candle (following Hope, Peace and Joy), and for those of us who celebrate Christ;s Mass (i.e., Christians), what we’re celebrating is the advent of Love into a world of darkness.

My family has always gone to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, which means that (since it’s at midnight), it is in fact CHRISTMAS! I’ve always loved the dark and cold and mystery, snow falling through the street lights on the walk to church—and then the blaze of lights and candles in the church, with the smell and drifting smoke of frankincense, a memory of the distant land where the story began. (Loved going home at 1:30 AM to eat brownies with milk, and open ONE present before going to bed, too.)

Whether this story is your story, or only a story, we all share the deep need of Love, and I hope you will all join me in that moment where the peace of the night flowers into the joyful light of Love, and hope fulfilled.

Merry Christmas!

[Excerpt from OUTLANDER, Copyright © 1991 Diana Gabaldon]

And if there was eternity, or even the idea of it, then perhaps Anselm was right; all things were possible. And all love? I wondered. I had loved Frank; I still did. And I loved Jamie, more than my own life. But bound in the limits of time and flesh, I could not keep them both. Beyond, perhaps? Was there a place where time no longer existed, or where it stopped? Anselm thought so. A place where all things were possible. And none were necessary.

And was there love there? Beyond the limits of flesh and time, was all love possible? Was it necessary?

The voice of my thoughts seemed to be Uncle Lamb’s. My family, and all I knew of love as a child. A man who had never spoken love to me, who had never needed to, for I knew he loved me, as surely as I knew I lived. For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary. It is all. It is undying. And it is enough.

Gabaldon, Diana. Outlander: A Novel (OUTLANDER, Book 1) (p. 580). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.