In a way, I suppose, it's fitting that some I know today are celebrating the Birth of God's Son someplace other than their own home and hearth.
After all, according to Matthew and Luke in the New Testament, Joseph and Mary (great with child and then, afterwards, not so much) weren't from Bethlehem, but were required to go there as part of the Roman Empire's effort to enumerate the number of subjects it had.
Yeats' power and command of the language notwithstanding, there was far more stoicism than heroism involved in their original journey as there has been for just about everyone following in their path for the last two thousand years or so. Of course there would be travelers underway from somewhere to somewhere else as there are everyday but today please spare a thought for those scattered across our globe in the profession of arms, hoping (and helping) to keep us safe from an ever more hostile world.
Very few of the professionals in our military would choose the places many are today to observe the birth of the Prince of Peace. Many of them are in an environment inimicable to anything even remotely connected to any form of peaceful pursuit, faced off against implacable enemies about whom we hear and read so little in our TMZ and daily gossip information streams.
Sometimes, I fear, we are in what might have been the final days of the Roman Empire because of the distractions we've invented to deflect us from the reality and gravity of the times in which we live.
Luckily, we have a holiday such as the one today that is something different for each of us, without ever being anything special not shared in some way by all of us, in and of itself nearly a Christmas miracle. I would hope somewhere you have a someone who waits for you and for whom you wait.
I've got a feeling this year's for me and you, so Happy Christmas, I love you baby. I can see a better time when all our dreams come true. And God bless us, everyone, at least until the New Year.
-bill kenny
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