My last Lauren Winner post...until she speaks at Zoe

From Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God and the chapter titled Christmas:

Here is the thing about God. He is so big and so perfect that we can't really understand Him. We can't possess Him, or apprehend Him. Moses learned this when he climbed up Mount Sinai and saw that the radiance of God's face would burn him up should he gaze upon it directly. But God so wants to be in relationship with us that He makes himself small, smaller than He really is, smaller and more humble than his infinite, perfect self, so that we might be able to get to Him, a little bit.
Being born a human was not the first time God made Himself small so that we could have access to Him. First He shrunk Himself when He revealed the Torah at Mount Sinai. He shrunk Himself into tiny Hebrew words, man's finite language, so that we might get to Him that way. Then He shrunk Himself again, down to the size of a baby, down into manger finiteness.
Jane Vonnegut Yarmolinsky wrote,"The whole concept of God taking on human shape, and all the liturgy and ritual around that, had simply never made any sense to me. That was because, I realized one wonderful day, it was simple. For people with bodies, important things like love have to be embodied. That's all. God had to be embodied, or else people with bodies would never in a trillion years understand about love."
Never, in a trillion years.


How does God become real to you? I can tell you that I see God in a thousand different ways every day and yet, there are days when I feel like I am searching and can't quite find God. The ways that I see him in my everyday life: a newborn, vernix-covered baby, a new mom holding her baby for the first time, a new dad who can't see his baby because his eyes are filled with tears, in a rosebush covered in roses, the sunrise and sunset, herons, the faces and voices of my friends, in my husband's patience, when my children are confident of their abilities and are triumphant in an endeavor, in the ocean, in the autumn colors, God is palpable in the room when a family has lost their baby....I could go on and on but I think you get what I am saying. I, of all people, understand our great big God coming as a tiny baby to a vulnerable mother and questionable paternity. I love that God is unpredictable and does things that we might consider crazy.