A Raw and Gritty Christmas Quote, Part 3

"But 'like a root out of dry ground,' he came, Isaiah says (53:2), and it was down to the roots of things that he moved all his life like a mole - down at the undetected sickness fiercer than flesh, the buried sin, the hidden holiness. 'Cleave the wood, I am there,' he says in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. 'Lift the stone, and you will find me there' (77), and it is always far beneath that he is to be found and deep within that his most shattering miracles happen...

"Because of this story of Jesus, each of our own stories is in countless ways different from what it would have been otherwise, and that is why in speaking about him we must speak also about ourselves, and about ourselves with him and without him too because that, of course, is the other story we have in us to remember and tell.  Our own story...

"To live and look beneath our own stories is to see glimmers at least of his life, of his life struggling to come alive in our lives, his story whispering like a song through the babble and drone of ours. Where he is strong, we are weak, God knows. Where he is faithful, we are what we are....

"And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business to speak with our hearts and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all." - Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark