Wilderness.

"We don't have John the Baptizer anymore ... but we have his wilderness with its constant flux and disorder. And within the weeks of dark December, all of us-city dweller and farm dweller, Christian and non-Christian--will try to wrap it around us.

"We will bring the pine branches in to us.... We will lay out straw and set miniature barns upon it, putting odorless cows and lintless sheep to rest inside each of them.... We will exchange red flowers with each other. Finally, near the end of it all, we will drag some magnificent conifer indoors and think its grandness complete only when we have topped the whole with an angel the likes of whom none of us has ever seen.

"And we will sleep, most of us, for close to two weeks wrapped in the pleasure of that wild disorder, knowing life, however briefly each year, as a rhythm more than as a plotted course; and at least for a little while, we will matter so much less to ourselves. We will do these things until peace itself becomes, like the Baptizer, a kind of forerunner, a herald; and we all shall cry, 'Even so, come, Lord Jesus!'" (Phyllis Tickle, What the Land Already Knows: Winter's Sacred Days; Loyola Press)