A favorite cousin has called to share news of emerging from a depression. Lasting several months, it was a crushing experience for this usually vibrant personality, now in her mid 80s. She reports herself returned back to her old self, ready to resume normal activities.

Two longtime friends, both widows and my juniors by some years, have fallen in love with men who have unexpectedly come into their lives, and one of them has announced plans to marry. It is infectious to see them embracing renewed life with the enthusiasm of youngsters. Along with other friends, I feel buoyed up by their good fortune.

In joining a new community of faith, another woman friend has brought joy to many of her friends, me among them. This development in her spiritual life is the action of a person who continues her search for light and peace.

As Christmas approaches, these are events in my domestic world of family and friends that strike me as manifesting the spirit of the season. These are all people who have found renewed life through these instances of grace.

On a wider stage, the Amish families who, last October, forgave the man who shot down five Amish children and reached out with help for his widow and children. Moved by compassion for those bound by family ties to the murderer, they transformed the unspeakable event into redemptive love.

Stephen J. Morgan, a journalist familiar with Lancaster County, has written of the Amish: “As people who know the Bible, they know well not only the long dark corridors of the human heart, but its capacity for forgiveness.”

If I look for such moments of grace, it is in part a defense against the negative influences of our contemporary world. Nationally, this is the winter of our discontent, in large part because of the war in Iraq, so disastrous for us Americans and incomparably more so for the people of that country.

This year has also brought books from writers who deserve to be numbered among the “cultured despisers of religion.” For them, religion is not only illusion but harmful. One of them, Christopher Hitchens, says it all on the cover of a book to be published next spring. He entitles it: “god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

I find this latter assertion both offensive and ignorant. It surprises me that people whose thoughts about religion seem mired in the 19th century are given such a wide hearing. In their own way they are almost as dogmatic in their atheism and scorn of religion as are fanatic religionists.

Critics like Hitchens show themselves tone deaf to the mystical dimensions of life, the poetry contained in religious teaching, and the hope that religion offers.

For me, Christmas contains all these three in abundance ─ mysticism, poetry, and hope. Among other things, it can be seen as a celebration of our own birth and that of every other person. In the light of this event, the indignity done to human beings throughout the world─assault, torture, slavery ─seems even more repugnant.  

The birth of Jesus, prayerfully contemplated, causes many spiritual seekers to wonder at the mystery of it all. And yet it carries this mystery in the midst of ordinariness

The scene at Christmas is also a kind of poetry. The cast of characters shown at the crib ─ the infant, his parents, the shepherds, the angels, and, ultimately, the three kings ─ give fanciful expression to emotions provoked by the birth of a child .

This latter set of emotions holds center place in this year’s Christmas letter from my friend Frank in Kalamazoo. “Awesome” is the word he chooses to express his feeling at the birth of his granddaughter Sofia Marie. “I don’t know of anything more awesome than the birth of a child─nothing,” writes my theologian friend.

In his letter of 2004, Frank had one complaint about Christmas: it doesn’t tell him much about being old. Of the beginnings of life, this event speaks eloquently. It celebrates important things, he says, like poverty and smallness. And it lifts up important people, not CEOs, but shepherds and the Magi from the East.

But the gospels say precious little about old age. “There are times,” Frank writes, “when I think one of the limitations of the gospels is that there is lots of good news for people up to about thirty, but not much for the geezers.” (This latter term is his, not mine.)

For me, however, inspiration remains in Christmas, the sense of a moment that transcends chronology. From childhood celebrations of this day I received a palpable sense of God’s goodness. The gifts received then, and other rites of the day, taught me feelings of awe, reverence, and love.

And the time felt holy, filled with the presence of something different. For me, this was and remains more than human time.

Richard Griffin