Yesterday, during a short break in a long day, I spent an hour at the art museum, and it crossed my mind yet once again how many ways we have of communicating with one another. The brush strokes of a painter, like the word choices of a poet, are designed to convey not only the surface of meaning, but to resonate within the soul, to evoke something that binds us together in our understanding of our humanity, our place in the world, in creation.

And the Word became flesh. The Word of God, the way in which God reaches out to us became a wordless infant, and a prophet, and a preacher, and a mortal man who died and was buried, and who rose again because the Word of God is irrepressible, because the Word of God cannot fall silent when it resonates deep within the human spirit. Because the love of God will use any means, go to any length to help us understand that we are made in God’s image, and that God inhabits ours.

The solidity of a sculpture, the fragility of glass, the intricacy of brushwork, the multivalency of language, the mystery of music, the bodies of dance, art become flesh: all of these are ways that we communicate with one another and seek to understand the human condition, even the divine. And God, who danced across the waters of creation and descended like a dove and painted the sky with stars and whispered loud words into the brains of prophets: this God who would stop at nothing to let us know that God is with us, became flesh, took on the language of love, of touch, of breath, of death, of life.

This incarnation, this child in the manger, this is the choice that God has made to be among us and to come alongside us and to share our burdens and our joy. Because love is the language that resonates within the soul of a human being, and makes it sing. Because love is the way that God will heal us, eventually, from our warring madness and sin. Because God is love, and whatever words or music or art or dance or silence is needed to convey that, God will stop at nothing, not at birth, not at death, to become new life with and for God’s beloved ones.