A Christmas thought The promise has at last been fulfilled. Everything we've waited for is with us.  The fullness of time has come in our time. Everything we could ever want we  finally have. The people rejoice. The angels sing. The truth has come.   Everything is perfect. Except…. Except that the stables of the world still house children whom the Christ child  came to raise to life. This time it is our doors before whom they stand and beg  for shelter. We are the people being asked to take them into our minds and  Crèche scene at the Mount hearts and souls. Christmas moves us to recommit  ourselves to re-form our minuscule  worlds to take in Christ the homeless  child, the outcast, the refugee; Christ  the other whose strangeness frightens us but whose otherness will teach us a great  deal more about the world than we know at the present time.   Christmas calls us to take our lives and  break them open at the crib where Jesus waits for us today. Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem because they were from the “tribe of Judah.”  They had to leave home to go home, in other words. It may be a Christmas lesson  for all of us. Tied up in our own little worlds, we may be missing the one Jesus came  to save through us unless we reach out to the “other.”  Christmas will come to us in  its fullness when we welcome into the human race all those we persistently see as  lesser, and cry, “Peace to God’s people on earth.”