Christmas Is Waiting to Be Born

What birth pangs are you experiencing as you
wait within Advent for the coming of the Christ child?

Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes,
And the heart consumes itself, if it would live,
Where little children age before their time,
And life wears down the edges of the mind,
Where the old man sits with mind grown cold
While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day’s life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed,
Christmas is waiting to be born:
In you, in me, in all humankind.

by Howard Thurman from The Mood of Christmas, Harper & Row, 1973