We at the Hermitage are old. As a group we are in our mid-seventies. From the start and set right before us has been God's wonderful gift: — a living, unfolding beauty constantly delighting and surprising — and that other, ineffable ingredient: wonder. This is His art: the only truly living art, a high and good magic that proceeds from His hand alone.

Ours is also a life of fading beauty and a world of dimming glory — which is only to say how great the gift was from the start.

You see, our world was made to unwind and to disintegrate. Sir Isaac Newton noticed this nearly half-a-millennium ago. He noticed that every random event contributes to the disorder of the universe (1687). For example, why should twine become a tangled bundle of knots when you toss it to the ground? Why should rocks rolling down a slope not aggregate into neat piles at the bottom? Why should gleaming steel rust? Why should our homes, and sadly ourselves, decline and rot? This is the way of the world, the way of all flesh.

We might rail against this. What is more common, after all, than old people complaining about their many ills? And what cause for rejecting God is more common than disease, decline, and death — whether in the world or in the immediate circle of family?

To fall into this trap, though, is to miss life's most important property: you see, life points away from its splendid self to something still more splendid. It sets before us breathtaking magnificence beckoning us to a deeper and more mysterious magnificence. Yet, that deeper something we can never reach .... on earth. Advance onward, yet you will never come to the end of the rainbow. It is real enough, bright and vivid and nearly right before you, yet it slips away as you seek to approach it.

People will climb all day up to a mountain summit in order to behold a river valley surrounded by mountain peaks with waterfalls pouring into it. If only we might enter its shimmering mists! Penetrate its otherworldly mystery! Many have done so .... only to find themselves surrounded by mud, sharp sticks and rocks, and insects that bite. Yes, I have done my share of wilderness camping. I know the pleasures of wilderness. But I am talking about something else. I am talking about an undeniable fact of life that cannot be explained through the elements of our periodic table: we are surrounded by inexpressible beauty — inspiring, even transforming. It is commonplace, as common as dawn and sunset, as common as burning stars in the night and moonlit meadows. It surrounds us. Yet, it is not here. It points away from here. Its reality is somewhere else.

This is our life: the gift of animate, ever-changing life here, which unwinds and then dies, and deathless, perfect beauty, whose reality is somewhere else. These are not two different things, but mysteriously one and the same thing. Both are true at the same time. And this is God's genius. For He has given this gift that we might understand Him and seek Him on account of it, that we might enter that distant valley and proceed into that deeper elsewhere.

But how does one present a gift so far above every other, far above the furthest reaches of imagination, delighting and pleasing in its ever-changing motion, and not render the recipient a slave to it? Surely, this has happened in the history of the world — men and women falling to their knees, worshipping nature. How do you overwhelm the heart with perfect, living beauty and then spare its recipient abject idolatry? Shouldn't the gift of beauty always uplift and ennoble rather than enslave?

The answer to this riddle is that the gift must enchant, even captivate, but then .... it must disappoint. The recipient must be left with a conviction: I knew the true magic of this gift, but the gift itself was not that magic. Our lives have been filled with marvels, imparting wonder, even extorting tears from our eyes, but this, this life of ours, is not it. The magic is real, but it lies elsewhere. It is here, fleetingly, but finally not here.

Now, let us consider a greater mystery still. This here and elsewhere is a living drama that plays out within ourselves, as well. We are both beautiful and noble, inhabiting an elsewhere of Heavenly intimations. We know our highest and best thoughts and convictions; they are our kinship with God, a participation in the thought-life of angels, who seek to encourage and strengthen this participation. Yet, we are also here, living in and responding to (sometimes being dragged down by) a gritty and ignoble here, whose brutish thoughts are heavy and weigh us down. This is the basic tension of life, stretched between these two opposites. We may give free reign to either one: the here or the elsewhere. And sometimes we might do both at the same time .... whether in the fullness of our beauty and strength or in our declining days when everything within us is winding down and we lose our strength to strive.

But in these little worlds God has created — the mysterious human creatures bearing His Likeness — we find a very great difference when set beside the natural order. For the elsewhere within us does not slip away as we draw near to it. On the contrary. We become united to the most real, most stable, and most beautiful energies of all, which is union with God. And as we advance further into this great power and force, the gritty here looses its hold on us. Perhaps this is what St. Paul means when he exhorts us to "let the old man die" and "let the new man be born"!

In our Epistle lesson, he writes

Is not this the meaning of the life of Abraham and Sarah? Was not this their story? They emptied themselves of royal prerogatives that they might become a free and open space for Divinity to dwell in. And was not this the great example presented to us in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who emptied Himself and then taught us to follow Him, emptying ourselves of every worldly thing?

The fullness of time of which St. Paul speaks is God's will that the ways He bequeathed to Abraham might be reclaimed according to God's purposes for us, according to His Gift to us.

Each year at this time, we put aside the world. We set aside our lives and duties and occupations and preoccupations. And we make a pilgrimage to a crib in a manger. When we were children in the 1950s, it seemed the whole world embarked on this holy journey. We joined in song to express this holiness with a sense of wonder: "What Child is this?!"

As I have matured having spent now my entire adult life pondering the faith and the many twists and turns that have led to our present beliefs, the university professor within asks an additional question: "Which Child is this?"

I can still recall candlelit Midnight Mass as a young man at my family's Anglo-Catholic parish, St. Uriel the Archangel. The place was hung with green holly and red berries. The organist played various Christmas motifs in a low, meditative tone. Families came into the pleasant place still cold from the late-night, December air, now warming in the presence of God and of each other. How reassuring this scene was — peace on earth, good will towards men. And the Midnight Christmas service magnified this good feeling. All was calm, all was bright .... until the sermon, until I heard the priest say to one and all,

"This was the Child Who was born to die! You see, this is the significance of the myrrh laid down at His crib."

My young heart rebelled and cried out in response, "No! This is the Child Who gives us life!"

To Orthodox eyes and to Orthodox ears, myrrh is dew from Heaven — God's grace quietly and profoundly upflowing from our Holy Icons. To the ancient Church, myrrh on Christmas is nothing to do with the mortician's art (as this priest would argue). The mortician can lay no claim upon this Child. Myrrh is rightly laid before this Child of utmost grace. He is the Incarnation, at once, of Elsewhere and here .... and the grace standing behind every instance of living beauty.

Meditating on Christ's Nativity, (On the Incarnation), St. Athanasius wrote that His touching our world with His person so shocked the Creation that it reversed human destiny (telos) from death to life. You see, this happened at His birth, already done! Our destiny was reversed from eternal death to eternal life.

The Lord of Life had touched the earth. And His gift to us cannot be His death. Death?! Why, Life Itself swallows death whole. Have you not read that He shattered the Prisonhouse of Death at the moment it sought to grasp Him? "Heaven cannot hold Him / Nor earth sustain."

On this Christmas at Midnight, we kneel down before Him. He is the Lord of Elsewhere and here and ours to have and to hold and to never slip away. Let His grace flow over you tonight as He is born into the world yet again. And never be parted from Him, for that is His will.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.