Isolation from ourselves as we may spirit off our GLBT identity into a holiday closet complete with Jacob Marley's chains. Isolation from comparison of another's outside appearance of happiness to our own inside experience of unhappiness or dissatisfaction. Isolation takes its most brutal form when we split our soul, flesh from spirit, believing they are enemies to one another. Reconciling old enemies walks us towards wholeness, and reconnecting the parts, the pieces, the shards is a spiritual endeavor. Within the Christmas story we find clues of connection for our healing.
Incarnation declares boldly that flesh and spirit united brings healing and hope.
In our daily journey of forgetting our wholeness and beauty created in the image, we need reminding of power paired with infant vulnerability, of lower caste shepherds encountering angels, of rejected travelers creating hospitality, of a barnyard birth of beauty. Somehow we say that the reunion of perceived opposites spirit and flesh, birthed in powerful vulnerability, saves the world. GLBT Christians make alive to the world the very image of this reunion, yet then receive the same rejection as did the Bethlehem travelers. But GLBT Christians claiming and living sexual-spiritual wholeness bring about over and over again the miracle of meaning born in a field of fragments. What was perceived and experienced as isolation becomes incarnation with God's action through us.