“This is the feast where we celebrate the commonplace blessed and transformed by the flesh-taking of God.  Straw and manger bed become a throne, ox and ass the gracious hosts, and humble, fumbling humanity the honored visionaries who come to look and, what is more, to see and understand.  The old tensions between sacred and mundane ease, merge and grant us peace.  It is our chauvinism, not God’s, that contrast the earthy to the heavenly and finds it ordinary, banal, and unimaginative.  The divine contradiction is that we find him where we least expect it.  The human condition: our peak experiences, and especially our sorrows, our successes and especially our failures, our “in loveness,” but especially our struggling human relationships this is the manger bed, these the places where we will know him, the Word in human vesture.”

-Gertrud Mueller Nelson “To Dance with God”