As Good As it Gets?

 

Christmas is Coming...

and 

Jack Nicholson Gives the Leading Line? 

No question for me.  This is Jack Nicholson at his very best. The neurotic guy only succeeds at writing because his social skills are about as good as his inability to walk down the sidewalk without stepping on a line.  Yet it is to Nicholson that my mind keeps turning before Christmas.

Remember the scene when he emerges at the Vet clinic, looks at the people sitting around and declares:  "Is this as good as it gets?"  At once, he opens up and calls life into question with 7 profound words.

So what about it, just a few days before Christmas?  Is Christmas the holiday break time after spending a month running ourselves into the ground?  So we take a day or so off.  The world is on hold.  There is a real truce as long as you don't turn on the TV---or venture into the world for a movie. We might even hear those familiar lines from "O Little Town of Bethlehem:"  our hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight. 

This peace requires something far more than putting on Christmas.  It means what Christians call the Feast of the Incarnation.  God comes to us in human flesh and blood in a manger to feed us and go with us into the world.  It means much more indeed than arriving at the manger and leaving the Christ Child behind to greet the New Year...instead of bowing humbly to the God who greets us in Jesus Christ.  That may not solve the world for us.  It leads us into a Kingdom.  And there we find the rest for our souls that the world cannot give.