Why is Christmas something so many just endure?

Maybe it's because we've created so many fictions about it. One of them is that Christmas is a feeling -- a passion that goes deep and fills us up somehow.

How sad the worship we create for something as fleeting as an emotional moment.

No, Christmas is painful because we just do it. And even when we're around others, too often it's still a solitary experience. We do it for ourselves and include others (if they fit who we are, or think we are.)

Unwrap the commercialism, the numbing blasts of glib, syruppy marketing hype. Turn off the TV. Get off the web sites that lie to you in converged ways. Christmas is not there.

Turn to someone near you and, if you can bear it, look for more than an instant into their eyes.

The connection that happens at that point of visual contact is a tiny glimpse of what God did when He sent His Son, God in human form, to the earth as a baby.

It was God saying, in a very personal way -- as personal as a gaze into your eyes -- "I know you. I love you. I'm here to be with you."

Even if you don't believe in God, He believes in you. He wired you to know Him, and to know others.

Someone has said that we all live lives of quiet desperation.

That desperation is felt most potently when we experience it alone.

The thing that sustains us in this journey is something intangible, yet as real as a firm handshake (one that comes from two hands), that hug clasping us tight and not letting go for a moment. It's the jolt in our inner recesses as we see a smile on the face of one we love.

All of that is an illustration, a subtle invitation to the kind of spiritual experience that only comes when we know God.

Pity the person who says they don't believe in God because they can't see Him. He is there. And as Francis Schaeffer said, He is not silent.

He told us, when He was leaving this earth that if He did not go away, the comforter would not come.

And that comforter has been mistaken for many things -- angels, demons, the force of the cosmos, the chemicals we put in our body to numb an emptiness we're born with.

The comforter enters our souls when we believe in who Christ said He is.

But the paradox is that though He's within us, we can't really know Him fully until we meet Him in the company of others who also know the One who said "I am with you." That coming together is community.

We so disdain that word, so misunderstand it, so neglect its intended meaning. (And how sad the inverse proportion between familiarity and our attention to the things we think we know.)

Community is like good water. Got it? You don't think about it. Don't have it? It's all you think about.

Community means we cannot exist alone and be fully human, fully ourselves. We are part of others, others are part of us. And when we know God, He puts an extra something -- something we crave -- in that encounter with others. It's a spark, even a roaring blaze, of His power that can transform us into what we never thought we could be.

Community can be messy, annoying, inopportune, frustrating. It can hurt. But it can also be a balm, a place of healing, a sloshing cool refreshment to a parched throat.

We need it. We need each other.

And Christmas is one of the darkest times of the year in the United States (and many Western countries) because it is the time when Jesus (whose name, one of many, is "God with us") reminds us that we are so alone without Him. Somehow, Christmas points out, too, how much isolation we build into our lives in pursuit of the stuff that we think is making us happy. Christmas, experienced without Christ and apart from others in any meaningful way, is torture.

But it need not be so.

The Beatles weren't prophets, but they occasionally stumbled onto concepts that have had lasting value.

Come together, as a phrase, has stuck with us (well, some of us.)

May we revisit it this Christmas with the meaning God can infuse it with.