A tendency found in many religions is to escape, sometimes even negate, the ordinary. The Buddha finds enlightenment after leaving home, friends, attachments. The yoga path of Hinduism is an ascending detachment from family, business, relationships. The Greek ideal of truth is the world of forms, while the life of time arid senses is illusion. Christianity itself has had its traditions of flight—from marriage, the city, the “world,” even if it meant being a hermit sitting on a pole above and beyond everyone else.

But the heart of Christianity is a transformation of the ordinary, not a flight from it. After all. Incarnation, the central mystery we embrace, affirms that the eternal Word becomes flesh, not flees it.

We are, in this respect, children of Judaism, whose God of Moses and the prophets enters space and time, deeply concerned about and profoundly moved by our condition. The most ancient covenant of Abraham arises from his rela-tionship to Sarah—her childlessness, her laughter, the baby she finally nursed in old age. Abraham’s mighty faith was tested in relationship to his son—his prize possession, his guarantee of immortality.

In the Christmas narratives, ordinary people like shepherds and travelers are the messengers of God, not just angels, and certainly not the power-brokers of nations.

Zechariah in his doubts and dumbness, Elizabeth finding God in her cousin, Joseph coping with the demands of Caesar—taxes, housing, and relocation—all encounter God. A simple, devout man like Simeon still searches, still hopes, and finally sees. Another old prophet, Anna, still praying in the temple sixty years after her husband’s death—when one might think there was not much more to look forward to—discovers the truth.

And then this holy family, these people. Cousins and aunts and acquaintances. A mother who is mother of one child, yet mother of us all. Her spouse, a man, a worker, a father of a child somehow not fully his. They are ordinary people who find the place where strength and wisdom and favor might flourish.

It is first and foremost in our relationships, our families, our friends, that God is encountered, that faith is given flesh, that our theories of justice are tested out, that our prayer is made real, that dreams are actualized.

Even the great mystic teacher St. Teresa of Avila insisted on that truth: when people came inquiring about the heights of holy prayer, she would ask how their relationships were going. And the great skeptic Freud knew it, too: the stage of the ordinary, of the family, was where the deepest dramas were played out.

Our most profound sufferings, our greatest heroics, our most significant encounters with God are here with these people we know and love, in their goodness, in their weakness. Where else do we most intimately encounter what Paul calls the “requirements” of love: those crucibles of patience, the winnowing of humility, the courage of forgiveness, the comfort of kindness.

It is one rather easy thing to love humanity. It is quite another to love this one, who is so close to me, so like me. But when it happens, there is glory, even if the sword pierces the heart.

A man entrusts his only son, merely twenty-eight but at the gate of death, to the arms of God.

A woman sees every one of her brothers and sisters die—and she trusts.

A young son goes to his parents with news that is first sad, and then is transformed, like a butterfly, into soaring grace.

A spouse forgives the great wound of infidelity.

A child gives the mother a flower, so unexpected, for the first time.

A husband cares for a wife, who has multiple sclerosis, for twenty years. After she parts from this world, he himself, suddenly unmoored in the abyss of Alzheimer’s, is cared for by the daughter he once had to forgive.

A mother still stands by and with her teenager who seems neither kind nor appreciative.

It is all here, in our homes, in the pews of our churches, in our friends, in our families.

Here is the holy ground. Here is the face of God, the smile shining upon us, the kindly gaze upon us. These are arks of the covenant. These are the holy of holies if we only look, like Simeon; if we only see, like Anna; if only, like Mary, we take time to ponder it all in our hearts.