new year, 5:32 am, and the feast of the circumcision besides...i find it valuable (and wrote about it last year) that the two are twinned, one of the reasons why i cannot give up the liturgical, is because these poetic intertwinings...that christ lost his foreskin, was to make himself a jew, that god becomes flesh, not flesh in general, but flesh in a v. specific historical and social context, that small penis and its interaction with a large knife, an the exclusion, not only made him a jew, not only made him a human (as my lds brothers and sisters would say in a different context, a body of flesh and blood), but a human who was going to suffer, who was going to lose flesh, until he was pierced by the spear--to be human is to lose flesh, to lose skin thru suffering, in a physical sense but in a translated sense, so that suffering becomes all of us.

i have been struggling this year, 2007, with ideas of family, community, flesh, the body, and place, with tribal notions and how they fit into my (and i hate this word) realtionship with christ, and its been a hard, often isolating year for that--and i dont want this to be a martyr's thing, because the circiumcision is a feast day, it is a day to celebrate the joy of his incarnation.

i dont know how to end this, i think that i will end it with the art historian STeinberg, who I have qouted before this year, adn whos book on the iconography of xian sex was seminal (pun intended) for me this year steinberg on christ and cicumcison