As we come to the end of celebrating the birth of god into his creation and look to a new year with many reasons for both concern and hope, I thought it worth sharing some comments on Jesus made by someone who was both a practicing Jew and a practicing Zen Buddhist – the late Leonard Cohen;

I’m very fond of Jesus Christ. He may be the most beautiful guy who walked the face of this earth. Any guy who says ‘Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek’ has got to be a figure of unparalleled generosity and insight and madness … A man who declared himself to stand among the thieves, the prostitutes and the homeless. His position cannot be comprehended. It is an inhuman generosity. A generosity that would overthrow the world if it was embraced because nothing would weather that compassion. I’m not trying to alter the Jewish view of Jesus Christ. But to me, in spite of what I know about the history of legal Christianity, the figure of the man has touched me.

From  ”Leonard Cohen in His Own Words” by Jim Devlin

The challenge for all of us in the new year is to be better at hearing that quiet yet revolutionary voice, the same voice that brought the universe into existence billions of years ago.