The Christmas season has always been a time to be with family members and close friends for me. This year especially, it's a time to rest and recover from a lingering cold. It's also a time for me to reflect and think of the birth of Jesus and to think about this Christian church that I've called my home for all of my life. I first became passionate about my faith when I was fourteen years old, when I was taking my confirmation classes in a Roman Catholic church. I would read books and articles about Vatican II, St. Francis and an itinerant Jewish preacher named Jesus who lived two thousand years ago and preached a message of loving God and loving our neighbors. Since that time, I've attended several churches from several different denominations and have had wonderful experiences and some painful conflicts. These various experiences have given me a love/hate relationship with Christianity, as I've strugged with the church's various contradictions, as well as my own personal struggles and doubts about God. Yet I still feel it is important to go to church and I still consider myself a Christian.

In the past couple of weeks, I've been following the local Occupy Wall Street movements that have sprouted up in the area. About fifty miles to the north, Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland have been causing big news with their clashes with the police and their large scale protests. I've been participating with protests closer to home, donating food to the Occupy San Jose encampment, and joining rallies in Occupy Palo Alto and Occupy Mountain View. I've been a fervent follower of the Occupy Wall Street protests because I share their fears about the growing economic inequalities in this country and agree with their criticisms of the financial institutions. As the holiday season gets underway, a perenniel Christmas chestnut is playing across the nation's playhouses and schools and it shares the same criticisms of economic injustice as the Occupy Wall Street protests. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol" shares with the Occupy Wall Street protests an indignation of economic injustice and asks us to help relieve the plight of the victims of our economic system.