Christmas shows us humanity's hope is to be found in the crib not in the stars

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/dec/21/christmas-humanity-hope-stars-crib

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I was recently told this extraordinary story about a tightrope walker who was asked the obvious question whether she ever felt scared balancing on a rope with no safety harness. She gave a brilliant answer. "I feel scared all the time," she replied, referring simply to her everyday existence, "but at least when I am up there, fear seems like an entirely rational reaction." I feel something similar about travelling. When you are abroad the world can often seem peculiar.

Which is why I often feel more normal abroad. Because, most of the time, I find the world I inhabit at home peculiar. The world always seems strange to me. And this can make me seem odd to other people. At least when I am abroad, this sense of the world being odd is perfectly explainable.

I think this is what I find emotionally indispensible about theology – and indeed about good art and Freud, for that matter. It doesn't dismiss the peculiar or the weird as inconsequential, or simply the product of bad reasoning. It recognises that something else is often going on, something that strict rationality has a hard job getting hold of. I have no problem with the explanations of science. It's simply that they are explanations to questions that I am not asking. They don't join up with my general puzzlement about the world or my place within it.

"But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves," was Wallace Stevens' advice. By which I take him to mean that any adequate response to the human condition has to be something that is both me and not me, something that comes from without and yet also meshes perfectly with my own existential reality. Or, to put it another way: an unlikely combination of something perfectly other, like God, and something perfectly human, like a baby. For here the ungraspable otherness that I take to be the source of my endless puzzlement about the world is located not in outer space but in the gurgles and frantic little gestures of a new-born child. I cannot properly formulate the question – it is something to do with how I connect up with the rest of reality – but this God/child feels like just the sort of thing that might count as an answer. As the theologians of the early church were keen always to insist: the answer is both fully human and fully divine.

Of course, to those who resolutely insist on a this-worldly explanation for everything, this invocation of the divine is mere hocus-pocus, a dangerous mystification of something we already have an adequate enough explanation for. I have tried atheism but couldn't keep it up because of a continual puzzlement with things as thus explained. There always feels like a remainder to the neat atheistic equation, something that, despite everything, dosn't seem fully grasped, a strangeness that is not done away with. "What seest thou else?" is what Prospero asks Miranda, as he introduces her to humanity for the first time. This sort of question, for me, is where theology splutters into life, where we are invited to traverse from the poverty of our humanity towards something unspeakably full of wonder – towards something that, despite everything, I will continue to think of as God.

If Christmas means anything it is that the answer to the human condition is not to be found in the stars but in the crib. Here the hope of humanity is continually renewed. God is not an old man with a beard. God is not some great cosmic power that believers can borrow for their own limited, and often bigoted, schemes. If that is God, then count me among the atheists, even if such a being exists. What I call God is to be discovered in the vulnerability of a child, in the excessive openness and dependence upon something outside one's own power or ability to explain. Happy Christmas.

<strong>Twitter:</strong> @giles_fraser