Advent

figurines of the nativity of jesus

The First Christmas After Death

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Jacquie and I are grateful for the cards, emails and other messages we have received in the past few weeks that acknowledge our ongoing grief.

One of the hard things about losing someone who is as much a part of you as your arms or legs — or more precisely, your heart — is that the rest of the world quickly goes on with its business. As it should. As it has to. We understand. We have done the same. However, we are comforted by those who remember that something important stopped for us this past summer.

In all honesty, our Christmas, on the surface, won’t be much different this year. Matt, and his family live(d) in Portland, OR, across the continent from us. He would call us on Christmas Day. We will miss that — that voice. (A church secretary once announced he was on the phone by saying, “it’s your son with the great voice.”) But, we won’t have the empty chair at the table like our daughter-in-law and grandchildren will. Just thinking of their table brings tears to our eyes.

I wondered if we would just try to skip Christmas this year.

However, as Advent progressed, it felt more and more like Christmas — not the way the bouncy Bing Crosby tune puts it. But, more like Christina Rossetti puts it:

“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan.
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
. . .
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.”

I am late to the Rachel Held Evans fan club, but this morning I came across something she wrote that resonates with me at a deep level:

“I know that Christians are Easter people. We are supposed to favor the story of the resurrection, which reminds us that death is never the end of God’s story. Yet, I have never found that story even half as compelling as the story of the Incarnation.

. . . the true miracle of the Incarnation— the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us.

Rachel Held Evans with Jeff Chu, Wholehearted Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2021) p. 5.

I hope that, when Easter comes around next April, some power beyond my own will have rolled away the stone in my heart. But, right now, I agree with Evans. I don’t know if I believe in an empty tomb right now. I do believe in a baby in a manger.

The one thing death does for us is enable us to see our loved ones whole. Whenever I think of Matt, I see him not just as the almost skeletal, cancer-ravaged remnant of himself who looked out at us the last time we Facetimed a few days before he died. I see him as the man who came to celebrate Father’s Day 2021 with me, bringing his own grown son with him. Both his mother and I were proud of what a good father Matt was.

At the same time, I see him as the young man I visited when he was working in Poland after college. I especially remember his ardent efforts, a decade before cell phones, to place a call to a young woman whom he had met in Geneva. I was not surprised when he married her.

I can see him in adolescence and in boyhood and as the baby his Mom and I brought home from the hospital, tiny enough to cradle in one arm, nursing like every baby ever born and sleeping like . . . well, like a baby who can sleep soundly in a bassinet or a feed trough.

I used to wrap the baby Jesus in metaphysical swaddling clothes. This year, for me, he is like every baby, including Matt. Therefore, he is the Incarnation of Life. As Matt was. As you and I and everyone we love are. He came into this world, whether he knew it or not, to live and to love, which means taking on all the risks of skinned knees, viral infections, broken hearts, cancer, and crucifixions. But also to delight in sunrises and sunsets, good food, friendship, skin contact, and new babies.

Matt loved every moment of Life. Incarnation was not wasted on him.

Easter may promise something after death, but, in this bleak midwinter, all I can believe in is Christmas and the life in this world that Christmas celebrates and calls us to live generously, gratefully, . . .fully.

The first poem I ever memorized — before I could read — were the last four lines of Rossetti’s poem. It was a “piece” I said at our church’s Christmas pageant, with my parents and grandparents of blessed memory looking on:

“What can I give him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would give a lamb.

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part.

What can I give him: give him my heart”.

“A Christmas Carol” by Christina Rossetti.

Seventy Christmases later, I finally understand those words. It is safer to give those other gifts: lambs, frankincense, Walmart gift cards. Giving your heart means to risk having it broken. Yet, to not give your heart would mean that you would miss Life — the real meaning of Christmas.

Peace — the Gift We All Need this Christmas

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Duane and Ida Miller have been close friends of ours for more than forty years. In addition to having both earned Ph.D.’s in Theology, the wisdom they have learned from seeking justice and loving mercy into their 80’s shows in the simply wise things they write. These three paragraphs from their annual Christmas letter need to be read by all of us. 

It seemed to us that Peace is the most precious gift that we could receive this Christmas and it is the gift that our communities, our nation and the world needs.  Recently we ran into this verse from Isaiah 55:12 –

For you shall go out in joy,

            and be led back in peace.

We certainly hope you experience great joy in this season whether it is from hearing familiar carols, a special gift, an important relationship or just because you are alive.  For then you go out in joy, go about your everyday lives without getting caught up in some conflict, and you come back in peace.

So often we hear something that we believe is wrong and we think we have to jump into the middle of it “to set them straight.” Too often such a response makes us feel immediately better but in the end we have helped make the situation a much bigger deal than it needs to be.  If we just quietly said: “I don’t see it the same way that you do” and not feel like we had to defeat the other, perhaps the volume of the conflict and the personal attacks could be lessened.  So we hope that you might go out each day with joy, not just in this season but throughout the coming year, and find a way to be led back home in peace!

Advent is Like a Missing Tooth

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The Door of Humility leads into the Church of the Nativity (Basilica of the Nativitiy).*

When I had a molar removed a couple of years ago, I asked the dental surgeon what the Tooth Fairy would give me for it.

“She leaves stock certificates now,” he said.

I liked that guy.

Since I no longer believed in the Tooth Fairy, I  did not leave the molar under my pillow. (I hope that did not require a spoiler alert.)

However, my tongue kept touching the hole left behind for many weeks afterward.

 I am not as concerned about the historical accuracy of the story of Christ’s birth as I once was. What I do know is that the story and the traditions that have grown up around it point to a deep truth the way a probing tongue finds the spot where the tooth used to be. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is a symbol of that tradition that draws thousands to it on Christmas Eve. The image above is of the Door of Humility in the basilica,  the entry to the cave where tradition says Christ was born to Mary among the animals that were stabled there. There is even a spot marking the manger where, according to the story, she laid him after wrapping him tightly in what most of us would call rags.

Apparently most people cannot enter through that door without bending over. For all the candles and symbols that are stuffed into that place, it is still, unmistakably, a cave — a hole in the earth. Whether or not you believe He was born there, this cave points to something important and hard to articulate, but Advent is  a time for probing the caves, the holey experiences, in our own lives.

My last two Advents have been a time for running my spiritual tongue around the holes in my life.

Last year was the first December in 45 years that I did not spend planning special services, attending Christmas potlucks, and going to concerts — to say nothing of trying to find something new to say about the Incarnation.

It felt odd, like a missing tooth.

This year, Jacquie left for India on Thanksgiving Day and won’t return until the 20th. On top of that, she is spending almost all of her time there in an ashram, a retreat center begun by the guru whose teachings form the philosophy that undergirds our local yoga center.  Visitors are not allowed to use electronic devices.

In other words, after half a century of communicating with each other every day, I have not heard from her since she messaged me that she had just seen the Taj Mahal and was on her way to the ashram. That message came in the day after Advent began.

I hasten to add that I am not spending this season shriveled into a fetal position. I have a dance card full of social connections with friends and neighbors, and a to do list that is astonishingly long. I am also a person who enjoys solitude.  But,  I will be glad when she returns.

In the meantime, this is an opportunity to explore the hole — not just the one that Jacquie fills in my life, but a deeper one.  One we all have.

I used to get in touch with it on that first Sunday in Advent when, attempting to put off singing Christmas carols at least one week, I would always choose “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which I have heard more than one parishioner complain is not very “upbeat”.

Perhaps I was being selfish, but the minor key worked like that tongue exploring a hole in my soul. Singing about Israel, I could feel myself sitting in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear. Then the music would end, I would pronounce the benediction and place myself next to the door to shake hands with the crowd that would swell through December’s Sundays until we were packed shoulder-to-shoulder on Christmas Eve.

This year, with time and opportunity to explore the hole, here is what I have found.

The hole is dark.

      The hole is cold.

             The hole is empty and lonely.

Why would anyone want to go there? Why would you want to explore it? Probe it? Feel your way through it over and over again, like a tongue probing a missing tooth?

Because:

It is only in the darkness that we can see the faint light of hope.

         It is only in the cold that we can feel the warmth of love.

                     It is only in the emptiness and loneliness that we can sense the companionship of Someone beyond ourselves.

Just as the stars fade in the sky over the big, bright, busy city, so the beauty of holiness is hard to see in the midst of the big, bright, busy “Christmas Season”.  But if your Advent contains some dark, empty, silent nights, you may come to Christmas Eve ready to experience a holy night that is calm in the presence of peace and bright with the light of love.

*

Image by Ian and Wendy Sewell (http://www.ianandwendy.com/Israel) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Have an Awful Christmas

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Another blog to which I subscribe introduced me to this letter written by a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter in late December 1942:

“The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.”’

Can you imagine how awful his Christmas was? How far this young man, barely out of his teens, was from his home and family? How cold he must have been to have tears freeze to his cheeks? How he feared that he would not live to see another Christmas?

Yet, that enormous starred sky created the most beautiful Christmas he ever saw.

It reminded me of Christmas on the farm in Southwestern New York where I grew up. It was a lonely place far from the city lights that I take so much for granted these days. The snow-covered fields and the woods that surrounded us were silent. The barn where we milked the cows steamed in the cold as the animals ate from their feed troughs, AKA “mangers”.

It was easy to imagine an awful Christmas when a young woman and her husband were denied shelter by their fellow humans and found refuge with the animals.

But above all this was the sky filled with stars, so it was also easy to imagine the stars that once began to swirl, like a Van Gogh painting, turning into angels who sang about peace on earth and goodwill for everyone.

Into this night, a baby is born. In some ways the most awful and most awe-full thing that can happen.

I don’t really wish you an awful Christmas, not like the one that soldier had; not like the one Mary and Joseph had. It’s just that awful Christmases are unavoidable.

Sometimes, it is in our awful Christmases that we see the real beauty of Christmas stripped of tawdry trimmings. Just as we are able to see the wondrous stars when it is really dark, so we are able to experience the awe-fullness of Christmas the most when Christmas is awful.

Christmas comes around every December 25th to ask us, “Do you get it, yet? Do you understand?”

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“Presents?” asked our 4-year-old grandson.

The word came up in a conversation between his parents and grandparents the day after Thanksgiving. We didn’t know that he was listening — and he probably wasn’t — until someone said “presents”. The very word “presents” conjured visions of wrapping paper and action figures for the 4-year-old and it grabbed his attention. He knew about presents.  The next month would go slow for a 4-year-old waiting for Christmas 2006.

It would go even slower for his Mom, who was eight months pregnant at that Thanksgiving.

I was one of the many adults in my grandson’s life who talked with him excitedly about the new baby that was coming. He listened to this chatter about a new baby respectfully because he loved the people who were talking to him and sensed their excitement, but it didn’t mean nearly as much to him as boxes wrapped with pretty paper under the Christmas tree.

Ten years later, our smart, articulate grandson probably couldn’t tell you what was in any of the boxes under the tree that Christmas, but he could tell you some of the differences the smart, articulate little girl that was born a few days after Christmas has made in his life. Furthermore, I’ll bet he’ll be able to appreciate her impact even more 50 years from now.

“Jesus is the the reason for the season”, probably sounds to most of us like “You are going to have a baby sister” sounds to a 4-year-old. We listen respectfully, because sometimes those who use such words have  internalized their meaning and speak with joy and wonder — just the way a grandparent speaks of the arrival of a new grandchild. But, most of us just don’t get it — and neither does the World into which He was born.

I have seen almost 70 Christmases and I am only beginning to understand what difference this Child has made in my life and in the world.

“Love your neighbor as yourself”

“Do unto others what you would want others to do for you.”

Yes, others said the same thing before Him and independently of Him, but because He said it, those words have a force that pushes back at the attitudes of privilege and hatred that threaten to tear apart our communities, our country and our world.

  • His story about a man of another religion and race stopping to help a stranger counters all of our fears about how those people are out to get us.
  • When we set His life of giving over against our lives of consuming, we cannot help but feel that there is a better way to live.
  • His mission of forgiveness and healing makes us question our military expenditures and our prisons and our vindictive sense of justice that is eroding our economy and our culture.
  • The story and songs about His birth to a homeless couple in a barn in the darkest part of the night at the darkest time of the year have helped hundreds of millions of people look for hope in the most hopeless situations.
  • The story about his family becoming refugees before he could walk have caused people 2,000 years later to show kindness to those that our current King Herods want to ignore or exterminate.

Those are my answers to the question Christmas 2016 is asking.

What are you discovering about Christmas this year?