Meditation for the Longest Night

Tonight Musical Friend, whose husband died in March 2008, and I are going to a Blue Christmas Service together.

Mags held one at her church last night. I love that they call it a Longest Night Service, since it was on the calendar the longest night and since this kind of a life does feel like one endless night. (My brother asked me yesterday. "When does it end?" "It doesn't," I said. "It changes, but it doesn't end.")

Anyway, a beautiful meditation:

Here.

The Best Gift You Could Give

If you know someone who's lost a child recently ~ or ever ~ sit down this week-end and send them a Christmas note ~ email or snail mail, it doesn't matter ~ and let them know, as specifically as you can, that you remember their son or daughter.

It will be the best Christmas gift they receive.

A Window into Grief: The Holidays, Round One

People tell me that the holidays and celebrations the second and third year are the worst. You are somewhat braced for the first round, they say. But then you look up and say, All right, I survived ~ and what do you get? Another year of celebrations, along with the knowledge that this is, indeed how it will be from here on out. He will not be back.

But we are only coming up on the first season. And I've been reading the advice to the newly bereaved: Stay out of the stores. Cut back on the decorations and other household traditions. Know that everything will remind you of everything. Go away.

The Lovely Daughter is coming home for Thanksgiving, something she did not do during her first three years of college, and we are going to the Quiet Husband's parents' home for a day or two. Gregarious Son announced that he and his sister had vetoed what he described as "a pathetic dinner at home with the four of us and a microwaved turkey." "Forget the turkey," I said. "Our point exactly," he responded."

And then comes Christmas. For awhile I was loathe to abandon our 20-plus year tradition of hosting many of our friends for a sit-down feast and conversation late into the evening, but the same son pointed out that I am only just now up to a dinner out on occasion. And then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I do not want to be here at all. Christmas has long been a time of deep religious significance for me, but memories of the last 24 of them are completely intertwined with joyful memories of our children, and many of those memories are specific and individual to Chicago Son.

What to do? Where to go? Where can we flee from Christmas? Pakistan? offered the Quiet Husband. Baghdad? suggested a friend.

Of course, one cannot flee from Christmas. One cannot flee. One can run away from the commercial trappings, from the traditions, from what now register as oppressive expectations. But not from Christmas itself. The insistence of the calendar means that it will come, whether or not we are ready. And the readings at our son's Memorial Service - Psalm 139 and Romans 8 -- take on a new layer of meaning.

I don't know yet what we will do for Christmas. I don't think that it will be here, but the decision will only come after much family discussion. It may involve palm trees, or a desert, and candles at midnight in a place we've never been. I just don't know.

For myself, the lone religious voice in our household, there will need to be something more. Advent in past years has been a time of quiet reflection for me. This year I am not going to be looking for cosmic significance. This year I am going to try to look for a moment of peace in each day. Such a find would be momentous indeed. This year the hope resides in one of the readings from our Lessons and Carols service last year: Will you come into the darkness of tonight's world?

*****

(Image: Stained Glass Window by Barbara Joyce, here. )

2008 Book Challenge: Dos

This might seem a bit on the late slide in terms of the church year, but Raymond Brown's slim An Adult Christ at Christmas was the required winter break reading and paper topic for my spiritual direction program, and I'm still finishing up the paper. That being the case, I'll offer the introduction and a bit of the conclusion from the current draft of my paper. Don't worry ~ I won't torture you with the whole thing!

"When we celebrate Christmas, we tend to merge the various elements of the gospel stories of Jesus’s birth along with various cultural traditions and practices with little thought to their origins or to the accuracy with which they reflect the events we honor. Raymond Brown’s An Adult Christ at Christmas is designed to counteract that tendency by explicating the theology of the narratives in Matthew and Luke through the chronology of gospel writing and the literary shape given the two infancy narratives by their authors.

*****

Brown makes the critically specific point that the gospels reflect the experiences and views of the post-Resurrection Christian community. **** In the context of Ignatian spiritual direction in which imagination is such a key component, it is helpful to keep in mind that in the writing of the gospels themselves, the events reported were being imaginatively reshaped and assessed in the context of the post-Jesus experience of the writers. "

If you enjoy scriptureal exegesis, this is a nice little book for use in preparation for Advent ~ a preparing-to-prepare book!

Fourth Sunday of Advent: It's Christmas Eve!

If you are celebrating Christmas, may your day be full of the holiness and joy of the light.

If you are celebrating Festivus, may your day be full of laughter and music and light.

If you are celebrating Chanukah, may your day be full of promise and liberation and light.

If you are celebrating Kwanzaa, may your day be full of community and energy and light.

If you are enduring loss and loneliness, may the darkness herald the light that will come again one day.

*******

And may you all have better luck than me! I was at the grocery at 8:00 this morning, picking up the free range turkeys who range no more and other last minutes requirements for tomorrow's feast. I tried to add two bottles of Spanish wine to our collection (I've been purchasing a couple of bottles every day for the past week as I have slowly filled the kitchen with goodies) in honor of the son who spent the last two summers in Barcelona, only to be informed that wine cannot be purchased before 10:00 a.m. on Sundays. I was dressed and ready for church, and thinking that Jesus, as I recall, drank plenty of wine, and I was, I'm afraid, a bit out of sorts at this revelation ~ but hey, I'm glad that our legislature is on top of all the many needs of our state. A prohibition on the purchase of wine before 10:00 a.m. on Sunday certainly tops my list!

Advent 21: Almost

California


The Vatican


Chartres

It's Coming! (Dedicated to Kathryn)

Tonight.

The longest night.

My last name gives me reason to believe that my love for Celtic voices is lodged in my DNA. And last night I discovered a delightful example of the bridge between contemporary and long-ago Celtic expression here, thanks to a blogger who is able to claim a much closer and more distinct connection than the one I imagine.

Turn up your sound, take a few moments, and enjoy!

The days will begin to lengthen and the dark will recede ~

(Images: Iona, July 2006)

Advent 18: Christianity: Does It Work Anymore?

I can't do this topic justice in the few minutes I have allotted myself this morning, but I want to sketch the basics so that I can come back to it in the new year. . . .

The setting: Mexican Restaurant, Post Women's Service of Lessons and Carols.

The cast: Two of the four young ladies who have been friends since first grade and are now college sophomores. (The other two aren't home yet.) Three of the four moms. Representative of Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian denominations.

The service just attended: Nine lessons and carols, with a nod to the King's College, Cambridge original, but revisted with scriptural and other sacred writings and songs honoring the Biblical story through the experiences of its women. A Lessons and Carols which honors Ruth, Naomi, Esther, Tamar, Mary and the other Marys, Martha, Rahab, and others.

Main points of the conversation, largely prompted by one of the moms and largely responded to by me, with some morning-after commentary also by me:

Point I: The stories are meaningless to me. Who are these people and who cares? I don't like big stories about people from thousands of years ago. Talk to me about the guys on Mount Hood, or the entire family of four just killed in the plane crash. What are their stories? Who were they and what mattered to them?

Response: But they are all the same stories. They are all stories about who people are, how they live and what they care about, who they are before God and what matters about their existence.

Response to response: Well, why don't we talk about that, then? That's what I want to hear and talk about.

Note: As meaningful as the metanarrative of Christianity is to some of us, to others of us it is just so much nonsense. If we can't make it come alive in the story of men who risk and lose everything on Mount Hood, then it's not a story for all time.

Point 2: Christianity is so ethereal. All this spirit stuff. I want the real stuff.

Response: What I have been thinking about over the past year is how earthy and bodily Christianity is. Christianity is a religion for real humans with real bodies and physical concerns. Look at what happens: birth and crucifixion, body and blood. People talk about the meek and mild Mary, but she has long been wrapped up in blue robes with her gentle hand on a sweet baby. Men, in particular, have seldom talked about her in terms of courage and physicality. But unless your experiences were very different from mine, there was nothing meek and mild going on when you were giving birth.

Note: We don't talk about what really happened. We all share in the life experience of Jesus or, more accurately, he was here to share in ours. But we do keep him at a distance.

Point 3: None of it makes any sense. What kind of God would bring his child here only to send him to his death? Today we would call that child abuse. The story is no longer one for our time.

Response: But the story is about God breaking into our world, about how there is a dimension of space and time (or maybe something else) beyond what we can describe, a dimension that we can grasp in some small way even though it makes no sense in the ways we ordinarily look at life.

Note: There was general agreement at the table that we are surrounded by the Divine ~ but also anger and resentment that that sense mostly eludes us and that the church and its stories do little to alleviate our feeling of disengagement.

Point 4: We need to talk more about our own present. There was a brief period in the service tonight when we were invited to share with one or two people the names of women who have served as spiriutal mentors in our lives. I would have liked to have heard the whole group on that. And there was another part where we prayed aloud -- and all the prayers, for women and children far away and in pain and terror and loss, by this group of very privilged women sitting in warmth and comfort, rang false to me. I wanted to pray about the realities of our lives, but I felt that that would be out of place.

Response: Agreed. I would have liked to hear what every woman there had to say in response to the first question and I had wanted to pray for every one of our daughters. As I had looked around the room, I realized that I knew the names of the daughters of all the women there who are in my generation ~ but it did seem out of place to pray for them, all safely in jobs and colleges and good schools, at that particular time.

Comment: Ignatius made the argument four centuries ago that we come to God through our experience and imagination, and so we do. Protestants are found of arguing for the primacy of the Bible, but if the post-service discussion last night revealed anything at all, it was how critical it is to our apprehension of God that our experience be honored, and how difficult it is for good and generous people of the 21st century to grasp the import of scripture in the absence of reverence toward who they are, who they have been, and who they are becoming.

Well. That was one sacred and challenging and envigorating evening. And one way or another, all be be well and all will be well. (Julian of Norwich) The story is always unfolding.

Advent 17: The Wise Women

Night before last, Husband, Chicago Son, and I went to the traditional Kings' College Choir Service of Lessons and Carols at our church. It's one of the most powerful evenings of music that we share, beginning with that solitary a cappella child's voice singing the first verse of Once in Royal David's City, a hymn that then morphs into the sounds of full choir and congregation and brass. We had all new readings this year, which is how I came up with yesterday's posting of the Denise Levertov poem.

I think you can listen to the whole service from Cambridge here. The readings there are probably somewhat more traditional.

Yesterday morning I had the pleasure of going to the airport to pick up the Lovely Daughter and one of her best friends, a young lady she has known since Montessori first grade, who also goes to college in Oregon. Although they usually drive themselves these days, it was a delight to taxi them home, as I have on occasion for thirteen years now.

And in a little while, both girls will join me at our Service of Womens' Lessons and Carols. I posted about this event last year, so for tonight I'm just going to do a repeat. It's worth reading again.

"Long ago, women of wisdom from all over the earth began to gather together: mothers and grandmothers, sisters and daughters, cousins and aunts. They converged in order to witness and to midwife the birth of a holy little girl-child of mid-Eastern descent . . . perhaps an Iraqi.

This was distressing to the Herods of the earth, who are ever distressed and fearful when women gather together: the male Herods because of their fear that someone might displace them, and the female Herods because someone else might be the fairest of them all. The Herods asked the wise women where the child was to be born: 'Return and tell us,' they said, 'so that we may worship too!' (In other words, give us your wisdom.")

The wise women went on and found the place and helped the birth to come about. And they brought with them gifts -- corn, squash, beans, and bread -- these symbolizing the interconnectedness of all of life, gifts that could be used to feed the whole world.

So instead of the ancient gifts we've been told were brought -- gold for royalty, frankincense for worship of divinity, and myrhh for the embalming of the dead -- these women brought other gifts. Instead of royalty, they brought humility. Instead of worship, they brought partnership. Instead of death, they brought the knowledge of how to live.

And when they had offered their gifts, knowing that they dare not go back to Herod and to the old ways, they made their home with this child. . . and thereby came home in a different way.

Because of that, there was no slaughter of the innocents -- and no Rachel weeping for her children."

(Image: Giotto, 1304-1306)

Advent 16: Annunciation by Denise Levertov

‘Hail, space for the uncontained God’
From the Agathistos Hymn, Greece, VIc

We know the scene:
the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book;
always the tall lily.

Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador,
standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience.
No one mentions courage.

The engendering Spirit did not
enter her without consent.

God waited. She was free to accept or to refuse,
choice integral to humanness.

____________________________
Aren’t there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? Some unwillingly undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride, uncomprehending.

More often those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from in dread,
in a wave of weakness,
in despair and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.

God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

______________________________
She had been a child who played, ate,
slept like any other child –
but unlike others, wept only for pity,
laughed in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence fused in her,
indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,

only asked a simple, 'How can this be?'
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb Infinite weight and lightness;
to carry in hidden, finite inwardness, nine months of Eternity;
to contain in slender vase of being, the sum of power –
in narrow flesh, the sum of light.

Then bring to birth, push out into air,
a Man-child needing, like any other,
milk and love –
but who was God.
This was the minute no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,

Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.

____________________________
She did not cry, "I cannot,
I am not worthy,"
nor "I have not the strength."
She did not submit with gritted teeth, raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light, the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.

Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

Advent 15: John the Baptist

While I have been absorbed (see previous post) by Mary and her story, I have, in fact, given some thought to that wild man, John. My Jewish students were asking me about the practice of baptism the other day, and I was telling them that I have only ever seen one full-immersion baptism, in a river, no less. Several years ago as the kids and I were enjoying a post-tubing-trip swim in a quiet and narrow section of the French Broad in North Carolina, a small church group arrived to use the outfitter's river access as a baptismal font. The fully clothed minister and several of his congregation waded right in to chest depth. (Feeling a little awkward, we stayed out in the middle of the river until the event was concluded.) That's the closest I've gotten to a John the Baptist scene.

But I digress. As I said, I'm much more engaged by Mary this year, as I was last. But I started thinking that Caravaggio must have painted John the Baptist. He would not have missed a subject of so much dark and light. And indeed, he did not. Herewith, some artistic renderings of today's subject ~ (and, as you can see, I managed to find one with Mary, too):

Bouguereau, 1875

Caravaggio, c. 1610

Moscow School, 1560s

da Vinci, 1513-1516

Advent 14: Moving On

The Annunciation
Henry Ossawa Tanner

I was getting restless a couple of days ago. What happened to the Annunciation and the Magnificat? The Big Stuff? How long were we going to wander around in Isaiah and with John the Baptist? Not that I don't love the beauty and magnificence of Isaiah. But this is turning out to be the slowest Advent ever. So I scrolled ahead and found what I was looking for ~ but it doesn't show up this year until CHRISTMAS EVE.

Well, I'm moving on. I want to look at Annunciation art. I want to think about Mary.

Last year about this time I came to the realization that the Mary we think we know, the demure, humble, and modest young woman of Nazareth, probably bears little resemblance to the real Mary. It seems to me that the Mary so often portrayed in art and music and story may represent the blind misreadings of a patriarchal church of the subsequent 2,000 years more than she does the real girl who found herself in something of a predicament and decided to honor the gift and the challenge.

Just think about the fourteen-year-old young ladies you know and imagine the attitude it would take for them to stand up to parents, fiance', extended family, and friends in Mary's circumstances. Imagine the courage. Imagine the sense of being enfolded into the wildest plan God could imagine and recognizing the pivotal role you are being asked to play. Imagine bearing God's peace and justice into this world.

Imagine the light.

Advent 13: Lights

It's taken me all night, but the outdoor lights, mostly blue and green with a little pink on the dogwood to one side, and the tree lights, the big old-fashioned brightly-colored ones except for the star with white lights on top, are all up. James Galway music is on. The husband is almost finished painting the dining room ceiling, which I guess means the sanding is behind us and the plaster dust has finally settled. Everywhere.

But it doesn't matter because I've just been outside. I always forget about the wonderful moment when I go across the street and look at the lights shining around the porch and from the tree through the front windows.

Magic.

And, let's not forget:

Happy Chanukah!

This amazing work of artistry is brought to you by the folks over at Quotidian Grace, where the author of that illustrious blog suggested a need for the sappiest Christmas Song Ever. In addition to QG and GG, the inspired lyricists include Psalmist, Presbyterian Gal, Rev Dave, purechristianithink, and Toby Brown.

Pets Need Christmas, Too: A Sappy Christmas Song

C'est Fini!

~cue the steel gee-tars~
And grab your hanky.

The Sappy Christmas Song is dedicated by Gannet Girl to the memory of Gretel, The Noble Dog, who surely would have walked away in disgust.

Pets Need Christmas, Too

'Twas lonely at the manse that Christmas Eve
As the pastor's dog waited under the tree
Buster's health was failing fast
When an angel came and asked
"Hey there Buster, I come to lift
Your sorry state with a heavenly gift"
She drew out a biscuit from her robe
And held it under Buster's nose.
"Smell this old friend, isn't it fine?
Guess what! It's 'Doggie Communion Time!!!

"Pets need Christmas too....
Just like me and Yoooooou....
When Santa lights Jesus' birthday cake......
Pets need Christmas too................

But the offering of that angel bright was not yet done,
For as soon as she had begun,
She served old Buster a dish of wassail true
And then, the dog did feel his strength returning,
Just then, with a flash of silken fur
The minister's cat, with a lordly purrA
nd a silver bell hung around his neck,A
nnounced, "No eggnog?! What the heck?

"Pets need Christmas too....
Just like me and Yoooooou....
When Santa lights Jesus' birthday cake......
Pets need Christmas too................

But cats are notoriously intrepid and brave
Especially when it's that eggnog they crave
And this one, with feline grace and speed
Leapt to the counter with little heed
For the cookies and cakes impeding her glide
And toward the vast bowl of eggnog did slide.
and drank deeply with kitty glee
and headed off to climb the Christmas tree

Pets need Christmas too....
Just like me and Yoooooou....
When Santa lights Jesus' birthday cake......
Pets need Christmas too................

But the nog had been spiked with whiskey,
(The pastor was not baptist, you see,)
Making the kitty rocky on his feet,
And seeing not one but two trees.
In one was her own dear mama
Dead these years gone by
She was hit in the road by an eggnog truck
And lives with that Lion in the sky.

Pets need Christmas too....
Just like me and Yoooooou....
When Santa lights Jesus' birthday cake......
Pets need Christmas too................

So I sing this sad song from the kitty stockade,
Awaitin' the hangin' tree:
I'm guilty of my sainted cat mama's death,
And as sorry as a drunk cat can be.
Dear Santa, if you're hearing my song,
Give my mama a message from me.
Tell her I'll look for her at the pearly gates,
And we'll go climb St. Pete's Christmas tree.

Pets need Christmas too....
Just like me and Yoooooou....
When Santa lights Jesus' birthday cake......
Pets need Christmas too................

Advent 12: We Are Still Waiting

"I closed my eyes, drew back the curtain
To see for certain what I thought I knew
Far far away, someone was weeping
But the world was sleeping
Any dream will do

I wore my coat, with golden lining
Bright colors shining, wonderful and new
And in the east, the dawn was breaking
And the world was waking
Any dream will do

A crash of drums, a flash of light
My golden coat flew out of sight
The colors faded into darkness
I was left alone

May I return to the beginning
The light is dimming, and the dream is too
The world and I, we are still waiting
Still hesitating
Any dream will do."

*********************

Tonight I celebrated Advent by going to a production of Joseph in which three of my students have lead roles. They were FABULOUS!

If you know this musical, the tunes will adhere to your brain as soon as you read the lyrics and will replay for days. That's certainly been my experience as the kids have talked about their work over the past few weeks.

They, of course, don't see it as an Advent production. But Advent is about the powerful movement of the Divine. So Advent it is.

"You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good."
Genesis 50:20

Advent 10: Reprise

I guess I was thinking about the same things last year as this. We got the tree tonight and it's shaking itself itself down in the living room, and I told the Lovely Daughter over the phone that it was already here ~ which saddened me a bit but did not perturb her in the least.

From last year about this time:

At this particular moment, I'm listening live to the Christmas Vespers concert from my boarding school in western Massachusetts. My son made it home from Chicago tonight and, as I waited for his flight to arrive, I reflected on how things have changed. If I were a teenager in the Connecticut Valley, I would be in a candle-lit chapel participating in a concert of haunting beauty and anticipating my own flight home. But now when I go to the airport at holiday time, it's to pick up and drop off -- my own Christmas traveling days are long behind me.

For the last couple of years I could deny it, but this year I can't: all three children have gone and we are the ones at home, anticicpating their return. It's an odd feeling. They all have lives, activities, friends, far from us. We've never met either of our sons' most important girlfriends of the past couple of years. When they come back, they spend some time with their best friends of those Montessori years past, the closely knit group that numbered only 15 by the time they graduated from eighth grade and headed for six or seven different high schools ~ and then they are eager to return to the lives they have created as young adults.

I found myself thinking tonight that maybe we should have had the tree decorated and waiting for them. It's always been a family tradition that the five of us choose the tree together, with much squabbling over height and width, and then decorate it over the course of a week. But Christmas will be only a week away by the time the Lovely Daughter returns -- maybe it's time to revamp that tradition and create a festive atmosphere to welcome them home.

I'd like to turn the clock back at least a few years.

Advent 7, 8, 9 ~ It Goes By Too Quickly

Christmas Eve 2004

It has occurred to me that this is the last year in which we can count on all three of our children being home for Christmas. The guys will probably (one hopes!) both be employed by this time next year; the Lovely Daughter hopes to be studying in Europe. As Jobs and Significant Others and Spouses and Grandchildren gradually become realities, the committments of these past two decades will be transformed. Already we are abandoning our family tradition of choosing the tree together, and instead making plans to get a tree tomorrow night and set it up before the kids come home next week-end, so there will be more time to enjoy and less need to run around once they are here.

This time of life reminds me of when they were tiny: as soon as you thought you understood what was going on and found routines and systems that more or less worked, everything changed and you had to devise a new plan. Next year may see them in Chicago, France, and the Czech Republic. Or not. And the year after that? Completely unpredictable.

*****

On the I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas front: the plastering is completed and looks great, but the thin layer of dust covering walls, furniture, poinsettias, piano, and Baby Jesus and entourage? Not so much.

*****

On The Friendly Beasts front, the following conversation took place between my neighbor (on the other side from the previous neighbor) and me this morning:

Neighbor: You know your soffit is falling down on the front corner.

Me: Yes, I know.

Neighbor: That's how the squirrels got into our crawl space. We can hear them up there. They've made nests in the insulation.

Me: Sigh. I had, actually, been thinking about the squirrels.

Neighbor: We chopped all the branches away from our gutters. I was watching today, and the squirrels seem unperturbed. They just ran up the trees by your house instead, and into your attic.

Me: Actually, I couldn't think of anything else to say about the disturbing presence of the squirrels. My neighbor's daughter, who lives in Germany, is in the same condition that I was 23 years ago, expecting twins, so we turned to that much more cheerful topic.

*****

I notice that the lyrics to The Friendly Beasts are not inclusive of squirrels.

The Second Sunday of Advent

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'" (Luke 3:1-6)

I just got back from a Messiah presented by a small but magnificent orchestra playing the baroque instruments for which Handel originally wrote. Such an evening! And the words of Isaiah are ringing in my ears.

Advent 5 and 6: Have You Seen a Child?

I've been indulging in one of my favorite holiday pastimes and listening to a recording of Amahl and the Night Visitors (while I washed down the kitchen floor in a house where plaster dust reigns supreme -- okay, no evening is perfect).

Amahl was a favorite in a childhood that was on the short side. We must have seen it on television once or twice in the 50s, and my father took my brother and I to a production in Cincinnati in the early 60s. I'm guessing 1962, as I remember that I promptly memorized most of the score from the record album jacket. I sang it to myself over and over as I wandered the dusty paths around the Florida cottages where my brother and I spent much of the following March with our grandparents while our father was off marrying Stepmother No. 1. I was nine, and the marriage was an unwelcome one from my perspective.

Oddly, Amahl, maybe because of his own status as a child of loss and resiliency, never lost his magic for me. For years I insisted that my own children settle down to watch a video production each December, and a few years ago we all went to see a wonderful production at the Institute of Music here. It never grows old.

If you aren't familiar with this little operetta written for children, I urge you to pick up a CD and sit down for an hour to listen with the script in hand. From the humor of the impoverished young boy who can't bring himself to come in from the night where he is mesmerized by "a star as large as a window," moving across the sky "like a chariot on fire," to the frustration of the skeptical mother who tells him to try telling the truth "for a change," to the perplexing arrival of the three kings, among them Caspar with his box of beads and stones and licorice, to the mixed motives among the small cast of characters that finally yield up the first miracle of Christmas -- it's a wonderful production.

And the haunting quartet sung by mother and kings (click on number 14) captures the essence of the moment both out of and in time that we celebrate this month:

Have you seen a child the color of wheat, the color of dawn?
His eyes are mild, His hands are those of a King, as King he was born.
Incense, myrrh and gold we bring to his side,
and the Eastern star is our guide.

Yes, I know a child, the color of wheat, the color of dawn.
His eyes are mild, his hands are those of a King, as King he was born.
But no one will bring him incense or gold, though sick and poor and hungry and cold.
He's my child, my son, my darling, my own.

Advent 3 and 4

I love having smart and talented friends who happen to be eloquent writers as well.

All I have left to do tonight is refer you to what Cynthia has to say about the church thing.