Eliot's The Journey of the Magi

Long ago, I was an English major. I had already fallen in love with T.S. Eliot in high school, and in college I took a couple of courses in 20th century poetry. I wrote many papers on poetry, ranging from the introductory work we did on Beowulf to the confessional poets so popular in the 1970s. No doubt some of those papers contained sentences referencing Eliot's capacity for the wide sweep of western mythology, his articulation of the universality of the experience of alienation, and his conversion to Christianity (which at the time would have seemed mythological and alienating to me!). These days, I find the symbolism much more accessible and the language an easier slide ~ but, in a life which has become foreign to me, the overall evocation of the difficult journey and the confusing mystery of life and death is much more significant than the details of poetic skill that underlie them.

It's a beautiful, beautiful poem, regardless of the ground from which you approach it.

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The snow was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.


(Image: Gentile da Fabiano, The Adoration of the Magi, 1422, Uffizi)

Making Room at the Inn

When our children were growing up, it was very easy to make room. It seemed that the more our lives filled, the more room there was ~ for more energy, more light, more people: more joy. When other kids showed up, we folded them in to whatever we were up to. When my grandmother, well into her 80s and not terribly mobile, came for Christmas week a few times, we made up a bed in the dining room and worked dinner for a couple of dozen people around it. When Hannukah and Christmas fell at the same time, there were children lighting candles in our living room for both. I would like to think that if Mary and Joseph had shown up during Christmas Dinner, I would have asked one to light the menorah and the other to stir the gravy, and moved ourselves, as we often did, to the fold-out couch in the (chilly) sunroom so that our guests could have our room.

The grief that accompanies the death of a child alters everything. There is no energy for anything beyond survival; no desire even for that. There is no light. The people who swarm like bees over the house during the funeral week gradually disappear into their own busy lives. The sense of meaning and purpose that enables you to do even the most difficult of tasks evaporates. Pouring a bowl of cereal is almost impossible; the thought that you once made up beds for guests while planning decorations and food and music for large gatherings seems like something you must have read about in a novel.

And there is, sadly, no room at the inner inn, any more than there is in the house itself. Grief is a process that requires almost complete self-absorption. It offers no alternatives, no respite, no new life. Eventually, your body starts to do things that apparently look unremarkable to others, but your heart is a cold, isolated place, filled ~ and filled completely ~ only by the longing for what cannot be. It is necessary and good to be well-defended, because inside you are made up of thousands of tiny pieces of cracked glass that would shatter irretrievably into millions more if the slightest wind blew your way.

No room at the inn. No room until something not of your own making begins to shift.

The stories we have of the first Christmas ~ what are they? Narratives of actual events? Historical fiction? Beautiful tales for gullible children? Formulaic creations of later writers, looking into their holy scriptures and trying to make sense out of an unlikely companion and his even more incomprehensible resurrection?

It occurs to me this year that, whatever else they are, they are exactly the right stories about exactly the right people ~ all of them finding inner room in which to respond to God out of desperate poverty. Mary and Joseph ~ impoverished by oppression, by rigid circumstances, by potential humiliation and rejection. The innkeeper ~ by hassles and exhaustion, by too little capital and too few resources, by too many travelers needing too many things. The shepherds ~ by cold and emptiness and boredom, by too many sheep and too much ground to cover, by thin-walled tents and danger lurking in the night. And even the magi ~ we tend to think of them as regally-attired kings processing across the desert with gold-laden camels, but: let's be serious. They were trapped in their own way, far from home, dependent upon irritable animals and the uncertain hospitality of strangers, seeking solutions to unresolvable questions ~ and probably tattered and tired as well.

None of the characters in these stories, with the exception of Mary, whose Magnificat indicates that she anticipates the struggle and sorrow that lies ahead for her child, is described to us as a grieving mother. But who knows? The innkeeper, one of the shepherds, one of the magi ~ any of them might be a woman moving blindly through the worst of losses. And regardless of specific histories, every single one of the characters in these stories represents a kind of inner restlessness and poverty with which we are familiar.

And yet they all make room. Not just physical room ~ room in a cave behind an inn, or room for a detour with sheep or camels. They all make available space in the inner landscape of their lives in which to respond to something out of the ordinary, something compelling, someone far more significant even in newborn form than the most extravagant display in the heavens.

Bright Morning Star. The way in which Jesus identifies himself in the Book of Revelation.

Perhaps if we, when we are able or maybe even a little sooner, respond to the invitation to make even the smallest of spaces available in our lives for someone beyond ourselves and our immediate concerns, no matter how all-consuming and overwhelming they seem ~ perhaps we, too, will see it shine.

Merry Christmas.



Image of nebula from nasa.gov.

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.

Christmas Eve

Some of our friends spend some time on Christmas Eve lighting up their neighborhoods and, in our absence last week, they stopped by our place to ensure that we remained bonded to one another.

Key West in No Particular Order (1)

"They will kill you!"

When I was a little girl and we lived for part of the year in Vero Beach, we viewed Portuguese men o' war as jelly terrorists. Lying in wait on the beach after the tide receded, they would whip their 50-foot long tentacles into the air and snap them around your legs, causing you to gasp for breath and writhe in pain as you succumbed to a slow and tortuous end.

I don't know how we expected them to consume us, or why we thought that they would have any interest in trying. I suppose that logic is not a component of childhood drama.

These days, I view them with a good deal more equanimity.

Gannet's Christmas Recommendations . . .

for those years in which disorientation is an optimistic descriptor:

Not recommended:

A Christmas Eve sermon offering as its theme, "Jesus came so that you could have a better life." Don't even get me started. (Move over, Joel Osteen.)

Recommended:

An afternoon walk through Gulf waters of blue and green followed by a long nap.

Highly recommended:

A Christmas Dinner of grilled shrimp-scallop-and-pineapple kabobs out on the deck.

Not a Usual Christmas Post

I have been thinking a great deal about Mary during this Advent season. A woman who also must have felt uncertainty and dread in those months prior to the birth of Jesus, a woman who also spent Christmas among strangers in an unfamiliar place, a woman who also would experience motherhood as a sword that would pierce her heart.

Last week I received a note from a Presbyterian minister whom I had just met ~ I believe I've mentioned the extraordinary things people have written to me in the months since our son died ~ in which she said that she, too, knows what it is to live on what seems like another planet, one on which the rules of gravity differ from those we thought we understood. I suspect that Mary felt that weight as well.

And yet, she remained loyal to the gift of radiant light entrusted to her. Denise Levertov's poem Annunciation ascribes to her "courage unparalleled" in responding with dignified assent to the life to which God invited her.

Perhaps it is the paradox of Christmas that we are invited to both. To the extent to which we welcome and participate in the life of Christ, so we will enter into the weight of suffering that pervades our world. And perhaps the reverse is true as well: to the extent that we absorb that suffering, so we will encounter the astounding love of our Creator that makes God's donation of self to us possible, a gift offered in our own form, as one of us, through one of us.

This year, unable except on rare occasions to glimpse anything beyond my own grief, I can only speculate. But perhaps, if we wait, in the mysterious paradox of Christmas we find hope and confidence and joy as well.

And so. I wait.

Christmas Eve List

Duval Street Shopping

Frigatebirds over Gulf

Key Deer
Midnight Episcopalians

It looks easier than it is.

Traditions

I am typing on the deck, surrounded by the tropical vegetation and blue skies of Key West. The image (from a tourist site; you'll have to wait for mine) is what it's like at night. So much for Christmas tradition.

A number of posts today have brought to mind the contrast between Christmases Past and Christmas Now. RevGals talks about how churches handle Christmas traditions, and PresbyOpia picks up the theme with a post on letting go.

For two decades, our home was the Christmas Dinner destination for our friends and, sometimes, parents who ventured in from out of town. QG's post about holiday hostessing got me counting and remembering: for a number of years, there were 11 families, meaning a minimum of 22 adults and 23 kids. There was the year we decided to go Mexican (hence the two pinatas). There was the year that Gregarious Son threw up hot chocolate and another dad and I dragged the dhrurrie rug up to the bathroom to try to wash the stain out in the tub (we failed). The kids remember a hallway light crashing to the floor in response to the joyful tromping of little feet upstairs; if that incident actually occurred, I blotted it from memory immediately.

Year after year, the same families brought the same chairs, the same extra silver, the same food (except for the Mexican year). Musical Friend, sometimes with other women and girls, sang O, Holy Night! as our grace. The tables were always decorated with holly and very cool candles from North Carolina, the piano was always out of tune, and we always sang the same songs around the fireplace after dinner.

It was different only once: the year that Chicago Son spent in France and we joined him there. That December, the Christmas Dinner migrated to Musical Friend's and. from what we heard, she actually got the kids to act out a nativity pageant ~ something I could never under any circumstances have accomplished.

This year, we decided that we could not bear it. We have so many traditions asociated with Christmas, and several of them are particular and personal to our beloved Chicago Son and me. He was always the one willing to respond with a "Sure, Mom, I'll go with you" whenever I came up with a new idea that caused the others to roll their eyes and hunker deeper down into their reading chairs. Without him, I could not imagine any way that it could be Christmas unless, perhaps, Christmas happened somewhere else and in some other way. And so the Christmas Dinner has moved, with four of us in Key West and the rest at the home of our group's own Hostess with the Mostess (who is still going to pull off the usual New Year's Eve gathering a week later, as she has done for two decades as well). In two places we will mark the loss of Musical Friend's Husband and Chicago Son. We will be sharing the same readings across 1500 miles, and we will talk on the phone, and we will acknowledge that almost everything is changed ~ and some of us will hope that one thing has not.

Christmas 1960

This past month, I have been thinking a great deal about my maternal grandmother. Perhaps wondering, rather than thinking, would be a better choice of words, as I never got to know her well. Although she and my grandfather lived only a couple of miles from us, in a small ranch house on the edge of town, she worked as a secretary in the city thirty miles away and had little time or energy for small children. She was always edged out by my paternal grandmother, who lived on the same hillside we did, out in the country, and was able to offer my brother and me endless hours of her own time along with books, card games, art supplies, and a creek.

She was perhaps also edged out, I now think, by the solitude imposed by the grief in which she dwelt, a grief that her natural reticience and the dictates of the culture would have prevented her from sharing with the small children who might have benefitted most from her companionship in loss.

Summer, 1960. Her son, in his mid-20s, was home from the Navy, not yet married, seldom in evidence. Her daughter, my blonde and vivacious mother of three, was the joy of her life. My mother didn't sing in the church choir anymore ~ it was too much on top of managing the children on Sunday mornings ~ but she often stopped by on the week-ends and sang snippets of songs as she helped around the house for a few minutes, until our rambunctiousness propelled us all back into the car. It was a delight to go out to our house as well. Our family had spent the winter and spring in Florida, and my grandmother must have been lonely. But by late summer the gardens that had lain dormant during my mother's pregnancy the previous summer were in full bloom, and my mother was always ready to sit outside and talk, lemonade on the wooden picnic table and the baby sitting happily on a blanket on the grass while the seven (that was me) and four (my brother) year olds ran around in the grass.

I wonder how, or whether, my grandmother even got out of bed on Christmas morning a few months later. I don't remember anything about that first Christmas without my mother and baby brother, which probably means that the adults united in a massive effort to carry it off as usual. My own physical injuries from the October car accident had healed by then; my brother's shattered arm was no doubt still in a cast, but that was part of the new normal for us and did not keep him off his tricycle or away from games. I suppose we plowed through Christmas Day as we did all the others.

But my mother's mother? I imagine her standing in her kitchen that morning, sipping a cup of coffee and staring vacantly out the window overlooking the backyard. I imagine her sitting down at the table and sighing, knowing that she needed to wake my grandfather, wondering whether she had the energy to get dressed. I imagine her dread as she considered her imminent arrival at our house, peopled by two small children bubbling over with Santa excitement, but no daughter to greet her, no baby to hold. I imagine her standing in our kitchen an hour later, reaching out to touch my father's shoulder, wanting to collapse into his arms and sob, but leery of shattering his own carefully constructed facade of well-being and turning the entire morning into a disaster.

My grandmother lived another twenty years, and she lived them all without her daughter and youngest grandchild. I wish so much that I had had the slightest inkling of what that might have been like for her. I wish I had sat down with her at every opportunity and asked her to tell me about my mother and about what it was like to have lost a 28-year-old daughter. I wish I had asked her about their mutual dreams for my baby brother. I wish that I had given some time to that every Christmas, each of which must have been a fresh trauma for her as she watched other families gather and other daughters come by with pies and ornaments and time for visits.

I wish that she had lived long enough to enjoy my own family before tragedy came our way again. Maybe it would have been some solace for her, to have heard my daughter's beautiful singing voice at Christmas.

16/365: Early Morning on Recycling Day

Epiphany: Glass and Stone

The last day of Christmas ~ and once again, the images come to us from Chartres Cathedral. Since I took the lower one, you can enlarge it for a look at the detail. Very cool, I think.

A few weeks ago it was mentioned in church that the Wise Men came from ~ ahem ~ Iran.

Tomorrow I start off a six-week adult education series at church on The Practice of Community: Hospitality in a Pluralistic World. Lots to think about.

Post Holiday Strike of the Infernal Intestinal Whatever

The image? A new favorite. Very lovely, I think. It was once part of the choir screen at Chartres Cathedral but was removed and BURIED when architectural fashion changed. Apparently its burial saved its life; it was rediscovered and is on display in the crypt below the cathedral, one of the few places we did not go this summer. I didn't feel any need to pay to see the relic of Chartres: the shift which Mary allegedly wore when giving birth to Jesus and the reason why the cathedral has been re-erected repeatedly after the various fires that have destroyed it. If I had known about this sculpture, I would have gone downstairs ~ oops! guess we'll have to go back.

It was a nice but exhausting couple of days, ending rather abruptly earlier today:

* my father visited for two days en route to my stepsister's in Chicago for Christmas. We enjoyed his company tremendously, although I was unable to manage much in the way of hostessy behavior -- I slept through an entire morning and then there was all that shopping. . . .

* a Christmas Eve morning service, a Christmas Eve evening service with the whole family at our previous and magnificent Methodist church (see yesterday's picture), a Christmas Eve party at which we learned that some members of our close circle of friends had been felled by an intestinal virus that the rest of us began to await with trepidation, and a midnight service at our Presbyterian church which my son and I attended together. The Lovely Daughter's response the next morning, when I commented on how odd it was to be packed into a church at midnight with so many people whom I had never laid eyes on before, and how some of them were sitting where I usually sit: "So did you tell them to take their finicky faith and move it to another pew?!?" (The Lovely Daughter, one notes, was not in attendance herself.)

* a lovely time opening presents on Christmas morning with children who no longer rise at 4:00 am to ascertain that SC has been by, whose wants are simple, and whose gifts to others reveal thoughtfulness and generosity

* one last afternoon of cleaning and preparation

* a dinner with friends of two decades (excepting the several brand new victims of the intestinal menance), sitting and conversing for hours and remembering years when we were lucky to grab five minutes of adult conversation. Among the children are seven born in the summer and fall of 1984, meaning that there were years when among the 30-40 people present were seven four-year-olds, and then seven five-year-olds, and then. . . you get the picture.

* the boys and a friend from kindergarten onward conversing in the kitchen as we fell asleep sometime after midnight. The morning revealed that they ate leftover stuffing from the fridge instead of the dish I left out for them, did not refrigerate the latter, and left the doors unlocked when they went to bed. At least they unplugged the tree lights, so the house still stands.

* a trip to the in-laws, shortened by the arrival, at 2:00 this morning, of the puke-every-hour-or-so thing. After much discussion of what to do when five adults get sick/are about to get sick, three of us have come home, having decided to make the drive before we couldn't, and two of us are asleep three hours away. If they can't drive tomorrow, their grandparents will keep an eye on them but will, I hope, stay physically away and not succumb themselves. Sigh.

Real Candles at Midnight

Christmas 2006

Thanks to the son of friends for the photo!

Merry Christmas! (Posting Early)

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness ~ on them light has shined.

Isaiah 9:2

HappyHolidaysHappyChanukahMerryChristmas

A question about holiday greetings elicited a number of comments on the PresbyBlog site, most of them lighthearted. My own vignettes on the subject:

The topic of appropriate greetings actually comes up for me all the time, since I teach in a Jewish school. It seems clear to me that it would be the height of rudeness and insensitivity to wish a Merry Christmas to someone who finds in Christianity a flat negation of everything she holds dear. On the other hand, I think it's a gesture of generosity to extend the appropriate greeting to someone who celebrates an event that you do not. Some of my students wish me a Merry Christmas with great warmth. Others tell me that it is halachically (legally) forbidden for them to do so.

A couple of mornings ago I walked in to work from the snow humming music from the Messiah that had been playing on my car CD. The front hallway had been decorated with rather an abundance of huge construction-paper dreidels hanging from the ceiling. Dreidels and an off-key "For unto us a child is born..." ~ that's my day.

The other night I asked the janitors, neither of any evident religious persuasion, whether they celebrate Christmas. They both do, and laughed about being in the minority where we work. "OK," I said. "I'm just looking for people to whom I can say "Merry Christmas" at the appropriate time." I admit it; I miss it. That same night one of the men on the personnel committee at church came to a meeting directly from work wearing a tie decorated with Christmas trees. That would just not fly at my place of employment ~ although I do wear a lot of Celtic jewelry and no one comments. I think most people have no idea about the symbolism, although I know for sure that one person does.

I love Christmas lights. Like many parents, we used to pile our jammied-kids in the car one evening during the holidays and drive them around to see all the lights, including the extravaganza at the local lighting company. I've always loved late-night drives during this season, thinking about what the lights represent. And then a few years ago I was reading a Chaim Potok novel in which one of the characters thinks, as he walks home through the city streets one Christmas night after school, that each light represents to him one of six million fellow Jews murdered in the Holocaust. You might find that a bit extreme if you're not Jewish, but it's seldom far from my mind, the thought of what might have happened to any of my own students had they been born two or three generations earlier. So I still love Christmas lights, but now there's a certain inner tension that I balance as I gaze at them.

Tension. I guess that's what we don't appreciate during the holidays. Christmas or Passover; we want interactions among strangers to go smoothly and meals to go well. It's not so easy, but I persist in believing that the way to make it easier is to acknowledge the complications.

So . . . for my winter photo today, I'm avoiding both my own advice and monotheistic celebrations, and going with the Greeks, as revived in the cemetery where I walk.

And it's Friday. Shabbat Shalom.

Hello Darkness My Old Friend or, . . ."Plastics"

It's funny. I've been trying to decide what to write about Christmas. Or whether to write anything at all about Christmas. I've already spent a good part of the morning venting my spleen about certain frustrations, and it seems kind of pointless to drum up all that energy again. And then as I headed toward the front door a few moments ago, intent on a walk, the sounds of Simon and Garfunkle drifted into the hallway and I realized that The Graduate was beginning on AMC. The music seemed far more apt than the Christmas carols with which I inundated myself last week.

(And no, I almost never turn on the television during the daytime. You will perhaps have some understanding of the desperation of my mental state if I tell you that I have been watching a Doris Day & Rock Hudson movie off and on for at least two hours, in between laundry and checkbook and dog-walking.)

As I write this, Anne Bancroft's long legs fill the screen and Dustin Hoffman is saying, "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me." Things are looking up.

So, Christmas. No more than five sentences, or remnants thereof, for each of its three elements.

I. The Dinner. An extravaganza, for which a surprising 25 people appeared. The college students, it seems, do not want to stay long, but cannot stay away, which is gratifying to the mom who has watched them all grow up. The friends linger around the table for hours, and the kids, who know they are far too sophisticated for all of this holiday nonsense, occupy themselves with a game of some super-challenging version of Trivial Pursuit in the living room. We force them, to the tune of much grumbling, onto the front hall stairs for the annual picture, and one of them, whom we have watched advance from bouncing towhead to professional soccer player, is heard to say, "Come on, guys; you know that for the parents this never gets old." And I meanwhile, am quietly but literally and physically ill with frustration over the family which, per script, appears an hour-and-a-half after everyone else, combining a beautifully prepared offering of food with oblivion to the rumbling tummies and drying meal spread across the kitchen.

"Plastics," says Mr. Robinson to Benjamin.

II. The faith. I am the only one in my family who experiences Christmas as a religious celebration. I'm not sure that my husband, he of the every single week attendance at Sunday School and the years and years of membership in the Sunshine Choir, ever believed a word of it and, when my children got wind of that in the earliest and most cyncial stages of adolescence, they too opted out. They all have harsh things to say about religion in general and Christianity in particular. As a rule I am not too bothered by their views, believing firmly that each of us is called to her own path and that God tracks people down in God's own time and way, and fortunately I do not subscribe to the "Family Values" distortion of faith promulgated by the Christian right. But God has in fact tracked me down -- I find I have no option but to believe in a faith so convoluted and improbable that it can only be true -- and so Christmas can be a very lonely time right in the midst of everyone that I love the most.

"Are you here for an affair, sir?" asks the desk clerk of an astonished (and very young) Dustin Hoffman.

III. The New Year. After Christmas comes the physical collapse, the day spent almost entirely in bed, the children eager to burst the bonds of family and meet their friends at a concert. And then the inevitable realization that the New Year is almost upon is. Time to clean up the clutter, resolve to lose weight, to brace onself for the visits to and from extended family , and to do all the work for which one was paid but did not actually complete in the month of December when one was shopping for presents and stuffing ingredients instead of grading papers. And time, most importantly, to create a new self -- the skinnier, smarter, wealthier, more successful and more accomplished self so hopefully invented every New Year's. The self whose arrival just happens to coincide with a lower back in such pain and sciatica so severe that the old self actually says "Ouch!" out loud as she is walking the dog and finds herself thereby reminded that the old self is probably here to stay.

Sigh.

There is, somehow, a connection that brings us all together: the sad and confused Dustin Hoffman wearing a jacket and tie as he pulls the blinds and brushes his teeth in the hotel room, the diffident Mrs. Robinson smoking a cigarette in her black dress, the sounds of silence and the longing for. . . what, exactly?

'Twas the night before Christmas. . .

and all through the house, the floors are gleaming, the glass is shining, the silver is laid out on the dining room dresser, the cherry pies are cooling in the cupboard and the pumpkin pies are baking, the downstairs tree glistens with green and blue lights, the upstairs tree with pink lights (guess whose tree that is?), and the presents are ALL WRAPPED.

Tonight my little crew of agnostics and I will go to a 7:30 service at the grand cathedral Methodist church we belonged to when the children were little -- we can't give it up at Christmas because of the candlelighting at the end and the raised candles, 500 strong, in the pitch dark sanctuary as we sing Silent Night. One Christmas Eve, I'd say just about 20 years ago, I spent much of the service pacing the hallway with a cranky one-year-old in a fuzzy footed sleeper in my arms. "Come here, Robin" whispered one of the ushers as the candlelighting began. He guided me to the door behind the altar so that we could watch as the entire church darkened and then began to light up, candle by candle, row by row. What a sight!

These days we tend to go up to the balcony we so that we can watch the same thing from above. Then we head to the annual Christmas Eve party hosted by adult friends -- some complaining from the kids this year, as they know fewer and fewer people at that event. And finally, a midnight service for those of us left standing -- usually just me and that young man who was once the cranky baby. The locale is up to him -- last night he said that he preferred the Methodist church for the atmosphere but the Presbyterian church for the preacher -- "of all these guys we've ever listened to, John is the only way who always has something worthwhile to say."

Tomorrow the gathering will be smaller than usual -- one family divorced and flung from from South Africa to California, one staying home to nurture the dad who just had hip surgery, one single mom who just wants not to do the family thing this year. But the four or five families here will eat and laugh and maybe even sing, missing the parents who used to join our circle and are no longer, and enjoying the college students who are here just a little longer.

Wherever you are and whomever you are with, I hope that your Christmas is a joyous one.

A Christmas Card

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

(The Gospel of John, as illustrated in The Book of Kells, Ireland, c. 800)

And so begins the most improbable of all stories, the one that we celebrate if we have the gift, or the willingness, or the loneliness, or the sorrow, or the stubbornness, or the wildness, to embrace that which is only just barely imaginable.

May your Christmas be one of a quiet and interior joy, a joy lengthened by the Solstice sunlight and heightened by the knowledge that there is more in heaven and earth than we have dreamed of.

Merry Christmas II

Sigh. . . . .

DEPARTURE
Scheduled:
9:15 PM
Estimated:
11:59 PM Reason: Schedule change due to Late Arriving Aircraft Terminal 1 Concourse B Gate: B4

ARRIVAL:
Scheduled:
11:28 PM
Estimated:
2:07 AM Reason: Schedule change due to Late Arriving Aircraft Concourse B Gate: B7

11:54/12:54: Hi Mom - We haven't boarded yet; there are so many people on standby and they're trying to get them all on.

Have they offered you a free flight to Europe yet?

Ever optimistic, even in the middle of the night. . . .