Dec
23
Musicians use a lovely Italian word for a gradual decrease in loudness: diminuendo. The very sound of the word makes me smile.
Tomorrow afternoon, about 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the diminuendo begins. One by one, cars head for home. A parking space empties. Then another and another. A storefront goes dark, a mall, a grocery store. Red kettles are spirited away. A dwindling stream of headlights melt into the dark.
No matter how many gifts I wrap, no matter how many cookies I bake, no matter how burnt out I get listening to Jingle Bell Rock, that moment comes when nothing is left but the hush of the silent night.
That is the moment I wait for, my favorite moment of the season, when I can believe that for this one night, all is truly calm and bright.
Merry Christmas.
Dec
19
Christmas, 1995.
Christmas had not been merry for two or three years. I wanted to do something different. I wanted it to mean something again.
My small family decided to adopt another small family for the holidays through one of the social service agencies in town. They give you names and ages and a wish list from people whose Christmas won’t be merry without a little help. People, hopefully, with little kids who will be fun to buy for and fun to imagine on Christmas morning.
This year, our family was one little old lady.
Her needs were minimal. All she really, really wanted was to cook a nice holiday meal for her extended family. Turkey or ham, some pies, maybe two kinds of potatoes, the mashed ones and the sweet ones. Soft yeast rolls and butter. Real butter maybe. She wanted to set it up on card tables in her little house, which was neat and sparsely furnished. The social service agency mentioned that grocery store gift cards give people the dignity of shopping for themselves. So that’s what we did.
No cute little toddler-sized winter coats, no teddy bears or computer games. No Santa wrapping paper, no big bows, no imagining on Christmas morning that the children in our little adopted family are wide-eyed and squealing over Santa’s visit.
Just one little old lady and a gift card from the grocery store for a couple hundred dollars.
We delivered the gift card about a week before Christmas. We probably gave her a few wrapped presents as well, house slippers maybe, or a soft cardigan. She was a dignified lady and thanked us politely and we left the house with nothing but the satisfaction of knowing that we’d done a good deed.
The door had barely closed behind us. We were barely off the front stoop when we heard it. Behind that closed door, an unrestrained shout from the dignified little old lady. “Praise the Lord!”
I cried all the way home. I cry everytime I think of it. And that, for the friend who asked earlier today, was the very best Christmas present I ever had.
Dec
18
"Cheers" regulars Cliff and Norm
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
The theme song for the 1980s TV series Cheers pops into my head a lot. It was a show about a neighborhood bar, the kind of place where regulars walk in and their usual drink shows up at their favorite barstool before they can even get seated.
Bars like that are still out there, I’m sure. It’s the kind of place my parents hung out when I was a kid. I spent a lot of Saturday nights playing dominoes while they drank beer and I really don’t much care to be a regular there any more.
In fact, I’ve spent a good bit of my adult life resisting being a regular anywhere.
But there I was, this morning, sitting in my regular spot in a most unlikely place, surrounded by a lot of most unlikely people, many of whom do, in fact, know my name.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.
A year ago today, I had never set foot in the place. But a week before Christmas, I slipped in at the last possible minute, grabbed an end seat in the back, easy for a quick getaway. After the small gospel choir with the big sound got everyone’s heart pumping — even mine — someone up front asked first and second time visitors to stand and give their names so they could be properly greeted. I did not stand up.
The details that got me from that moment in time to this don’t matter much. What does matter is that this morning, one year later, there I sat in my regular spot. Even before the small gospel choir marched its big sound down the aisle, I had talked with at least a dozen people about our lives and all the ways and places our humanity intersects.
What does matter is that something in the spirit of the people who gather in that place made it impossible for me to stay away. It’s a spirit that welcomes all of us, with our baggage and our doubts and our differences and our ways that haven’t always been a natural fit with stained glass and hymnals.
You wanna go where people know,
people are all the same,
You wanna go where everybody knows
your name.
Here in the South, some folks call churches the poor man’s country club. Still, comparing mine to a neighborhood bar may seem a little extreme. But I believe a lot of folks at Caldwell Presbyterian would like the idea that somebody thinks their church is the kind of place where people might just shout “Cheers!” when you come in the door.
Right after they call you by name, of course.
Dec
7
Here we are, nearly the middle of December, and a million miles from Christmas.
The ways we relate to this holiday are anything but holy. It is a retail orgy. It is precious videos and music over-exposed into meaninglessness and a distinct lack of comfort or joy.
As for the birth that launched us into this Celebration Gone Wild, we are separated from it not only by centuries, but by beliefs so tattered and divisive that those of us who claim to remember the reason for the season face off. We are the battleground and the birth itself has become the victim of the stiff-necked certainty that divides us.
So what is there left to say about this holy day that we have stripped of meaning and left at the entrance to the mall, battered and unrecognizable?
Last year, I attended The Birth, a play based on the writings of theologian Frederick Buechner, one of the deepest and most profound writers on Christianity from the last half-century. Buechner likes to challenge us to shift perspective, to step into the story of our tired old beliefs and imagine being touched by the workings of a God too mysterious and magnificent for us to fully comprehend. A God who sends his message of hope and love in the form of a baby – a helpless baby born poor and homeless, already rejected by people just like us.
Sitting in the darkened theater that was as Spartan as any manger, I fell into the mystery and the mysticism of that birth, that simple birth whose echo should have long since faded. And somehow, has not.
