Dancing around the Christmas tree

A story my mother often told came from the Christmas when I was three. My sister Linda was two, and Karen (I should not forget to mention her) was just a baby. According to my mother she came into the living room one day shortly before Christmas and discovered that the Christmas tree had been pulled away from the wall out into the center of the room. And I had been the one who had done it, because, I said, I wanted to dance around the Christmas tree with Linda. 

I don't remember this happening — how, according to my mother, miraculously, no ornaments fell off the tree and nothing was broken. How she was so astounded she couldn't really administer a scolding. And I've never heard how the tree got moved back into place. 

My mother is known to embroider stories from the family past. I often tell others, believe half of what you hear — I just can't tell you which half. But I am absolutely certain that the part of the story about three-year-old me wanting to dance around the Christmas tree is true. I don't mean "true" in the sense that it might point to a deeper truth. Not at all. There's a picture in my head of little girls in folk dresses, gathered skirts, snug bodices, caps and aprons, lined up and silhouetted at the bottom of a page in the Augsburg Christmas Annual — "The Annual of Christmas Literature and Art" that we girls pored over as Christmas approached. Printed on high-quality paper, the oversized pages were filled with articles about Christmas customs around the world, inspiring stories I could not yet read, and beautifully illustrations of the nativity story. If you looked deep and long into Mary's beautiful face and Joseph's tender eyes, you could imagine in your heart what it was to hold the Baby Jesus, what it was to be there on that most holy night. 

Those girls in their dancing clogs and braids weren't much more than woodcut clip art, filling space at the bottom of a page about something else — butter cookies, perhaps. But to me at three and a half, they seemed to hold the key to a proper Christmas celebration. Maybe there was a tree in that line-up as well, decorated with candles set upright on the tips of the branches in little tin holders. Maybe this is more detail than could possibly have been incorporated in that little picture more than 60 years ago. Maybe my mother is not the only one who embroiders her stories. 

I don't know how Linda and I could have danced around the tree to my satisfaction, just the two of us (though much credit goes to her for faithfully following her big sister — and not for the last time). What dances did we know? What childish steps would have worked with the Robert Shaw Christmas carol recordings that were the sound of Christmas in our house in the 1950s? And we could hardly have encircled the tree. We'd have been more like a little two-car wind-up train chugging around a circular track on the floor.  Though perhaps, if Mother had not come in quite so soon, the dance would have fulfilled my childish dream. I've dreamed many other "perfect Christmas" dreams since that time. They are more perfect, more treasured in memory than they were as tried, too hard sometimes, to bring them into being. 

This year, as last year, Christmas is hard, even without dreams for a perfect celebration. This is what I've been saying to myself all day today. 

Christmas is hard this year, as Linda and I made plans for a COVID-safe Christmas Day with an elderly mother, unvaccinated family members and Zoom. 

Christmas is hard this year, as I click on yet another news story about how quickly the omicron variant is spreading. 

Christmas is hard this year. The aggravations and negativity I manage to sweep aside in the morning come creeping back in the afternoon. I have yet to bake a single cookie, nor have I grated the orange rind for the cranberry bread. I'm drinking white wine from the big bottle opened at Thanksgiving. It's not very good, especially on its own in the evening. 

And my heart is weighed down by news of old friends having sober discussions about cancer and thinking of those who keep vigil with the dying. Sad memories surface. It's hard. 

I subscribe to Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation emails. Some days I even read them. This morning's was an excerpt from a Christmas piece by Kathleen Norris whose writing did much to form my mid-life faith. Here's what spoke to me this morning:

It is precisely because we are weary, and poor in spirit, that God can touch us with hope. This is not an easy truth. It means that we do accept our common lot, and take up our share of the cross. It means that we do not gloss over the evils we confront every day, both within ourselves and without. Our sacrifices may be great. But as the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, once said, it is only the poor and hungry, those who know they need someone to come on their behalf, who can celebrate Christmas.

A proper Christmas celebration takes up the cross. That is where hope appears, right there, in the darkness. 

Hope appears in the care of the poor and hungry for others who are poor and hungry, in the care of the grieving by those who have known grief or who know that someday they surely will. Shreds of hope hang in the anxious or rueful conversations we share with one another, in the mirrored shrugs where we look at one another and acknowledge our lack of wisdom, our vulnerability. 

Hope appears in the Incarnation — not in a glowing halo of divine presence, but most clearly and truly in the smooth and slippery skin of a newborn child, the in-drawing of that first breath, the baby nuzzling his mother's breast, encircled in her arms, who will soon be greeted by rejoicing, dancing shepherds and glittering earthly gifts from the majestic procession of the magi. God with us, like us, on our behalf, so that we can care for one another and celebrate even a hard Christmas, perhaps daring to pull the tree away from the wall for some dancing. There is faith and love and Christmas joy in that circle of hopeful dancers around the tree — if you take the time to look, or better, just let it come. 

The tree in my living room in 2021 is encircled with gifts, wrapped last night. I have a new patchwork Christmas tree skirt this year, also a circle, pieced by me and quilted shortly after Christmas last year by sister Linda. (There's a present for Karen -- she's there, too.) The muslin angel on my tree, made by me in the 1980s, would have pleased my three-year-old self, with embroidered ribbon around her waist and red trim on her skirt and sleeves. 

I dared to move this tree after it was fully decorated, inching it off to the side a bit. Not for dancing, but to make room for my favorite chair, the place where I watch the December sky brighten in the morning and where I look deep into the trees' branches in the evening, seeking peace and hope for a new day.

Second Sunday of Advent

I went out walking yesterday morning. The weather app on my phone said rain from 9 a.m. on, through the afternoon and into the evening. I needed the exercise. So out I went at 8:15 to jam 45 minutes of fitness into my life before getting dressed for Sunday School and church. 

My walks are simple: walk 20 minutes in the "away" direction and then walk back home. Some mornings there are lots of right-angle turns through the grid of urban/suburban streets. Some mornings I walk mostly straight west without making decisions. It was a straight-street day yesterday. I saw a couple of runners  and a few quiet dog-walkers on a grey, grey day. Plus a long-legged walker in a pale orange hoodie, who quickly outpaced me. Brown leaves crunched underfoot -- oak leaves, the last to come down from the trees. 

I was trudging along next to an shoulder-high hedge when something yellow caught my eye. A tiny flower, poking through a mesh of unlit Christmas lights, the kind you drape over bushes, quick and easy coverage, no light strings to untangle later. It was a tiny, perfect forsythia blossom. Not plastic, not silk -- a real flower with a few green leaves on a hedge that was badly out sync with the natural cycle of fall, winter, spring.  

One little flower. An Advent thing. 

Behold, a Branch is growing

Of loveliest form and grace,

As prophets sung, foreknowing;

It springs from Jesse's race

And bears one little Flow'r

In midst of coldest winter,

zAt deepest midnight hour.

"Faith + hope = confidence." This was the formula in the Richard Rohr devotion in my email inbox this morning. Optimism is a gift of temperament, he said. Some of us are wired that way. Confidence is not like patience, which he said can be learned through practice. (I agree. Continual practice.) Confidence, faith plus hope, is a sign of participation in the life of God.

The sun will not rise today until 7:04, about the time I hope to hit the "Publish" button. I'm awake far too early, thinking Monday thoughts and cares. Soon I'll watch the electric candles in the living room window turn off one by one as they sense the morning light. I watched them come on yesterday afternoon, shortly after 3 p.m. -- such a dark and dingy day it was. 

The sky is gray this morning and moving, with a wind advisory. I won't be out walking in a westerly direction. It's chilly enough here in my chair. 

Where is this "life of God" of which mystics speak? Where do I look? 

In the wintry branches moving against the brightening sky? In the disordered flower on the forsythia hedge eight or ten blocks away from my home? In the hope and faith of cancer patients or ALS warriors treasuring life all the more gracefully because they must fight for it? In the laboring woman about to give birth? In the social justice advocates who fight for the dignity of Black lives? 

Somewhere in me? Today? 

Image file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

All Saints Sunday 2021

The first, far-too-early sunset of Central Standard Time has cast blurs of pink and purple all the way across the sky. I saw them even from the east-facing windows of my living room. Not quite 5 p.m. and trees, evergreens, everything close to the earth was in shadow. If I had a fireplace I'd be thinking about building a fire, more for the light than the heat.

Metaphors were everywhere this morning in church on All Saints Sunday, from the pilgrim throng to the throne of God and the saints singing in glory. And the golden evening brightening in the west in the hymn "For All the Saints," just like the real one here in the Chicago suburbs a little while ago. 

I am steeped in all these images from a lifetime of All Saints celebrations, funerals, Easter services and prayers for the dying. On some days, in some circumstances, they open up the heavens for me, or lift the veil or something else -- alas, something metaphorical -- between life and death, between what can be known and what can't. On other days -- well, I can only marvel at the human poetic imagination.

Poesis, philosophically, is making something -- making something that did not exist before, such as a poem, a play, or a musical composition. You make it by speaking or putting words on paper, by singing or recording notes on a staff. Not as impressive as God speaking light and darkness, dry land and living creatures into existence in Genesis, but still, the making of a poem (or a blog post) is a creative act. There's no more blank page, there's something there. 

So it follows that other somethings must have been brought into being by other creators. And are those things brought into being real things, or just images of some greater and more perfect reality? I'm in far deeper than I set out to be. The little I know about Platonic ideals is nipping at my frontal cortex, and since what I know is indeed very little and I am not a methodical thinker, it seems best to back out of this mess. 

And return to pondering those metaphors which seem entirely other-world to me lately. Not as in heavenly, but as belonging to a very specific world or tradition within the church and western literature and liturgy, which may be slipping away. Do they still have any meaning for us today? Would they have any meaning at all outside the church, away from being among those who attend worship services or read Christian devotionals? 

There is, of course, the music associated with these texts, music brought to the texts to bring them more emotion, more dimension. You don't have to know the Bible to grasp the Brahms Requiem or the Verdi.

For me today, the best text from this morning was this one* which is very direct:

All of us go down to the dust, 
but even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia. 

We've all seen decay, we've seen the ashes. We've stood at the graveside. We all die, yet we rejoice in the beauty and mystery that is life on earth. Our brains can grasp -- or perhaps create -- that transcendence. 

Thanks be to -- God?

Washington Island sunset 

*Evangelical Lutheran Worship #223, setting by Matthew Mummert

A future with hope

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Jeremiah 29:11.

I copied this Bible verse into a draft post weeks ago, wondering -- not if it were true, but in what ways it could be true. Surely not as a blithe promise of prosperity or happy endings. I'm not averse to them. I've spent a lot of time thinking surely one was out there somewhere. But even a happy ending never exactly ties up all the loose ends. And a future with hope is not a destination, it's a moving target.

I've just celebrated my birthday. That and other things have sent me looking back through the eras of my life. 

A friend recently sent me photos of the church my father served as teacher and organist from 1955 to 1958, when I was a very small child. In the years after we left, in a time of growth, the congregation built a new school and then a new church a few blocks away from these aging buildings. 

What happens to the old churches when congregations move on? Sometimes the buildings are sold to new congregations. In gentrifying neighborhoods, perhaps, they're turned into restaurants or libraries or other public spaces. Lutheran elementary schools become preschools or after-school centers. Or, with no plans or resources for future use, buildings stand empty and decay. 

My only real memory of that old church is of a Christmas service. It must have been the school children's Christmas Eve service, because I remember straining to see the pageant up in the chancel, to see Mary in her beautiful blue robe. I was only three and a half years old and my mother, my two younger sisters and I were sitting far back in church.  A kind gentleman (as my mother would say) sitting near us allowed my sister Linda to stand on his lap so she could see better. (I think this is true.) But I had to stretch my head and shoulders high to see between all the heads in front of me, and I was disappointed. 

At home, a two-story white house down the street and around the corner from church, I'm sure we'd been getting ready for Christmas. That would have been the year that Linda stepped on Baby Jesus and crushed him. We cried—but that's another story. On Christmas Eve we came back home from church and discovered that Santa had come to our house while we were gone. Daddy must have slid off the organ bench quickly after the final hymn and hurried home to get the presents out of their hiding places.

I picture all of this now as if it's a movie set in the 1950s -- the church-going version of "A Christmas Story," with little girls in Christmas dresses, church shoes and wool coats. The photo of that old church in Saginaw fits right into the production design.

But what of it? What now? What plans does the Lord have in store for this church, for Christ's church?

Eighteen months of pandemic have changed the pace of change everywhere. Children's progress in math and reading has slowed down, as measured on standardized tests. Other kinds of changes have accelerated, especially our society-wide awareness of disparities between rich and poor, white and black and brown. Church attendance, church affiliation -- these measures of religious behavior have been declining for years in many denominations. 

And then there's the whole planet in the grip of climate change. heat waves, flooding and wild fires.

Hope is a moving target. God lives in the future. 

Thank you to Jim Gladstone for the photos.

Attachments

Sage in the foreground, chives in flower at left. 

 

"I respect you," I said to the armload of thyme plant as I lifted it away from the ground. 

"Thanks for taking one for the team."

I dropped it into its new hole in the garden, at the base of the grape vine, three feet closer to the garage. Moving it was like picking up a pile of books and papers just as it lies on the table or couch and lifting it, unsorted, over to the desk—though the thyme holds together more stubborly. It's a felted mass of tangled stems, tiny leaves and, in late May, even tinier purple flowers, that has been rounding its way out onto the patio and any other empty space it finds. It smells like cooking—the seasoning for roast chicken or turkey or Thanksgiving dressing. In its new home, it needs patting down or maybe a comb-through to pull out the dead leaves from last. It will settle into in its new space soon. I'm pretty sure this mighty plant is indestructible. 

And yeah, I'm talking out loud to an herb, ascribing a personality to it and apologizing for bumping it out of its bossman place. I have attachments to this little patch of dirt.

Moving the thyme made room for last-year's lavender to grow, and for a second lavender plant and a marjoram and the dill that was already half-dead in the pot and might not come back. I'll have to trim the sage back just to be fair but not right now. It's got tall spiky purple flowers, where a few minutes ago I saw a hummingbird. 

I would not want you to think I'm a gardener. On a lot bigger than most of my neighbors' I have less than 40 square feet under control. My lawn is made of dandelion stems, waiting only for a strong wind to seed the neighbors yards. Last week I bought some new hostas for a shady spot next to the house, but there's a significant aching-back worth of weeds to pull out there before I can plant them.

Lots of birdsong in the backyard this morning. I'm just happy to be here with my herbal friends. 

The server is down -- until tomorrow

I arrived at the oral surgery office today, three minutes late for my appointment. When I went to check in at the desk I was told, "The server is down," and then asked, "Have you been here before?" A few minutes later I was told they would have to reschedule my appointment, which, of course, they could not do right then, but only when the server comes back up. 

I wondered what message the office person, in her colorful scrubs, with her pink clipboard and heavily (but beautifully) mascara'd eyes, was getting from the half of my face above the face mask. I'm pretty sure my eyes and forehead conveyed a full measure of irritation and unhappiness. It's not like they were telling me, good news, I wouldn't have to get this tooth pulled after all!  

(If you're asking why computers going down means you can't pull a tooth -- I dunno -- probably something about images stored on the server from an earlier visit to a different office of the same practice.)

By 2:30 this afternoon, the appointment time, I had invested approximately 20 hours of dread in this trip to the oral surgeon. And yes, I am counting hours spent dreading the appointment while sleeping and not sleeping, as well as the usual waking hours. There are many layers to this. I am not new to having teeth pulled (nor to root canals). Dragging myself through this includes the yuck of standing in line at the pharmacy to pick up after-appointment prescriptions with my mouth still stuffed full of cotton. Also, tooth decay and gum disease are reminders of mortality to me. My mouth is dying faster than other parts of me. (Read more: "Dust to dust" from Ash Wednesday 2006.)

It was a beautiful April afternoon -- delicate green leaves just emerging in the trees overhead against a soft blue sky. I am not without blessings, including friends who listened to my griping and returned more sympathy than I deserve. Instead of the milk shake I was planning to have for diner, I've enjoyed a chopped salad, a chocolate chip cookie, and an Edmund Fitzgerald Porter. 

It's been a long year of COVID worry, isolation, and inaction. Just like the seven-year-old version of me, I'm looking for a good ending to this story.  But it's in process; we're barely able to draft the story of how we come out of this, while trying to figure out how we join up that story with the one we were telling back at the beginning of 2020. 

Roadblocks appear -- today, for me, a cancelled dentist appointment, and yeah, much bigger problems in the big world in which I play only a bit part. I guess we wait until morning, when we're back online again, and get back at it. 

Quietness of evening

 

I sat outside for a while after the sun set tonight, through twilight and into darkness. 

At first I was listening. There was lots of birdsong while there was still a bit of light and a blue sky. Not just insistent cardinals, but lots of different sound.

All day the sound of nail guns echoed through the neighborhood, as roofers replaced a roof across the street. They worked until it was dark and finished the job. The pounding faded to the sound of engines idling as they loaded their tools and ladders into a pickup and a van. One drove off, and a few minutes later, the other. I hope they went home to good suppers and people glad to see them.

The birds stopped. Silent dog walkers passed, bicyclists with their headlights glided down the middle of the street, passing an 8pm jogger. I listened to silence all around me and sounds of traffic in the distance. I breathed carefully as I tried to quiet my mind. 

News websites everywhere are full of stories about coming out of the pandemic. Personal growth stuff like how to hang onto the good habits that helped you hang on through the last year. Big picture stuff like has the nature of work changed for good? And much more, as they feed on each other. I click on headlines but seldom read to the end. 

I did follow one thing today all the way through, and I think it's what inspired my evening efforts at quiet: Who We Are Now, in the New York Times, with comments from readers about how they've been changed by the pandemic. Pretty photos float down the page with short quotes and a few longer stories from people who faced fears and worse and who seem to be deciding as they described their lives, to be okay. 

It's takes some work to be quiet, to listen and be still as the darkness falls. More than once I had to turn my phone off and over after restlessly clicking it on and looking for something to get the hit of dopamine. Thought for a minute about getting a bowl of cornflakes to help quiet my mind. (Helpful, I find, when awake at 3am.) I called my monkey mind back more than once to enjoy some peace and positivity before it wandered off again. And of course now, writing, I'm trying to experience that quiet again from my living room chair, wondering who I am now.