Christmas
Christmas is sentimental 100%. It’s the time we all “remember the birth of Jesus.” Nobody honestly pretends to believe that Jesus was born the 25th of any month in any world’s winter. But we all think about Jesus December 25th and the more we do it the more comfortable we get with it and the more it becomes important to us. I’ve been “remembering the birth of Jesus” on December 25th for 30 years. A handful of those days stick out with their differences--Nigeria, near Dallas, stuck in Colorado snow, one without Anne--but this one sits far upon a mountain of differences. The differences have been teasing me the last few days but I didn’t really think about them until last night at church. Bill Frey, former Bishop of Guatemala and Colorado now retired in San Antonio and visiting Uganda, preached simply about the extraordinary manner of the coming of Jesus and compared it in gravity to the death and resurrection and ascension. I learned some things about Jesus. But those things had nothing to do with Christmas. The Pine Ridge Baptist Church sign is right and Jesus is the Reason for the Season, but you realize when you’re without your family in Africa that the reason the season’s so special is you and your family have made it into something.
Me and my family have made it into something as vital and unconsciously beautiful as unacknowledged blood flowing safe in humble veins. We’re together in the house. We know we’ll be together in the house for Christmas every Sunday through Sunday of every week of the year since the Christmas before so when we’re there we’re not hugging and jumping all over each other--we’re sitting, lounging, talking, watching movies, listening to songs, remembering without trying things that we remember without trying every year when the weather’s a little cooler and the house smells salty and dark like Party Mix and cranberry sweet like Christmas jam, and the lights reflect on the college football or basketball or cooking shows or chorale concerts or parades. The house contains a different place than it usually does. It’s the same place once contained at 32 Mitchell Avenue and on a compound in Jos and at 1156 Vail Circle and 1157 St. Mary’s Road and at 673 and 667 Mitscher Drive. It’s been constructed by all of us together without plan or intention with our minds on parents and brothers and sisters and brothers and sisters-in-law and grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews--some brand-new on Earth and some already in Heaven--and our minds on the small pieces of the unconscious construction we remember missing once or twice and the big pieces we remember missing hard once or twice and the way we do appreciate those things even more when they’re here, and our minds on what we know and what we remember learning about the Holy Nativity while our eyes are on the ceramic nativity that’s as old to our construction as the real manger is to Bethlehem, and our hands on or not far from some food made by the woman most vital to the construction, who sits somewhere near with her legs under the brown and white afghan woven thick by another vital woman many years before--woven to warm--to cover children awake and asleep for years until the children are too big to share and then until the children are to long to be covered so it goes back to the legs of the vital woman and the children are covered by whole blankets woven intentionally by other older vital women. All these minds open on specific things and aware of more than they know and these legs covered by the vital blankets of necessary and unnecessary comfort welcomed ten years ago a new mind with new memories and new understandings of the Holy Nativity--young understanding of Truth in Jesus--and that honest mind fit perfect into the construction that had unconsciously been ready for it since it’s beginning. And that new mind and body eventually brought with it another new little beautiful mind and body that changed the construction completely in ways none of us knew to ask or hope for and now there’s an even newer beautiful mind with a body not so little and a life begun to grow just as vital as all the other lives lived and known and remembered in the couches and chairs of the unconscious construction.
Ma with the afghan and sweatpants and my mother’s knowledge of who I am and my mother’s smile, Dad with the Bible and the finger in Luke and humble eyes not afraid to get red and wet, Anne with the gifts and the gift of giving and the gift of loving and comforting the children God’s given life, Corey with a soul full of honest love for and service to anyone God tells him needs it and as grateful as he is humble to also receive it, Rosalyn ecstatic about every happy minute not knowing she’s learning more now than she ever will about Love and Truth, and Jacob receiving eye-fulls and mind-fulls of first-time Love and Truth from the people on Earth (minus one) bound by will to do anything to deliver all the Love and Truth to him that God will allow. The place where all that is happening is the only place on Earth I want to be.