As we prepare
for Advent and the new church year, I am trying to figure out the best way to
get myself through a season that now bears painful as well as joyful
associations. It is usually difficult enough for newly bereaved people to make
it through their first holiday season, but I will have a particularly
challenging time of it for two reasons. My wife died last year shortly before
Christmas. What’s more, her fatal stroke occurred on my birthday, whose
proximity to Christmas has always brightened this season for me. Now I need to
figure out how to mark those occasions so as to recognize both the joy and the
horror.
I’ve decided to
start with the lyrics to a song that has moved me deeply
the past few years at this time: Noel Paul Stookey’s “Christmas Dinner.”
And it came to
pass on a Christmas evening
While all the doors were shuttered tight
Outside standing, a lonely boy-child
Cold and shivering in the night.
This, of
course, is the paradox of Advent. A young boy comes into the world, yet it is
not in the midst of plenty but in a poor and meager place because the doors of
those who could give in abundance were shut and barred to keep strangers out. It
is a strange kind of joy that must stand cold and shivering because the night
envelops it, the taint of death ever-present even at birth. But note that it is
of this child that we long to hear, because his predicament touches our common
humanity.
On the street
every window
Save but one was gleaming bright
And to this window walked the boy-child
Peeking in saw candlelight.
Why did the boy
go to the one window that was dark: that seemingly had the least to offer? Yes,
he may have felt himself unworthy, but perhaps there is also something about
darkness that draws us as no mere light can do. Darkness is deep and rich and
welcoming, and the faint glow of candles warms the heart.
Through other
windows he had looked at turkeys
And ducks and geese and cherry pies
But through this window saw a gray-haired lady
Table bare and tears in her eyes.
Why, we may
wonder, is this lady alone? Has she no children, no grandchildren, no family at
all to make this night a time of laughter instead of tears? Or have we simply all
missed her, all in our mad rush to the turkeys and pies whose richness dulls
our senses to the truly lonely, to the ones among us for whom any special day will
yield only a bare table and candlelight? To her the child is instinctively drawn, for he has
no abundance to distract him.
Into his coat
reached the boy-child
Knowing well there was little there
He took from his pocket his own Christmas dinner
A bit of cheese, some bread to share.
Where, I
wonder, did he get that food? Someone in pity must have reached out to him as
he, instinctively, is about to reach out to someone else. The gesture is so
universally human that we may be ashamed to have forgotten it. He who has so
little has had no time to forget.
His
outstretched hands held the food and they trembled
As the door it opened wide
Said he "Would you share with me Christmas dinner?"
And gently said she "Come inside."
In the question
and the answer are stored all the mystery and holiness of the season. The young
boy and the old lady are strangers and opposites, yet they complete each other.
She has the home without joy or sustenance. He has the food without company or
the nurturing presence of another. An old lady should have grateful children,
and a young boy should have loving parents. By reaching out to each other, both
acknowledge their need.
The gray-haired
lady brought forth to the table
Glasses two and her last drop of wine
Said she "Here's a toast to everyone's Christmas,
And especially yours and mine!"
How many
others, we wonder, had toasted that year to everyone’s Christmas? In all the
houses with the turkeys and ducks was such a toast ever heard? Why is it the
lonely old woman and the poor shivering boy who alone (in both senses of the
word) share such a Christmas wish?
And it came to
pass on that Christmas evening
While all the doors were shuttered tight
That in that town the happiest Christmas
Was shared by candlelight.
And now we see
the point of the story. I imagine that the old lady had been mourning the loss
of her family, either to death or to its spiritual cousin, indifference. She
had been crying because this Christmas, for her, was a time of heightened pain
and grief. The boy must have either run away or been, inconceivably, cast out. In
their dinner together, loss and rejection met and embraced, and the result was
the magic chemistry that produced happiness from out of nothing at all: no
turkey, no presents, no beloved children or loving parents, death from cold and
starvation a mere step away.
This year I
will acknowledge that my birthday is a time to honor both birth and death,
because the two are always and inextricably bound together. I will acknowledge
that Christmas is a time to celebrate both joy and loss: the blessing of family
at hand and the deep and lyrical grief of a great love that now lives only in
the past, but whose memory paints hope and comfort on the unknown canvass of
what is yet to come. I will step into that vastness with gratitude. I will live
to begin another year.
