Christmas Presence

Christmas was a time of terrible expectation, during which, for one week prior to the fateful day, our family was confined to the claustrophobia of our winterized home, forced to “spend time together”. For a family who mixed like vinegar and baking soda, this was a cosmic blooper. My siblings and I were out of school for two weeks, but, unlike summer vacation, (with the various distractions of summer camp and summer jobs), during Christmas break, we were snowed in on all sides, cooped up in small, poorly insulated rooms, and forced, by our father, into the manual labor of household chores: hauling wood, sweeping the stairs, picking fleas from our dog Sarah. This was his version of Family Time. My father survived the holidays through work, taking on multiple jobs, double shifts, or implementing odd, complicated, time-consuming chores around the house, such as shoveling two-lane walkways in the snow in the yard, and an escape route to the creek out back, in case of an emergency. He joine...

"In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary," and that is the beginning of a story – a time, a place, a set of characters, and the implied promise, which is common to all stories, that something is coming, something interesting or significant or exciting is about to happen. And I would like to start out by reminding you that this is what Christianity is. If we whittle away long enough, it is a story that we come to at last. And if we take even the fanciest and most metaphysical kind of theologian or preacher and keep on questioning him far enough – Why is this so? All right, but why is thatso? Yes, but how do we know that it's so? – even he is forced finally to take off his spectacles and push his books off to one side and say, "Once upon a time there was...," and then everybody leans forward a little an...

 Let me mention one or two things about Christmas. Of course you've all heard that the animals talk at midnight:a particular elk, for instance, kneeling at night to drink, leaning tall to pull leaves with his soft lips, says, alleluia. That the soil and fresh water lakes also rejoice, as do products such as sweaters (nor are plastics excluded from grace), is less well known. Further:the reason for some silly looking fishes, for the bizarre mating of certain adult insects, or the sprouting, say in a snow tire of a Rocky Mountain grass, is that the universal loves the particular, that freedom loves to live and live fleshed full, intricate, and in detail. God empties himself into the earth like a cloud. God takes the substance, contours of a man, and keeps them, dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion. from  Tickets For A Prayer Wheel by Annie Dillard

Christ climbed down from His bare Tree this year and ran away to where there were no rootless Christmas trees hung with candycanes and breakable stars Christ climbed down from His bare Tree this year and ran away to where there were no gilded Christmas trees and no tinsel Christmas trees and no tinfoil Christmas trees and no pink plastic Christmas trees and no gold Christmas trees and no black Christmas trees and no powderblue Christmas trees hung with electric candles and encircled by tin electric trains and clever cornball relatives Christ climbed down from His bare Tree this year and ran away to where no intrepid Bible salesmen covered the territory in two-tone cadillacs and where no Sears Roebuck creches complete with plastic babe in manger arrived by parcel post the babe by special delivery and where no televised Wise Men praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey Christ climbed down  from His bare Tree this year and ran away to where no fat handshaking stranger in a red flannel suit / ...

RILEY. What I resent about Christmas is the general presumption of good will. I feel no good will towards my fellow men. I feel ill will. LEWIS. It's got nothing to do with how you feel, Christopher. Feelings are far too unreliable.  RILEY. Maybe so, Jack, but they're very close to me. I'm very attached to my feelings. I won't hear a word against them. They're easily hurt. HARRINGTON. I'm afraid Christmas is something of a lost cause, Jack. LEWIS. That depends on how it's presented. If you tell people it's about peace in the world, and being kind to the poor and needy, then naturally nobody listens. RILEY. Aha, the archcommunicator in action! Give us the sales pitch, Jack. LEWIS. "Virgin Has Sex with Omnipotent Alien – Gives Birth To God." RILEY. I've always thought the incarnation proves that God has a severely limited intellect. Who'd choose, voluntarily, to be human, when you have the option of staying safely divine? LEWIS. Think of ...

I've been feeling funny this year. Funny bad. Unsettled. It took Advent to show me what it was. To reveal my heart to me. Something's been going on in me, something I don't like. It seems absurd to say so: in many ways it's been one of the best and most privileged years of my life. Who am I to say something's wrong? All I know is, a life is a big place, a human heart a complex one, and things can be great and not so great all at the same time. And underneath the fertile landscape of my life this year there's been running something subterranean, an underground stream of... Of what? Unease? A groundwater of disquiet?  * When I was a kid we moved to a house on what was then the bare and distant outskirts of Calgary, shoebox houses clad in black tarpaper and wire mesh awaiting stucco. To the south, a dirt track that eventually evolved into Southland Drive; beyond that, open fields and gophers; beyond that, eventually, Montana. Our yard was made of the same stuff as ...