“… I took my time walking down the trail, trying with each step to leave the world behind. Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart—I don’t know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep. Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.”
January 6th, 2018. Epiphany.
For weeks now I have sat and pondered the eight foot evergreen that made its way into our living room to mark the Advent and Christmas seasons. By any measure it is a fine tree, cut by hand in early December from the grounds of a small local farm. White lights and an eclectic assortment of inherited, gifted and handmade decorations encircle and ornament it. I enjoy the warm, broken glow with which it illuminates the walls against the darkness of these northern winter nights. It is a fine tree. It exudes color, and cheer, and memory. It is lovely. After this, the last day of Christmas, it will be taken down.
A bittersweet moment, always, as the end of Christmas stands as the gateway into the long, cold weeks of deep winter. But in honesty, for all the loveliness of this season I have struggled these past weeks. Struggled for sentiment; struggled for a spark. Contrary to common perception, I don’t actually dislike Christmas. Truly. But with each passing year, it seems, I feel as if I understand it less. Not Christ. Not the incarnation. Not the Gospel of our self-giving, shockingly vulnerable, infant God. These I find nearer and more achingly dear to me with every moment, if that is possible. But the euro-pagan, nostalgia-driven, cultural and retail rituals that mark the American Christmas holiday - from the “Black Friday” rush, to the littered curbsides of December 26th; the trees and lights and endless playlists of sappy seasonal 1950’s pop remixes - while there was a time when the syncretism held for me some measure of warmth and magic, I find in recent years the spectacle has simply left me cold.
I know you will think me terrible, for saying so.
But in the early, gathering darkness of late December evenings, I would sit and ponder the glow of small white lights shining out from amidst tightly packed fir boughs and dangling ornaments. I would sit, and watch, and wait. Wait for a spark, for that sickly-sweet wave of nostalgia to well up within my chest and carry me off to some other place. Wait for that window of memory and warmth and longing to open in time, and draw me into its hazy embrace. But on this night, and through this season, I find no window opens, no whiff of magic carries me off to anyplace. Truth be told, sitting here now, the whole thing just strikes me as strange.
Strange, that we come to all these odd and disparate seasonal trappings in search of the transcendent. Searching for something lasting and profound in our passing, if warm and well-meaning diversions. Strange, that in our wholehearted embrace of what passes for Christmas, we should be satisfied with so very little of Christ. And when the gifts have all been opened and forgotten, the visitors returned to their homes, when the trees have been stripped of ornamentation, laid out and drying on the curb, we are left only to wonder: What IS it that has just happened? What does it mean that it has passed? And, what are we NOW to do? The world keeps on spinning. The moment is fleeting, and cannot carry the burden of enduring significance that we so longingly wish upon it.
Moment is the medium, but can never in itself contain the meaning, of a life. To a human soul, knowing itself to be born for eternity, the inexorable passage of time is experienced as dissonance and absurdity. To stare too long into that void - to ponder the collectively fleeting nature of each and every of our moments - without root or reference beyond oneself is to be simply undone. And so we willfully invest with sentiment and significance these strange conglomerations of seasonal rituals, hoping that nostalgia itself might prove a preservative against the assault of time. And it works, to an extent. But as with any preservative, that which we can save is but a strange, pickled semblance of the once living thing.
Our lives are lived and spent in the currency of moments; inescapably fleeting, and yet a gift, every one. Like breath, they pass through our being and bring life, but we cannot hold on to any single one for very long. Some moments, we are glad to see go. Others, we wish could linger. But, for good or grief, time continues on, each moment passing invisibly through our bodies and leaving us in the process, incrementally, changed.
“Remember that my life is a breath…” - Job.
These fleeting moments, accruing day-by-day into the substance of a human life, are inestimably precious - like a breath - and yet cannot bear enduring value under their own strength. For that requires MORE; an aim, an end, an ultimate and eternal context. And it is into precisely this that Jesus draws us. It is in the reality and revelation and immanence of Christ that we are given the eternal STORY that makes sense of our fleeting stories. In his enduring and incorruptible body, we find one which is capable of capturing and sustaining the gift of each and every one of our breaths. It is the miracle of grace that our fleeting and impermanent moments become the currency, not of mortality, but of our eternality, as we discover in each the invitation to ever-deepening Love and ever-more complete submission to the Lordship and embrace of Jesus.
In the light of Christ; every moment a gift, and every breath an opportunity. Each one a prayer, in fact. And it is in the light of this conviction that I find our syncretistic, nostalgia-driven and nationalistic distractions so dangerous. So easily diverted by the jingling sound and retail fury of our American Christmas, we are tempted to seek transcendence and permanence where they simply cannot be found. And in the diversion, we easily and regularly miss HIM and that which WILL satisfy and sustain us: the Emmanuel, God with us, the Christ, our savior and self-giving King. THIS story, and this Christmas, so tenuously bound to much of what we experience of the season. There is sweetness to our American holiday, and a certain secularized warmth and joy. But the more I fix my eyes upon Christ, the stranger the whole affair seems to me, I’m afraid. Maybe it’s just that, with every fleeting moment that accrues into the substance of my passing and progressing human life, the less I feel I can abide the distraction. I long not for another sickly sweet and momentary diversion, but for that - and for Him - which will last.
For now, small white lights glow through these tightly-packed boughs; ornaments still hang, and the fine, small evergreen stands in the corner, exuding celebration and marking season. Tomorrow it will be taken down, and the moment will have passed.
But He remains.