Jesus Has Come!

It’s funny how much we think about what’s missing at Christmas time: friends and family who aren’t here, things in our lives that didn’t come to pass, things that did and left us feeling empty. It can leave you feeling like a bit of a Grinch if you don’t feel the holiday cheer. Sorrow, darkness, anxiety – the opposite of the Christmas story, no?

The Nativity stories tell us that this is precisely what Christmas is. Christmas is about a woman scared of what is to come; about a man who doesn’t understand what has happened; about lonely shepherds in a field; about a difficult and dangerous journey undertaken at someone else’s whim; about a couple desperate to find a place to bear their child. Our sad and empty feelings are exactly the place in which the Christmas message appears.

These last weeks, we’ve been calling on God in our prayers to return and rule the world, to free us from darkness and pain – our Advent prayers expect us to be experiencing these difficult feelings. Sorrow, waiting, hope. Waiting in joyful hope for the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The joyfulness is in the hope, and not necessarily in the lives we’ve been living.

Our community in particular has experienced a great deal of loss and sadness. We’re faced with the reality that none of us will be getting our Christmas hug this year. Forty days ago, we celebrated our first Mass after Father died, some of us learning for the first time that God had taken him from us the morning before. Forty days we’ve been in the desert. What have we been preparing for? What, like Elijah, have we been calling for? Where have be been journeying to, if not the promise of the Lord?

Today is the forty-first day: today, as our Savior is born for us, we are coming out of the desert. Tonight we light candles in the darkness and see anew in the glow of that flame.

That promise – that light in the darkness – is fulfilled, the answer given to us in the Nativity story. Although Mary is troubled and afraid, so scared of what will happen to her that she hides at her cousin’s house for three months, she accepts God’s promise and is given a beautiful baby boy. Joseph, who is angry and confused, listens to the message of an angel and enters into the greatest story ever told. The shepherds are gathered together amid tidings of great joy. The Holy Family makes it safely to Bethlehem. In their hour of need, God provides through the kindness of a stranger.

We, too, experience this amazing love and joy, this great gift of light. And it isn’t because we’ve forgotten our sadness, or because we’ve left it behind and no longer feel it, but because God’s promise is fulfilled in the midst of it. Christmas is about those feelings, that sorrow, darkness and anxiety, and about how God embraces those feelings – those moments – in something greater. A light so great that the darkness did not comprehend it.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Pink Sunday?

So I’m wondering whether or not there is more than one Advent wreath tradition. I went to the local Anglican church today, and they lit the fourth candle, which was the pink one. Apparently it’s the ‘candle of love.’ I didn’t know there was a candle of love aside from the Bethlehem candle (the second one). Also, I didn’t know that ‘pink Sunday’ was, like, moveable. I knew it was optional, but not that it could be relocated from the third Sunday to the fourth. They also lit the white candle in the centre of the wreath.

I am so confused.

On the other hand, their children’s Christmas pageant was very cute. I’ve never seen a pageant that wasn’t on Christmas Eve, so I found it rather odd, but I’m going to just assume that this is an acceptable variation…sure, why not? I guess that’s why the white candle was also lit: Jesus is born!!

That is just so not right…

I keep feeling like I’m living in some horrible dream; not a nightmare, just a kind of stepping through the looking glass, a kind of disconnection of an image between one mirror and the next, something misaligned, distorted or missing. It’s not a nightmare, but a world I’ve fallen into in which I don’t exactly belong. Like a life lived sideways.

Back Off My Sparkly Pink Flower!

One day in November, I was alone in the chapel for evening prayer (I don’t know if I mentioned this before or not, but it isn’t like I’m a stranger to obsessive repetitiveness), which actually doesn’t happen that often. Anyway, so I’m there by myself in this chapel. It’s a very pretty chapel. What do I decide to do?

I decide to sing evening prayer. Not all of it, just the hymns, canticles and psalmody. Got to do the psalmody differently, too: with antiphon, psalm and psalm prayer – bonus! Since no one else has to try and copy me with my no-actual-music, I can do what I want.

After I finished evening prayer, I got one of the hymn books and sang all the songs in it that I knew (except the ones about Jesus dying, which would be liturgically inappropriate, I think), which were depressingly few. Still, having memorized a few of my favorite songs anyways, I ended up staying there quite a bit longer than the usual half hour. It was great!

I realized when I was leaving that I was super happy, which was an interesting and welcome departure from my usual moping and despondency (cue the violins). I think it just felt like…I was doing what I was meant to do, that for a moment things slid into place, that this was what I wanted.

Do you think Medicare would subsidize building a chapel as a medical expense? Hey Medicare: build me a chapel! In the long run, it’ll be cheaper!

Absurd notions aside, it isn’t the building that gave me that feeling, though I must admit the sound was great. The praying, that’s the key…But of course praying can’t be the entirety of my life: I’m not trying to be a twelfth-century German anchorite mystic.

More’s the pity.

There are other things that make me happy in my life. I mean the kind of happy that is just pure and unreasonable – that is, there’s no reason at all for such a thing to make me happy like that.

I really like snow globes. I gravitate toward them in stores. I keep forgetting about how much I like snow globes until I’m actually standing in front of them. *happy sigh* I like the sometimes-sparkly little snow and the way it drifts down after I turn the snow globe over. I like watching it settle. I like looking at the little scenes inside of it. Simple snow globes are the best: easy to turn over, simple enough little worlds within them, a perfect little image. Thus, I am somewhat annoyed by complicated snow globes that try to integrate multiple scenes and globes in the same structure. You know, like the dragon and wizard war ones where the dragon and the wizard are in separate bubbles that are stuck on the same unwieldy base, which is also thematic. You can’t watch both at once. One bubble per globe is enough for me. Though a snow globe may come with the ability to play pretty little music, I almost never wind it up.

So far, I have prayer and snow globes.

I also really like balloons. If snow globes make me a kind of relaxed happy, balloons are their excited brethren. People don’t randomly give each other balloons nearly often enough (I don’t randomly give people balloons, either, mostly because I’m afraid they won’t want them). I love getting balloons. *happy dance* I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because they’re so innocent and joyful all by themselves. Helium balloons are so cool! I admit that the tin-foil looking balloons shaped like other things (a heart, for example) kind of annoy me. This doesn’t make any sense because I think balloon animals would make me happy – I haven’t actually had any, but they seem like so much fun in the movies.

One of the saddest things I ever saw was…you know those garbage cans with the round hole in the top that you put things through, that’s a bit smaller than the circumference of the actual can? The reason for these holes and discrepancies is mysterious to me. Anyway, one day I was walking to the tunnel that connects Place Ville Marie with the Eaton Center, and I saw an upside-down red balloon stuffed into one, part in and part out because it didn’t fit through the hole. I don’t know why it made me sad…there’s just something wrong with throwing out a perfectly good balloon. Letting them up in the air is fine – freedom! FREEDOM!! – but stuffing them into a garbage can just isn’t.

So I’ve got prayer, snow globes and balloons. I think that’s enough.

Which is kind of funny, because I don’t actually have balloons or snow globes, and sometimes even prayer, but somehow just knowing they exist is enough.