My mother gets cranky about the crowds at church on Christmas and Easter. I get the feeling, though she might not put it this way, that she thinks you need to earn your seat at Christmas by showing up the rest of the year. But I am going to Mass tonight with a person who is emphatic about not going to Mass most of the time, and I am grateful that there's something about those celebrations that draws the reluctant and the skeptical.
Last night at choir practice the altos and tenors were picking their way through their parts in It Came Upon The Midnight Clear, and I was thinking about the third verse: O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing. Maybe the people who will be there tonight after a long time away will be thinking they're there to please family or to satisfy a dubious obligation. But I wonder if it might be an echo they're hearing, a little snippet of angel song pulling them into the crowded parking lot.
And so I hope that I can keep my own ears open, listening for those strains of angel song. I hope I can remember to be patient with the parking situation, and the seating situation (it helps that I'm singing with the choir tonight), and the communion line situation. This morning at the gym I was reflecting on the gift of desiring God, and it left me a little wobbly with gratitude. I am so grateful, too, to serve an open-handed God; I really want to be generous as I go to celebrate his generosity.
The wobbliness at the gym was partially fueled by low blood sugar and by seasonal blues. In the early part of December I was congratulating myself on my relative sanity. Wasn't it nice that I was feeling so calm about things? Wasn't it nice that I was recognizing shreds of seasonal crazy as, you know, crazy, instead of being whipsawed by them? Imagine the crazy lumbering after me, dragging its knuckles as it loped along determined to catch me. About a week ago it tapped me on the shoulder, panting, "Didja miss me? Didja? Didja?"
The place where I'm most likely to get sucked in by the crazy is in my self-perception. Last night I was trying to pull off a birthday celebration for Stella in time to get to choir practice. She had requested a castle cake, iced in ivory with ribbons and tall candles. I was doing fine with the baking, doing fine with the algebra required to turn a square into a regular octagon, but then I was clotheslined by the piping bag. I made my sad little rings of cockeyed shells, lamenting the too-warm cake and the too-soft icing; I made squishy rosettes in lieu of actual roses; I wound gold ribbon with a wincing awareness of the gulf between my version of the cake and the picture in the cookbook. I will not reproduce my inner monologue here; perhaps you can imagine it. But then, you guys, the kids came in. And where I saw only shortcomings, they looked with loving eyes on an offering made in love. "It's amazing," they said. "You," said my husband in a voice both tender and stern, "are always too hard on yourself."
I think that anything I offer to God is bound, in the big picture, to look more like the catawampus crafting of a kindergartner than the crackerjack creation I conceived. I write this, though, sitting next to a tree covered in ornaments made by kindergartners. I treasure them, of course.
A week ago we marked the end of the 10-week Alpha course that kicked off our parish's new RCIA program. I agreed to help with a measure of reluctance, but it turned out to be one of the highlights of the fall for me. It prompted me to begin a difficult daily practice, of sitting with open hands and inviting God in. It feels like work, you guys; it's really hard. But in that discipline of opening, of emptying, I believe peace and transformation are waiting for me. The secular world will not believe our claims about peace on earth if we lack peace in our own hearts. So this season when God emptied himself to open a door for us -- it seems like just the right season for emptying and opening.
I was listening to The Messiah this afternoon while I made pots de creme, and I was thinking about those beautiful words at the beginning: every valley shall be exalted. I was thinking about how the low places are temporary and the rough places, the irritations in our life, can smooth us out, if we let them. December presents plenty of opportunities for being smoothed, does it not? I am wishing you a peaceful Christmas, and a joyful heart, and as I head off to cook our Christmas Eve dinner I am still thinking about Isaiah's exhortation: Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
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