Decorating

 

Christmas begins in the McKirachan house, after Thanksgiving with the migration of angels, flocks of them, fleets of them, a veritable population of the winged beings.  There is a troop of Santa’s too but the rooms are transformed by the representations of the multi-dimensional messengers.  It’s more than tradition, it’s like the leaves changing color.  It’s a seasonal reality. 

This year, after discussion with my wife, we decided to begin the migration earlier.  Such a simple change.  But it’s like a snow storm in August.  It’s unnatural.  But  I’m sticking to it.  The boxes and tins are coming down from the attic.  And the messengers are intruding into our space.  I guess that’s what it’s all about.

Behold the days are coming.

Where’s Christmas?

Here we are a whole week into Advent and we’re already up to our ears, eyes, nose in just about everything except the gift that is coming.  Christmas is a celebration of something so far beyond our logic, beyond our sentiments, beyond our cookies and tinsel that it is ridiculous to even consider the limits of our frenzy as we approach the experiences described in the Gospels.  And the ordeal of our celebration leaves us with anything but hope, peace, joy, or love. 

Yet we yearn for Christmas.  And as we reach toward something more than tinsel perhaps the yearning itself, reaching toward something more, something beyond all the dead ends that we’ve lived with, invested in, been disappointed by, perhaps that  yearning is what the holy day is about. 

Perhaps the words of the prophet of ‘Comfort ye my people…’ reach toward more than treaties and disarmament.  Perhaps they point toward the hurt we carry away from hard words from a friend, from Christian leaders forgetting vows of reconciliation, from people using love and punishment in the same sentence, from all the moments we’ve neglected the least of these. 

Prophetic visions see far beyond this or that moment.  They reveal a landscape that is founded in a reality beyond time, bound in mystery.  They speak truth that cannot be pinned down with calendars or three dimensional measurements.  If we to hear the prophet speak, really hear him we need to look beyond our small specificities into the cloudy places of the heart.  Out there where we yearn and dare to believe that the angels sing to us.

And ye beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low

Who toil along the climbing way, with painful steps and slow

Look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing

Oh rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.

 

Being a Fan

 

Each season I look forward to football season.  So call me a testosterone addled idiot.  Worse, I’m a Giants fan.  I have a strange relationship with this enthusiasm.  The team has always been a strange mixture of clumsy and sad stirred in with amazing miracle workers.  They seem unable to be consistently good, but have been known to pull off impossible victories against a seeming landslide of impossible opponents.  It’s hard to watch some of the games.  Moments of victory turn into moments of tragedy.  And then back again.  It’s probably not that good for the adrenal system.  I know some people who refuse to watch the games.  I can understand that.  But Big Blue is my team.   

Such loyalty is a strange thing.  But it is instructive.  It allows me to understand the value of identity more clearly.  It has little or nothing to do with success.  It has more to do with a consistency, a willingness to be faithful in the face of even embarrassing defeat. 

I would hate to be predictable.  But, by claiming some bits and pieces of reality as ours and sticking to them, we establish a home in this here and now, which is mostly defined by change.  The question is, what bits and pieces will we choose?  Some of that decision must be carefully weighed, ethics and practicality, spiritual truths and the hope of the Kingdom of God, not to mention how it touches the least of these are all critical.  And then there’s the extra wing nut that doesn’t seem to match the functioning of the machine.  It’s part of who we are. 

Call me what you will, I’ll still be a Giants fan.  And someday, against impossible odds, we’ll be stunned to watch them win another super bowl.  For whatever that’s worth. 

Go Big Blue!

Sick

I’ve spent a good amount of time sick and in pain.  Let’s have a collective awwww…  I find it interesting all the different kinds of limitations sickness and pain dump into our living.  They slow us down, they get in our way, they confine us to prisons of beds and hospitals, and in worst case scenarios end our lives. 

But during a recent go round with a bug, one I’ve been blessed with before, I realized something else about such situations.  A pawl falls over our existence, limiting our ability to focus on anything but the plod between the bed and the bathroom.  Sleep is unconsciousness, and not much different than the strange twilight of being awake.  And time becomes a very strange tangle.  Memories of what was and is and things that are imagined, the order of events, time itself are tangle and swirl like a half melted chocolate fudge sundae.   

Fatigue that is based on physical exhaustion and boredom allow us to simply lay back into our illness like mud, clogging any possibility of moving, thinking, or appreciating.  It’s taken me a lot of years to realize how limited we are when we’re sick.  It think we tend to forget it when we climb out of bed and reenter our lives.  I guess we can learn even when we’re submerged in the body’s battle with bugs.  I hope I’ll remember this next time I visit or see someone who’s where I’ve been recently.  It’s nice to climb out of the mud.