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.

Something Other than a Pencil

At four o'clock this morning I woke up with a pencil, a very well sharpened pencil stuck in my right eye.  Actually it just felt like that.  I've had this feeling before and I've tried to figure out exactly what it feels like.  I settled for the pencil.  I use pencils.  The big yellow ones with the erasers on one end.  I sharpen them with my pocket knife.  They're sharp.  That's what it feels like.

It's called Iritis.  It's an inflammation of the iris of the eye.  It's nothing you want to have or have long enough to figure out exactly what the pain feels like.  I wandered around the cabin.  Being on study leave, I'm in a cabin in the woods on the Connecticut River.  So I wandered.  The pencil went deeper.  It usually does.   So, I walked outside, trying to figure out what to do.

I drove to the hospital.  Dumb.  But in the long run it kind of made sense.  I found a mental institution.  Lots of bricks and a pleasant lady who wanted to know if I needed help.  With her and a great amount of grace I wandered into the emergency room.  The security lady asked me "How are you today?"  I took a moment, hand over my eye, spasms shooting into my head as some giggling demon jammed the pencil in and rotated it, just a moment to tell her that I've trained people who visit suffering souls in the hospital to never ask, 'How are you?'  They're in a hospital.  How do you think they are?  Teaching moments abound.

 They were nice to me.  I tried to be pleasant.  The doctor dropped this stuff into my eye that hurt like hell and then took all the pain away.  Wow!  He used a portable version of the thing my eye guy uses to inform me that I had some sort of mark on my eye.  It looked like a twisted knot imprinted on the cornea.  No Iritis.  Good news.  But somehow the druids reached me, in Connecticut.  Go figure.

I have little perspective on this whole thing.  Gratitude per usual.  But who gets a symbol of the eternal connectedness of all things etched onto his eye?  I guess it's better than a pencil.  But sometimes things are too strange to shrug off. 

I apologized to the guard lady.  She told me nobody had ever told her that before, but it made a lot of sense.  She told me it was good advice.  She hoped I felt better.  All that to teach a guard lady?

Luke 17:11-19 You Can’t Go Back

 

I’ve often wondered if I could go back in time, what would I be able to change without altering the future in some unspeakable way?  I’ve heard it called the butterfly effect.  If on our jaunt into the past we smush one butterfly, change something infinitesimal, as days and weeks and years pass, that tiny change would alter the future radically. 

But I’ve known people, myself included, who try to live in the now acting as if parts of our past didn’t happen.  We try to forget that moment of weakness or arrogance or foolishness.  Some of those moments are so powerful that we wince or worry or dream about them.  They may be buried by the monster dandruff of time and new acquaintances, logistical alterations, behavioral switches, new habits, new jobs, but those moments, those pot holes, those choices, those lapses, those horrors are still there.

Whether we like it or not, now is an amalgam of then’s that are the raw material for now.  No matter how we’d like to make them go away, they are part of the bed rock that our center hall colonial of now is built on. 

When I went to a reunion of my graduating class from High School, it was one of those moments of embarrassment and gratitude all stirred into the same pot.  They all knew me, geek, fencer, football team mascot (a great way to meet girls), singer, proto hippie, etc.  High School was a time of devastating awkwardness and loneliness.  It was full of those moments I would have gladly altered, removed from my time stream like teeth crooked and painful.  But the reunion revealed less pain than nostalgia and an amazing sense of gratitude.  Gratitude for what that time taught me, gave me as tools for the future and in retrospect laughter at our mutual silliness and audacity.  It was an amazing experience, especially since I had a lot more hair than most of the guys.

In my first book I recounted this story from Luke’s gospel about the ten lepers from the point of view of one of the lepers who didn’t go back to thank Jesus.  He couldn’t because he wanted to leave the horror of that part of his life behind him.  But no matter how he tried, it was there, following him, polluting him, holding him back. 

I do PTSD therapy for people who have been through horror and find themselves caught in those moments when the world stopped making sense and caved in on them.  The chief therapy is to get them to walk through the moment again and again until they can allow it to become a memory not a living nightmare.  They have to go back, they have to remember it to allow themselves to face the now.  A now that includes that moment in the past.

We are Christians.  At the center of our faith is the cross, a traumatic horror.  Our job is to embrace that event and accept our culpability in it.  Then we can move on to the Resurrection and transformed life. They are all a part of who and what we are.  They all make the bedrock of our faith upon which we build our hope and our abundant life.  Not only can we go back, we have to if we are to accept ourselves, forgive ourselves and others, and accept the miracle of life and life abundant that blooms before us every day.

At the reunion some of the same tormentors that used to make me sweat tried to pick on me again.  I laughed with them.  There we stood laughing.  But I noticed they were wondering what the heck happened to the geek.  I guess I grew up.

 

The Plague

 

 

Our struggle for survival has been an up and down affair since we dropped from the trees and shambled out into the grass lands.  It’s been a tale of ups and downs in our journey through history, periodically bringing us close to the endangered species list, if there had been one.  Now our numbers seem to pad such edges.  Thousands, even millions might die, but we make so many more, so fast that there seems no end in sight. 

Disease is frightening.  Contagious bugs that move from one to the other touch a cord, if not in our conscious minds then somewhere in memories passed down from ancestors who watched their families and even towns die from the Black Death, or Small pox, or Cholera.  Such specters have haunted us since we stood up.  They sneak into our fortresses, under our gates, past our privilege and bring us down, peasant and king alike. 

Are they punishments for neglecting our God?  Are they cruel tricks of some demonic spoiler?  Are they merely evidence of the vulnerability of all life?  Whatever they may be, they remind us of our fragility and demand that we climb down from our high and mighty attitudes and adopt humility not as a virtue, but as a way of life. 

But far beneath the discussion of cosmic perpetrators lies a more basic issue.  The plagues we fear are dwarfed by our own success at survival.  It has become a plague in itself.  The sixth great extinction that is shutting down polar bears and frogs and corals, bats and bees and bluebirds is not the result of some massive asteroid or even some silent virus, it is the result of the relentless pressure of our infestation of every nook and cranny of our planet, including its seas and atmosphere.  Our light, our heat, our noise, our lack of restraint have created a place where life is struggling to survive. 

It is hard to see ourselves and our off spring as a plague.  But what else can we call it?  Such dark thoughts trouble our dreams and darken our days. 

There is a Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’  Surely that we do.  The challenges of this day seem daunting to a species so young and too powerful for its small measure of wisdom.  Perhaps the impractical lessons that call us beyond our roots of dominance and self-importance, the ones that we are left with when we face Ebola, the ones that are the only options to fear could apply here as well.   We do have options, we always have options.  They may not be easy.  They may demand that we grow beyond the laws of tooth and claw.  They demand that we become more than the ultimate survivors.  They demand that we become truly human, even in these interesting times.

I’m pulling for us.  After all, we invented the cello and pecan pie.