When Christmas Hides

Has there ever been a less Christmas-y Advent? I sure can’t remember one.

Even during times of great sadness and crisis, we’ve always allowed — I daresay welcomed — the season to comfort and encourage us.

I remember a time in the 1970s when I spent most of the day at the newspaper office. My family and friends were all far away — it was a college town and I was a townie. I was the only one at the paper — someone had to be — and the feeling was a little melancholy. Of course, melancholy is just one tick-mark away from sentimentality, followed by longing. It’s a continuum, and we can move along it as easily and as quickly as the violinist can move up and down the fiddle’s neck, each tiny increment changing the tone.

I turned on the radio, a little after noon, to Paul Harvey’s show. The good one, not “The Rest of the Story,” which wasn’t that good and which was often inaccurate. No, I listened to “Paul Harvey News and Comment.” It had a homey, midwestern flavor and brought with it memories of summer lunches with my grandparents, who always had it on, so there was an innate warmth to it.

On this particular Christmas the broadcast concluded with the story of a department store Santa Claus somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. The store where he had assumed the role year after year was near a school for little deaf children. He had despaired his inability to communicate with them. So he had taken lessons in American Sign Language ever since last Christmas, and now he delighted the kids by being a Santa who could hear their Christmas wishes.

The purpose of telling the story was to get tears wending their way down our cheeks. It was effective, at least in that newspaper office that day.

I think that most people would have such a reaction. I hope so, but I’m not so sure this year. Our taste for the milk of human kindness has been replaced by bitter bile. More and more we seem to believe that our strength is in our hatreds. We are encouraged in that direction by “leaders” who profit from our dissension and anger. Where once we had a warm and caring president extending holiday joy, we now have the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters — seemingly welcoming but in fact motivated by selfish and evil intent. And supporters who claim that it is all in the name of Jesus.

Looking around, it is difficult to see cause for hope. Averting out eyes from one awful situation we glance at something even worse. Good cheer seems unavailable.

There must be a reason we’re given the choice of faith. Faith is a good thing to have always, but it’s a happy luxury when we think that all is well. Yet when we’ve embraced it during good times, when gratitude is easy, we find its comfort more readily when hope is distant and times are ominous. We rightly anguish over those who will begin Christmas Day with no real reason to assume that they will be still alive at day’s end, who have become accustomed to the arrival of fiery death from the sky because some miserable man who has power believes — what does he believe? I can’t imagine the motivation. I hope you can’t, either. (I don’t name him, because the description fits several people, doesn’t it.)

For much of this year, like the faint stench of a moldering compost heap someplace upwind, the air has been filled with a faint but justified sense of dread. It has been difficult to escape and impossible to escape entirely.

Though comfort is his job, I was surprised to find it a few days ago in something said, almost offhand, by Pope Leo. It’s useful to any believer, Catholic or not.

Asked what inspires his own spirituality, Leo pointed to a slim (though dense) volume written by an obscure, shoeless Carmelite monk 350 years ago. When I heard a report of his comment, I was well and truly startled.

More than 20 years ago, when during difficult times I was considering conversion to Catholicism, I received a copy of the book from a good friend. Robert T. Miller was and is a respected lawyer and professor and a thoroughly good man, someone whose spirituality is not of the trendy, “I’m a very spiritual person” style but the real thing. The Practice of the Presence of God, by Brother Lawrence, was to be taken seriously, if Robert recommended it.

It is not an easy book, but the difficulty, I found, was not in its text but in me. When we think of the contemplative life, the image that comes to mind is that of the bearded fellow dressed in rags and living in a cave. (I do not think of such people as especially contemplative, because most such persons are victims either of a terrible world around them or of their own poor choices. John the Baptist was unique.) The contemplative life, it seems to me, is yes, one of thought, but as much one of awareness. Brother Lawrence teaches us to be constantly aware of, well, God’s presence and to act accordingly.

A couple of days ago I learned that there is a new translation of Brother Lawrence and that Pope Leo wrote an introduction to it.

“The path Brother Lawrence points out to us is simple and arduous at the same time,” the Holy Father writes. “Simple, because it requires nothing other than constantly calling God to mind, with small, continual acts of praise, prayer, supplication, adoration, in every action and in every thought, having as our horizon, source, and end Him alone. Arduous, because it demands a journey of purification, of ascetic discipline, of renunciation and conversion of the most intimate part of us — of our mind and our thoughts even more than of our actions.”

That is a very tall order. I certainly haven’t achieved it. I will never achieve it. Getting right down to it, one of my manifest shortcomings is that I am not sure that I want to achieve all of it. Heaven, we are told, is where we devote ourselves to praising God, all the time. I confess that the prospect, from my current, earthly vantage point, does not hold the appeal to me that perhaps it should. Frankly, it sounds a little bit like being in the Trump administration, where one must spend his days in adoration of Trump. Though perhaps that praise comes in gratitude, appreciation. That sounds pretty good to me.

We are here because of God and, God knows, we fall short in even the simple part described by the Pope. Holy mysteries are mysteries for a reason.

Over the years I’ve come to think of this life as the nursery school, not even kindergarten, of our full existence. Some time, in a place where there is no time, I suspect that we will think back on our lives as we now know them in the same way that we’d approach finding a second-grade test our mother saved. The errors are funny and we’ve now learned better, but oh, how important that test seemed at the time. Let us hope, and pray, that things that seem so big now diminish in importance when the wholeness of time is revealed to us. And let us remember that getting the spelling wrong in the test may have burned the correct spellings into our minds more than the ones that were just correct guesses.

I’ve gotten some things from Brother Lawrence that I’ve absorbed, imperfectly but mostly. One is the constant or near-constant awareness of God’s presence. The second is an intermittent but improving sense of gratitude. For every child born, there are millions who are not. I was, and you were, and we cannot take that for granted. We, like it or not, have a relationship with God. His presence cannot be turned off, even if maybe sometimes we’d just as soon He not be watching.

It is relatively easy, if we want it, to be constantly aware of Him.

Two anecdotes come to mind that soften it. One is the story told of Pope John Paul II (I think it was John Paul II; it may have been Benedict), who managed during his papacy to get a car door slammed shut on his hand. Wincing in pain, he is reported to have said, “Thank you, Lord, for loving me in this way.” It cannot have been said without at least a little irony.

The other and more famous one involves St. Teresa of Avila. She is said to have been riding a horse, pulling a small cart, in the rain. The horse stumbled, the cart got a wheel turned sideways in a rut, she was tossed to the ground, and all her possessions were swept away in the roadside stream. Looking skyward, she said, “If this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder you have so few of them!”

The two stories are striking to me, not that we can assume such familiarity with our creator but instead that such familiarity is possible. Our concern then becomes striving to be worthy of it.

It might seem simply to be salve against an increasingly imperfect world. But salve might be what we need. We might need to be reminded that we are children of God and not God Himself. In becoming tragically aware of the error of other people’s ways, we might look to our own imperfections, perhaps through our perpetual remembrance of God. There is room for both, maybe.

Though the date is more traditional than certain, Christmas is the time when we can and must remember that no matter the date there was a time when the Word — God in the form of Jesus — became flesh, and dwelt among us.

So let’s remember to have a grateful Christmas, a time when the things of the world do not consume us.