"Christ is born.
Christ is born.
Christ is born."
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel
"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
--Thomas Hardy
This year at midnight found me sitting in and emergency room. Everyone is fine, my father-in-law's wife bumped her head getting into the car, and given her symptoms and medical history, it was better to be cautious and have it checked out. Everything came back clear so that was good.
ReplyDeleteFor many years, midnight would have found me tucked into the choir loft with a host of other singers and musicians. The idea was to time the service so the passing of the lit candles, an the singing of Silent Night would fall right at midnight. It was always a very moving moment. This year was not a transcendent moment of light and music (although there had one earlier in the evening as the lights darkened in a white clapboard church on a New England green, as the candles were lit and the bell choir quietly began Silent Night). It was far from that revenant picture we want to paint of a dark night with shepherds, cows and sheep surrounding Mary and Joseph leaning over a baby in a manger in a little town far from the center of anything.
This was instead a city emergency room, brightly lit and filled with patients and efficiently bustling hospital staff. Machines beeped and issued warnings, doctors and nurses darted in and out of curtained off rooms. At exactly midnight according to my cellphone connected to towers and the world, I was in a chair waiting for my father-in-law's wife to returned from scan. I sat there trying to find the connection between that day over 2,000 years ago and today. What did it mean for this baby to arrive into this world, for Advent and to prepare for this baby to arrive at this Christmas day that is just a few minutes old.
I too want to set off that day and this moment. To make the creche on the mantel, separate and isolated from the wold. But that is not what happened, as both sermons reminded me (I got to hear a more broad one at the Unitarian church and a more Christ centered one later at the Congregational Church), the baby arrived in the real world. A world where this in power could demand that a 9 month pregnant teenager travel a long and difficult journey to be counted. Where poverty was everywhere, where magi travelled home by a different road so as not have an infant killed by those that felt threatened of their power. Jesus arrived in the real world, not an idyllic world.
The infant arrived again this year into the real world of the sick and dying, on a bitterly cold night where the unlucky, the sad and the lonely found themselves in this antiseptic place of high technology machines as far from a dirty stable as imaginable. In a world that still is in desperate need of saving. Of an ER waiting room where as we left, 5 or 6 police officers where walking in and out. One was kneeling down to talk to an old man in a chair, while another stood talking to a young woman with a puffy, tear streaked face, with words "and then when he punched you..." drifted by as we exited at 2:00 am.
This was going to be a memorable Christmas Eve, but as I sat here writing it became clear it will be memorable for the right reasons, for the most Advent of reasons.
Peace to all this Christmas Day.