Every Thought...

Week 52: Christmas

How awesome it is to culminate this year, and every year, in the story of a beginning.  And not a boisterous beginning with a big bang of light, but a quiet, predawn, pre-creed beginning in a shed in the back.  Yet from here...


12/23:

Postscript: A Note to the Symposia


The first draft of my Waste Land annotation project was presented in five installments on Stillwater Symposia, a family-run blog.  I waited until after the fifth installment to explain myself:

There!  I have resisted saying anything to you, my family of readers, until after I could give you the whole effort, but now that it is done you deserve a personal explanation.
 
This has been an immersion into education, tuition free and at my own pace, and I recommend student mode revivals to everyone.  What started as an easy end of day pasttime, keeping me away from online Scrabble and television shows, has become a passion, bringing me to dust off old books on the shelves in my home (Hamlet! The Inferno! Ecclesiastes and Isaiah! And, incidentally, a completely new reading of Nemerov’s Blue Swallows!) and then exploring the greater library of the internet.  Without spending a dime, I read all of Plato’s Phlebas and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Hesse’s review of the Brother’s Karamazov.  I have not read the whole of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or seen any of Wagner’s Ring cycle, but I certainly delved into these works more than ever before.  And I have a whole new reading list for the future: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, for instance, or Mallory’s King Arthur.  I was reminded, too, of what Professor Kogan told my English lit class 25 year ago, to go back and read Heart of Darkness at least once every five years or so.

Meanwhile, I have journeyed through the elements and discovered what the thunder said and traveled the April road from Gethsemane to Emmaus.

Before this I had kept a deliberate distance from Eliot’s The Waste Land, thinking it too dark and grim, but I have now discovered how unexpectedly positive this poem really is, full of the audacity of hope, if you will, and drawn by the pull towards an incomprehensible peace.  In fact, it is the arrival at that peace in one of Eliot’s later poems, Little  Gidding, that first led me back to this one.  From that 1943 poem, which is about an allegorical English chapel:

...If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion.  You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report.  You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.  And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying...

It is, sometimes, in the simple word The Waste Land ends with:

Peace.


12/24:

Christmas Eve


It’s cold outside (sometimes)
and it might snow (sometimes)
I feel the wind (sometimes)
but Sunday’s coming.

As we grow old (sometimes)
we drift apart (sometimes)
a thousand miles (sometimes),
but Sunday’s coming.

Memories stir. I hear a song
that makes me smile, and I start singing.

I don’t know where these winds will blow
but I believe that Sunday’s coming.

—

They count on us (sometimes)
though we are strangers (sometimes)
far from home (sometimes)
but Sunday’s coming.

And travel’s tough (sometimes)
and there’s no room (sometimes),
we’re all alone (sometimes)
but Sunday’s coming.

And we take comfort where we can,
and when it comes it ends up being

all we need. Sometimes a few warm words
are all it takes. Sunday’s coming.

—

Lately I feel (sometimes)
I've worked so hard (sometimes)
the whole night through (sometimes),
but Sunday’s coming,

Out in the fields (sometimes),
out in the dirt (sometimes),
out with the beasts (sometimes),
but Sunday’s coming.

I want to hear what shepherds hear,
and see the things that they’ve been seeing.

I want to stand next to the choir
and hear the song of Sunday's coming.

—

We've come this far (sometimes)
from distant lands (sometimes)
to see a child's eyes.
Sunday's coming.

And we've brought gifts (sometimes)
fit for a king (sometimes)
into this country barn.
Sunday's coming.

I want to see what wise men see.
I want to go where they are going.

I want to know the light that leads
to Christmas time and Sundays coming.


12/25:

Festivus, Revisited


Four days past the winter solstice, when
the sunlight hours are at their shortest and
the drive home's darker than it's ever been,
it's good to know that Christ is born, again,

and if that's more than you can comprehend,
imagine those first Christmas moments when
the angels broke the shepherds' darkness and
declared the day and what it meant to them.

God meets us in our fields of fear and sin
and brings joy to the world we're living in
and gives us peace, such peace that even when
the nights seem endless we're assured again

of good news worth repeating now and then:
to us, this day, the son is born, again.


12/26:

Silent Night


This is my wreath: my evergreen circle
    hung on a nail on my front door, closed
    to the world cold, to winds uncertain;
    this is my home, my dependable storm.

Behind this door I live life daily,
    ready to open when friends stop by
    but happy to stay this side of winter
    showing my wreath to the world outside.
 
This is my tree: my forest aroma
    cut from its roots, brought in from the cold
    to where it’s warm and dry, my summer
    green as the grass beneath the snow.

This is tradition marked with tinsel,
    silver and gold reflecting fire.
    I like my tree real, my ice artificial,
    the smell of pine with a touch of stars.
 
These are my lights: blinking and flashing
    my Christmas spirit without a sound
    but every note is filled with passion,
    every word completes my song

and takes the message out of storage.
    After long nights of singing blind
    on lonely streets I am determined
    to light these candles for the world outside.

This is my card: my Christmas greeting
    telling you how I bid you well
    and think of you in this wishful season
    of shepherd’s wake and wisdom’s call,

of peace on earth, forever hoping
    in God come down on a silent night.
    I’ve been a stranger.  You barely know me,
    but this is my chance to make things right.


12/27:

Christmas Vacation


O boatswain, let this be a lesson
  For your children lived and learned
Of hope stirred out of cynicism,
  Grace unsought and love unearned,

That even as the inquisition
  Mocks the shepherd just returned
Or marks the missionary vision
  With a basic truth discerned

Before the mission ever started,
  Far beyond the pasture’s hold,
So too the message angels uttered
  In a field to shepherds told,

And so the glory first imparted
  In a trough, uncounted, cold
And barely noticed, always mattered
  More than Christmas green and gold.

No doubt we need to feel the fire,
  Watch the stars and keep the day
As holy as the world desires,
  Festive, bold and on display,

And certainly we should aspire
  To give gifts as the wise men gave
And to receive from one another
  More than the receipts we save,

But let there be a better lesson
  After all the songs have died
To outlast every brief vacation,
  Make each day we set aside

Endure, let every contradiction
  Stir what’s beating deep inside
And let the challenge of the mission
  Move us, ne'er to be denied.


12/28:

Back To The Beginning


The voice of the Lord is over the waters
— Psalm 29:3
 
Water without bottom,
Ocean without surface,
Creation without distinction:
Poetry without an audience,

Night and day without distinction,
Heaven and earth without separation,
Expanse without wind:
A breath waiting to be breathed,

Volume before substance,
Substance before form,
Form before vision:
Goodness undeclared,

Beginning before beginning,
Theory, Theos, God before the bang.


12/29:

My Doxology


Yes, I will praise God from whom all blessings flow
and by whose strength my every song is sung.

And yes, I think there’s nothing wrong
with letting my convictions show
or testifying to the things I know.

And yes, I’ll sing, and though I’ve learned
the lesson long ago that God is (always) singing
greater songs than I will ever sing,

I will no less keep singing
to the music God has given me
and by the truest notes I know,

and with a voice as providence bestows
I’ll raise my earthly spirit up to heaven
as loudly as the wind allows,

And yes, I will praise God from whom all blessings flow!