Light that Darkness Cannot Overcome

It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness At Christmas, New Years, winters solstice there is much talk of darkness and light

The days are short and the nights are long and in this time between Christmas and the new year the trees are still lit and the houses and lawns with their angels and reindeer and wreaths of light still shine in the darkness.

We begin again tomorrow. A fresh start. Take it from the top.

And we carry this past year, and all our past years, forward, with memories, with smiles, with tears, with love and forgiveness and the million moments of grace that once in a while we sit still long enough to feel, and be grateful: graceful.

I have written before of the prayers of monks and nuns whose job it is to keep the lights on. They are professional pray-ers. I am grateful for them and their quiet unseen work, raising incense and chanting prayer with their whole being to God, arguing our case to keep the lights on a little longer. And so far God has agreed.  Despite. In Mercy. In love. In the light that darkness cannot overcome.

In my fivety-five years of living, through all the trials and heartache and joys and uncountable blessings, through loved ones deaths and the miracles of birth, I believe.  I believe in the power of prayer, in the graces waiting to be poured out to us for the asking, and yes, of course, even if we don’t have enough faith to ask, the blessings still flow.

How can I say these things in light of war and starvation and fiscal cliffs and the gunning down of kindergartners and their teachers, and all the misery that only scrapes by the daily news programs?

Because there is love. Love in the little acts of kindness, in the big acts of generosity and heroism. In the blankets wrapped around shivering shoulders. In the gentle touch of my mother’s hand on my cheek, so long ago.  In conversations with my father, who now cannot speak, tethered to a respirator and feeding tube. In the squeals of delight when my grandchildren call out “Mamaw!” when they see me. In the cup of coffee my husband sets up for me each morning.

It is these small acts; all the small acts of love and tenderness, of generosity and forbearance, in kind words and hands held. The list is endless, the love is boundless.  In the face of darkness, we light a candle. And then another and another until we are bathed in the light of love, in the midst of pain, in the midst of tragedy.  It is these small acts of love, of prayer, of faith, of struggle that rise like incense to our God who came to live among us and open our hearts to love beyond understanding.

Keep the lights on. 

Baptism

When I taught Baptism prep classes to parents and godparents way back when, part of my job was to relate the physical elements of the sacraments to the spiritual gifts. God works through the physical as a means of bestowing grace.  I find this a comfort, a reassurance, a reminder of God in the everyday objects such as water, wine, oil and touch as transmitters of a grace beyond our comprehension. Here's a little excerpt from my forthcoming novel:

“How we doin?

“Behind by four. But there’s time. Ohh!! Make that six.”

Jimmy’s face is pointed toward the television. No reaction to the shot. He holds the coke can in his hand. He’s not watching the game. He can’t. They’re way beyond basketball games in search of common ground. His right hand is getting jittery; the left is tucked under his thigh.

“Need a smoke.”

Jimmy goes through the kitchen to smoke on the back porch. First stop is the refrigerator to grab a beer. The long cold drink rushes down his throat, wave after wonderful wave. It hits his belly in a splash, immediately releasing its magic. There’s his old friend. Now he can relax, get his hands steady. He tosses the bottle cap toward the metal can. It pings and misses. He leaves it in the mud.

It’s dark. He turns right, to the aurora of street lamps along Forest Park Drive, to the diluted light pushing its way through the trees that have arbored this area for generations. Wind whips up under his shirt and slaps his back. Jimmy steps out from the awning. A smoldering cigarette in one hand, an empty beer bottle in the other, he raises his arms over his head breathing in the cold, clear, wet dirt smell. His upturned face receives the sharp needles of rain. A baptism.

The wind and rain pick up. A crackle of light breaks blue deep into Forest Park. Thunder reverberates his thin frame, tolling out the bell of him. Somewhere in there, somewhere in here, I still am. I still am.   

Better Angels of Our Nature

The mystic chords of memory…will yet swell the chorus… when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.  From Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address Good ole Abe Lincoln with his quotable words. One set of words that often runs through my mind is from the last paragraph of his first inaugural address: “the better angels of our nature”.

The progression went something like this--I was praying for people, and naturally, on my list were folks who have died, such as ancestors, friends, family, others I have never met in this life. And that led to thinking about who we are once we have passed from this world to the next (‘cause, well, I don’t know about you, but my life experiences and energy attest to the conclusion that life goes on in some form after we have left this flesh behind).

Do we lose all the nonsense when we die and become our better selves? Do these ‘lesser angels’, our baser inclinations to sin versus our better invitations to holiness, joy and love, get sloughed off in the transition between this world and the next?

Then I wondered, hoped, that once we pass on to the next life, in some process I can barely grasp at, like vapors of a dream, I think we will become our better selves. Ourselves, yes, but better. Shinier, more true, unencumbered by faults and sin. Unencumbered by jealousy and resentment and anger, lust and greed. All the big and little faults that separate us from a more perfect life.

And, “mystic chords of memory” in that same speech. Ah, what a beautiful confluence of words. How brilliant was this American saint, this secular holy man of history? Isn’t it memory and imagination that builds us, feeds us, gives us strength to draw on and reminders of what to avoid? Memory girds us when we feel bereft of comfort; it brings to the foreground those moments when we once felt, whether fleetingly touched by the divine or filled with light in every cell of our being. Thus armed, we can endure, we can hope, we can pray.

And, become, the better angels of our selves.

To Bear Witness

This post first appeared on Melissa Embry's blog: nojobforsissies.blogspot.com on July 30  

If you are at a writer’s conference and the first speaker of the weekend shares with you his ‘moment of grace’ where he received his commission in life, you should sit a little straighter, lean forward and tune up your hearing.

Luis Alberto Urrea went on a mission trip as a young man; he came back a writer.

What was this ‘moment of grace’, as he called it? He and his pastor were working among the most forgotten, the world’s cast-offs who lived and died in an actual garbage dump. Young Luis, notebook in hand, was writing his observations, thoughts, scenes, scribbling words on paper that he would turn into story. A resident of the dump asked what he was doing. Writing. About this place? This dump. About me? Yes, about this place and about you. “Tell someone I was here.”

Now, Mr. Urrea did not say that the sky opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him. But novice writer Luis knew that this moment, standing in a cathedral of trash, was his commission, his anointing, his sending forth. He was tuned in to the energy of the moment; he was paying attention. That is what we, as writers, are asked to do. Pay attention, and as my friend, the writer Bill Marvel, likes to say, bear witness.

We are to bear witness to history in its small moments and its large moments. Bear witness to people, to changes in the atmosphere, to changes in attitude. Pay attention to the new and to the ancient that threads through the now. Be an instrument of history, a commentator, a sense maker, a question raiser.

Writers sift through the materials of life and choose a bit of this to expand on, a bit of that to explore. We churn and tumble and wrestle with the stuff of life long after they have moved into silent history and then we snatch them back and give them a place on the page.

“Tell them I was here”’ is our common plea.

It is also our job.

Choirs of Angels?

Several years ago, when our oldest child was in high school and our youngest in elementary, Gene and I came home from our Small Community of Faith gathering to find Katie directing John as he posed as a shepherd for the Christmas card she was drawing. She had him wrapped in a pastel green tablecloth and was instructing him to "look afraid" at the sight of the Angelic Host. He complained, in that youngest child way, why every year his siblings tried to make a fool of him.  They protested that accusation with a defense that they try to make of fool of him every day.

Mike was waving a shillelagh/shepherd’s staff and Daniel was sitting on the couch reading through a skateboard magazine awaiting the director’s instruction.  When it was Daniel’s turn to sit on the stairs that were doubling as a Bethlehem hillside he brought over the magazine and announced that he was studying the “Noble Word”, a new title for sacred scripture, we supposed.  He had an old blanket on his head and a belt from a Ninja turtle costume as the headband.  A large blue sheet was his garment.  Mike was sitting on a dining room chair, still waving that shillelagh and making up a dialect that was a cross between Mel Brooks and Darby O’Gill reacting to the imagined choir of angels, while he was draped in tablecloths.  Katie’s attempt at directing her three brothers to look serious, contemplative and afraid of the celestial announcers of the birth of the savior was not very successful.  No way were they sitting still and going to look anything but goofy arrayed in our best dining table attire.

Ah, Christmas!

It was rather refreshing to be greeted at the door by the sounds of our children laughing and joking with each other. You can believe it was a wonderful change from the almost usual litany of complaints and the call to separate boys mid-fight over some squabble that would erupt as soon as we stepped out for a little adult conversation. This was a benefit of their ever-growing maturity, along with the large sneakers that littered the house.

I knew this was a 'snapshot' moment.   I almost took a picture of them in their silly outfits, but I didn’t, for two reasons.  One was that there are some moments you cannot pose for.  Another, very practical reason, is that we never develop our pictures (this was before we had digital cameras).  We had rolls of undeveloped moments of our family history in drawers and cabinets and shelves all over the house. Why we bothered to say “Cheese!” is one of our family mysteries.  This was something we would trust to memory and imagination:  the four of them laughing and joking and trying to pose as historical figures from the greatest drama of all time in our suburban living room/ hillside of Judea.

I had been nostalgic for Christmas past when we had a house full of young children anxiously awaiting the arrival of Santa on Christmas Eve.  There is no question that those early years of childhood are precious beyond measure with innocence and hope in the generosity of a jolly old saint adding a special wonder to their eyes. It was one of the few nights that we could actually get the kids to go to bed without too many complaints or stalling maneuvers.  They all camped in the front bedroom with the blinds up so they could spy Santa and his reindeer-led sleigh passing overhead.

When morning came too quickly for parents who were up all night helping a red-suited elf display the fruits of the Magi’s legacy, it was impossible to resist the excitement of little round-bellied tots in footy pajamas as they ripped open the mysteries left overnight while visions of sugarplums, or whatever the current new toy was, danced through their heads. Yes, I do miss that.  But, over the years, we have deposited quite a bit in the “remember when” reservoir that adds depth to our definition of what Christmas means to us.

After all that posing and pretend complaining, when Katie produced her initial sketches for what that year’s card would look like, her three shepherds on the hillside all have their backs to us.  There is a flash of angel in the distant sky awakening the sleepy trio to announce the good news, but their faces are hidden.  But I know what they look like.

We managed to get Katie's drawing turned into Christmas cards. If  I had it handy I would post it along with these words.  I'm sure it is somewhere safe in a folder  in the back of my closet. Someday I'll find it and show it to the grand-kids. There's always room for new family traditions.