A Christmas Reflection

It’s Christmas 2006. I’m working again fulltime, thankfully, this time for the Dept of Energy and its corps of PhD scientists. It’s a job.

The air is warm here in Oklahoma, cooling at night. My wife’s stepmother and I went out to gather the ice cream. The clouds reflected the light of the city, the light of the moon. Beautiful skies here in Tulsa, this strangely liberal outpost in the midst of right-wing Soonerism. And the ice cream is great.

It’s Christmas, we’re here with my wife’s family. So many things are going well, so many possibilities.

And so many things are ending.

I wish my dad were here. He’d have liked this weather. But he won’t be. We buried him on October 4.

Everything ends, but I figured I would have some more time with him. Figured that he would at least last until it became evident to even us that we would never be able to have kids. But that’s not how things worked out. Talking to him the Friday before he died, I had no idea.

There’s no big thing between us any more. We settled our differences long ago. We probably didn’t have what you would call a good relationship, but then again, you’re not us and you don’t have the personality that we had. No, no big message that I wish I could give him. Just wish I could talk with him one more time, about anything. Or nothing at all. Well, it was normally something that we had either read or about something at his work.

I miss him. More than I thought that I would.

It’s Christmas 2006 and my life has opened up as things I wanted badly have closed down. It was a moment, I couldn’t get people to move with me on it, and those who were given to us to serve have wandered away, some broken, some damaged. Some perhaps the better for it. But only a handful.

The moment itself has passed, as it does. These moments, these points along the flow of your organizational time when you can move to a new place, do something impossible, when the Spirit of God invites you into an impossible work. These moments pass, as all moments do, and everything that came with them, pregnant as they were with the potentialities shared and hoped for, all passed with them.

Like my dad’s life, passing so quickly. An aortic aneurism isn’t a bad way to go, as dying goes. It’s not a great deal of long pain. He was here, my brother and I talked to him, and then he was gone.

It’s Christmas and we are called by our churches to reflect, to remember the incarnation, an event or a happening of long ago. But not so long: when was Jesus born in you? “You are the mother of Jesus,” Visky says. I reflect, and wonder. The old ways have passed. They don’t work any longer. Something radical, to the root, has happened.

It’s a stupid story, of course. God being born of some girl. God having his messengers tell the only people in the community that you, by law, could absolutely not believe. Some sign-watchers coming over from the civilised world because of a star. The killing of some 20-40 children under two, maybe even less. A warning, a flight, a mystery. It’s all ridiculous.

It’s ridiculous to think that a being outside of time would have any interest in us as persons. Ridiculous to think that such a being could imagine us any more than we could imagine an ant. If a thousand years were like a day, what would you talk about?

Here’s the leftover stories of a man that we killed. Had to kill.

Here’s the story of him not staying dead.

Like I said, it’s all impossibly ridiculous. Like the hope of glory.

I sat there with my brothers, sobbing so hard the pew shook. And for the first time, the hope of glory mattered. Heaven was always something that others believed in. I never paid it much mind, even when my friends died. But now, somehow, it mattered.

I’m not much of a believer. I’m not true blue, I’m not someone whom anyone with sense would ever entrust with the Gospel.

The Gospel, it turns out, is no respecter of persons.

Jesus, born so small that we could have crushed him with our fists, crushed out the life from God. Jesus dying for some wild propitiation, dying because he seemed to have a plan about it, a point for it.

They tell me that Jesus died to save you from your sins. And maybe that will work out for you. Me, I’m too far gone to need just saving. Me, I need redeeming. Redeeming of every rotten thing I’ve made of myself, of every rotten thing I’ve done with myself. Because if it isn’t corrupted, there isn’t much left.

Jesus may have died to save you from your sins. He fought his way out of the grave to redeem me, my story, my very essence. To give me new life. To make everything new, every sordid last detail. Redeem my last few years.

You impressed the teachers and the lawyers as a boy with your questions, and your questions confound me still. Everything about you confounds me.

It’s Christmas 20006 and I’m reflecting on the incarnation. I miss everything I am losing this year, moments that have passed.

I miss my dad more.

Merry Christmas.