BitterSweetLife

A Christmas Retrospective

I’m finally breaking my blissful Christmas silence. Three days after the fact, I feel adequately rested and coherent enough to attempt a post. True, our apartment is still formless chaos. Gifts are strewn around, chocolate piled ridiculously high. But as Shakespeare’s Henry V says (with questionable veracity), “All things be ready if our minds be so.” My mind is still harbored in Christmas, but the blogger impulse is tugging at the moorings. And actually, the two motives don’t need to disagree.

On Christmas Eve I discovered that—Surprise!—blogs can actually be relevant to “real” life. I had the opportunity to share a devotional “meditation” at our Christmas Eve service, a chance for us to think deeply about Christmas, and a previous post gave me my theme. I guess this blogging thing isn’t totally unrelated to my waking existence after all.

Christmas Eve became even more unique when Lindsay and I arrived home to a pre-Christmas surprise. If I may offer a variation on some oft-parodied lines:

‘Twas the night before Christmas
and all through the house
scarce an outlet was stirring—
just the ones by the couch.

And so it was. Most of our apartment was without power and we didn’t have heat—Santa had played us a dirty trick. This precipitated* a change in our evening’s plans. After Lindsay phoned the electricity people, she moved her base of wrapping operations into the living room, and I holed up in the study, the only two rooms with light. We put on warm clothing (since it was below zero outside) and waited for the power to come back on, which it did, sometime after midnight. A couple hours later, we had both finished wrapping our presents, doubly grateful for the gifts of Warmth and Light.

In the aftermath of this Christmas, I know that an intent focus on Christ “the Light” is the best way, really the only way, to weather this season. We call it a holiday, but Christmas is bittersweet, a time when expectations are trampled and painful absences become glaring. Christmas reveals an emptiness that no thoughtful gift can fill.

Sometimes we come away realizing that, despite our good intentions, “the world is too much with us,” and “peace on earth” is still only a good idea. Christmas, in truth, is an agent of sobriety. Apart from Christ, this season reveals merely holiday clutter, too many calories, and a billion silent people, wearily lengthening their orbits on a darkened planet. Separated from Jesus, Christmas does no one any real favors. Christ-less Christmas is a season of storms—sadness, irritation, ingratitude, stress and hurry. A cold apartment piled with gift bags but no light or heat.

But with Jesus…the storm of Christmas is Sweet. A hurricane may wreck your house, it may even kill you. And the tsunami of Christ, in a sense, is no different. When he arrived, he brought an ocean of spiritual sea-change, brimming to overflow the world, destroying human pretensions to grandeur. The waves from that arrival are still with us; at Christmas they lap most persistently on the beach of our awareness. If the season is void of Jesus, the flood may leave us cold and shivering. But if we know him, we splash in the waves that reduce us to who and what we really are—human and poor—and leave us ready for a glorious sunrise.


* This word appears in association with the Vocabulary Reclamation Project, which has been revitalized thanks to Norma, who knows a good word when she sees one.

Precipitated: Some may think of rain, snow, hail, etc., and this (precipitation) would not be unrelated. But the thought here is swift causation. Synonyms include “caused,” forced,” “provoked,” with an emphasis on the immediacy of the action. As in, “The former author of BitterSweetLife found that his surprise bestseller precipitated (brought on rapidly) a whole new lifestyle—one involving lots of gourmet coffee…and naps.”