The Christmas Gift

The beginning of Christmas week. Where has this year gone? It seems to me that thought comes with more frequency as the years pass.

We have lit the forth Advent Candle at church, the sandwich ministry has served the pre-Christmas December meals, the Live Nativity and the Christmas Pageant were great successes and the presents are wrapped and the cards mailed.

Now, all of these wonderful and necessaries being done, the anticipation of the celebration of the Light come into the world begins to take hold.

This is a wonderful part of my year, when, all of the stuff that precedes Christmas being dealt with, there comes a moment during a day when my heart lets me know that it is opening itself in anticipation of, in yearning for, the gift.

This moment is not only with me at Christmas, what a poor thing that would be. But, while those moments of God revealed within come with pleasing irregularity throughout the year, that moment at Christmas is Christmas.

I do not have the combination of education or skill to explain the nature of this gift, this experience. I suppose, even if I had such talents that I believe God to be inexplicable and the experience of God to be something that cannot be communicated well in words.

Here is the closest that I can come, by describing everyday incidents that mirror and approach the anticipation and then the gift that my faith gives me, always at Christmas, occasionally at other times:

When Laura was pregnant with Eli and her time came around she had a very difficult labour. Hour upon hour in the hospital, me alternately raging at the doctors to do something and fearing that what was happening was not OK and occasionally being possessed by rather unkind thoughts towards the imagined object of the delay (Laura). Always, entwined about this maelstrom of feeling, a space, an until then unknown emptiness, and the anticipation of that space being filled.

And then, after what I recall totalled twenty-three hours of hard labour the fear born of the suddenness of the nurses wheeling Laura down the hall with great speed and the hurried words of another nurse explaining-we'll do a c-section, don't worry, she'll be OK.

In a bit they came and got me and said that Laura was fine and I looked into the plastic box that Eli lay in, pink and wrinkly and still sticky with yellow and red stuff, and the hole inside was filled. God, was it filled. Overflowing, uncontainable, laughing, crying. Joy? Tenderness? Completion? I don't think that there are words to describe that which filled me such that me was no more for those moments.

And it was no less a decade and a half later when Patty brought Jessica, and two years after that, Alley, into the world.

Life is not always about new babies and such, so I'll tell you about the other experience in my life that mirrors the gift of Christmas.

My mom, Fran, had a tough time with cancer at the end of her life. God but it ate her away. At the end mom was in hospice and the family was gathered and the time came around and she took one last breath and was gone.

The nurse came to do her necessaries and, in what seemed like no time at all, the family left.

I sat beside this old woman whose body had borne me, whose arms and warm bosom had comforted me, whose hopes and prayers had lifted me up, and within me a desolate foreboding, a dreadful anticipation of her passing, an overwhelming fear, all of which I had secretly harboured all the days of mom's illness, was subsumed within a flood of joy, of thankfulness, of the rightness of this moment. What filled me was such that for those moments I was no longer me and all that I was was the gift of this woman's life and a companion with her in her passing.

I rested with my mom for a bit until our moment was broken by one of the hospice nurses who came in and, sitting beside me, asked if I was OK. Yes!

Then she took my hand in hers and I was blessed with yet another experience, different, yet the same as that which followed mom's death and which accompanied the births of my children.

And which graces me every Christmas, and sometimes in between.

God bless you all. Merry Christmas