10. 9. 8...
10 days until Christmas. It has meant different things over the years.
I don’t know when last I had an advent calendar of any kind, chocolates or just little cardboard windows to open with little fun anticipatory pictures. It’s been a while for sure.
Talking to a choir member yesterday for whom this time of year is incredibly busy, I realized afresh how different 10 days to go feels depending on your situation.
Crawling toward Christmas, it seems, isn’t an optional situation for many small business owners in retail. Days are far too busy and heavy, but it is a necessary part of your business model.
I know, too, that not everyone who runs an afterschool math and reading like I do takes two weeks off at this time of year. So I am even more grateful, first that while each week has flown by filled with activity and song, it hasn’t been exhausting, and that there are those precious weeks to look forward to beginning with this Saturday.
There wasn’t ever for me going to be another way to proceed with my new business that first Christmas, December 1996. My third child had just been born, and I was ecstatic, first that they had come into the world so healthy and perfect, and also that I had every good reason to take those weeks to enjoy them with my older two children before having to go back to work a few weeks later in the New Year.
My little December baby.
I never understood as a child why adults would sigh so deeply and complain so loudly about time flying by.
I am 60 now, in utter disbelief that my youngest is nearly thirty and my other two in their mid to late thirties.
I cannot figure out where all those years went.
Yesterday in churches round the world, the pink advent candle called Joy was lit.
Yet as often is the case, we were filled with very mixed emotions.
Shortly after I posted yesterday about Chanukah, I read the horrifying news about the 12 people who had died after a terror attack in Australia. One more heart-breaking example of the terrible escalation of antisemitism that I had been writing about.
And in the middle of choir practice before church, a choir member shared that the little boy who had died on Thursday after being hit by a bus was the grandson of a former choir member.
Even in the midst of joy, grief rears its head. Life is all the feelings and experiences, not just the ones preferred to focus on and celebrate.
Near the end of the operetta Candide, by the third time the song Universal Good occurs, Candide has come to understand life is much more complex than he had imagined in his innocence.
Life is neither good nor bad.
Life is life, and all we know.
Good and bad and joy and woe
Are woven fine, are woven fine.
All the travels we have made,
All the evils we have known,
Even paradise itself,
Are nothing now, are nothing now.
Universal Good (Life is Neither)
It is certainly very understandable that many feel in the wake of unspeakable loss that it is difficult, perhaps seemingly impossible to perceive the meaning or stay connected to the joy.
The Joy candle, and the life and witness of Jesus, are reminders that hope can arise again after the greatest darkness, the deepest suffering.
God has not abandoned God’s beloved people.
We are not alone.