Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, December 15, 2002
In yesterday's Hartford Courant the front page of the business section had a story that began with an inch-long headline, "Will Late Buyers Save Shopping Season?". In the article I read the following words: "Retailers are now in the same spot they were last year, dependent on a late buying spree to lift them above dour expectations. Can consumers save Christmas again?"
Can consumers save Christmas again? The really weird thing about that question is that it was written in the article without the faintest whiff of irony. Of course I realize it was the business section, and everyone's worried about the economy, and the retail sector sinks or swims according to how much we buy. But what about those of us who genuinely love Christmas? What about those who struggle to translate its meaning for our kids and hold to some family traditions and honor the religious meanings that can be found there?
We can have all the sympathy in the world for small retailers and wish them well; but it's precisely this commercial focus -- this notion that the 'Christmas' we've got to save is an economic one -- that drives us to our most Scrooge-like moments. It's bad enough to have to face the weeks and weeks of ads, the blizzard of catalogues in our mailboxes, the pressure to buy and wrap and package and send. But to add to all of that the subtle and sometimes overt message that we're not quite doing our patriotic duty unless we're out there racking up the debt -- that's enough to give even a cheerful shopper a few rebellious thoughts.
Not being a cheerful shopper myself, I have more than a few rebellious thoughts at Christmas time. But the ones that are most useful to me are the ones that help me focus not on what makes me mad but on what makes me grateful. So I wanted to spend some time this morning thinking less about gifts and more about giftedness.
For nearly the entire twelve years I've lived in this area I have visited the Mercy Center in Madison regularly, sometimes just for quiet reflection, sometimes to meet with a spiritual director. Each time I go there, especially in the late fall and through the winter, my closing ritual is to visit the small greenhouse the nuns tend. It's the place where outside plants too tender for this climate are nurtured through the winter, and where trays of annuals are started to give them a longer growing season. It's a very informal greenhouse, really kind of shabby, not designed for public browsing although no one has ever thrown me out. But I go there so faithfully because to walk from a frozen, black-and-white world into color is to suddenly wake up.
To breathe the air of green growing things in the dead of winter feels like a kind of miracle. But there in that little oasis, with the steamy windows holding winter at bay, I remember that to breathe the air of green growing things at any time at all is a miracle! When you look up at the brilliance of the stars on a cold winter night, it's awesome; but the long stillness that drifts down on us from those stars is also a little lonely. Who knows whether or not there is any other place in all that dazzled reach where living things breathe together? And why is it that in the long loneliness that question can evoke, there is still not enough tenderness among us, on this small planet where we do breathe?
Poet Adam Zagajewski has written a poem called "The Greenhouse", that was so precisely evocative of my own experience that I wanted to bring it to you today:
In a small black town, your town,
where even trains linger unwillingly,
anxious to be on their way,
in a park, defying soot and shadows,
a gray building stands lined with
mother-of-pearl.
Forget the snow, the frost's repeated blows:
inside you're greeted by a damp anthology of breezes
and the enigmatic whispers of vast leaves
coiled like lazy snakes. Even an Egyptologist
couldn't make them out.
Forget the sadness of dark stadiums and streets,
the weitght of thwarted Sundays.
Accept the warm breath wafting from the plants.
The gentle scent of faded lightning
engulfs you, beckoning you on.
Perhaps you see the rusty sails of ships at port,
islands snared in rosy mist, crumbling temples' towers;
you glimpse what you've lost, what never was,
and people with lives like your own.
Suddenly you see the world lit differently,
other people's doors swing open for a moment,
you read their hidden thoughts,
their holidays don't hurt,
their happiness is less opaque, their faces
almost beautiful.
Lose yourself, go blind from ecstasy,
forgetting everything, and then perhaps
a deeper memory, a deeper recognition will return,
and you'll hear yourself saying:
I don't know how --
the palm tree opened up my greedy heart.
What are the things that open up our greedy hearts? When I came across the example of the horse chestnuts in Vic Carpenter's essay, a whole litany of old memories were evoked. I too collected horse chestnuts, when I was growing up in Spokane, Washington. There were only maples and pines on our street, but about a mile away there was a long boulevard with a central island strip that was lined with enormous old chestnut trees, and in the fall it seemed the richest street in the whole world. I would go there with a paper bag and load it up with fallen chestnuts. Back home with them, I would carefully peel off their thorny husks to find the treasure of rich mahogany swirls and wood grain inside.
Each chestnut was different in pattern, each one incredibly beautiful. I would cradle them in my pockets, finger their smoothness with wonder, and never tire of looking at the lovely flow of their color. Vic Carpenter points out that there is nothing you can actually do with horse chestnuts. What he doesn't say in his essay is something I remember quite well from the experience of being a collector: not only are the chestnuts useless, they don't even last as objects of wood-grained beauty. Not long after they're pulled from their husk, they start to dry and shrivel, and the smooth and lovely wood-grain skin soon wrinkles and becomes a uniform brown.
Like Carpenter, I must have been a slow learner because despite this fact, I collected the chestnuts year after year. I don't remember when I finally gave up, but by now it's been a fairly long time since I've even seen chestnuts of the type I remember from my days as a collector.
So it was good to be reminded of how these not only useless, but very transient, bits of gratuitous beauty had once caught my eye and made me marvel. It made me wonder about the term useless itself, especially when we think about all the free things, the unexpected gifts that drop down on us the way the chestnuts fall from the trees.
The best of these gifts are useless in the sense that they can't be turned to a function, or made productive, or sold for a profit. But they are useful beyond all of those purposes because they wake us up to the day and fill our hearts with gratitude. They make us glad, sometimes even breaking in with that gladness at a time when we are plodding along lost in little clouds of doom and gloom.
In a book called Gratefulness: The Heart of Prayer, David Steindl-Rast uses an example as commonplace as Vic Carpenter's chestnuts: the gift of watching the cardinal that comes to his feeder in the winter. He writes, "No matter how often that cardinal comes for the cracked corn scattered on a rock for the birds in winter, it is a flash of surprise. I expect him. I've come even to know his favorite feeding times. I can hear him chirping long before he comes in sight. But when that red streak shoots down on the rock like lightening on Elijah's altar, I know what e.e. cummings means [when he writes]: 'The eyes of my eyes are opened'.
What counts…is that we remember the great truth that moments of surprise want to teach us: everything is gratuitous, everything is gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is the measure of our gratefulness. And gratefulness is the measure of our aliveness. Are we not dead to whatever we take for granted? Surely to be numb is to be dead…To live life open for surprise, in spite of all the dying which living implies, makes us ever more alive."
'To live life open for surprise' -- not such an easy stance for most of us. It isn't simply that we tend to live lives we think of as pretty predictable. It's also that we want our lives to be predictable because we know that a surprise can go either way. It might be something wonderful, but it might also be something catastrophic. And when it's the latter, when it's a bad surprise, how then do we take Steindl-Rast's position and see all of life as gratuitous, all of it as a gift?
I don't really know the answer to that, since nothing has yet happened to me that has wrenched my heart out of me and turned it inside out, the way the death of my spouse or child would do. Until something that tests us sorely comes knocking on our door, we don't really have any idea how we'll greet it and how we'll pick ourselves up to live life afterwards. But I have lived long enough now, and seen enough pain around me now, to know that in one way or another each one of us will come face to face with our fragility. We will each have the chance to test our faith and to see whether the stance we take toward life in the rich and blessed times can sustain us also through the storms.
I know at least that what I want to hold to, even in those storms, is the faith that life is gift: that every fleeting moment of it comes laden with meaning, and that whether the lessons seem harsh to us or gentle, the shaping they bring to our lives will still, somehow, be something for which we can cultivate gratitude. Benedictine Joan Chitister has said, "Grace is anything that happens to us, out of which we become better or stronger or more alive people." If that's true, then grace can hide in the shadows of even the most difficult and painful things that come to us, even if we have no eyes to see it until we're years further down the road.
For my lessons in this realm, I listen to those who have already greeted catastrophe, who know from first-hand experience what it means to find the gift in life even when suffering has come to stay. Last week I used as our reading part of an essay from Philip Simmons, who continued to write through all the disability and indignity visited on his body by ALS until his death earlier this year. In another of his essays, Simmons writes, "We have all heard poems, songs and prayers that exhort us to see God in a blade of grass, a drop of dew, a child's eyes, or the petals of a flower. Now when I hear such things I say that's too easy.
Our greater challenge is to see God not only in the eyes of the suffering child but in the suffering itself. To thank God for the sunset pink clouds over Red Hill -- but also for the mosquitoes I must fan from my face while watching the clouds. To thank God for broken bones and broken hearts, for everything that opens us to the mystery of our humanness.
The challenge is to stand at the sink with your hands in the dishwater, fuming over a quarrel with your spouse, children at your back clamoring for attention, the radio blatting the bad news from Bosnia, and to say, 'God is here, now, in this room, here in this dishwater, in this dirty spoon.' Don't talk to me about flowers and sunshine and waterfalls: this is the ground, here, now, in all that is ordinary and imperfect, this is the ground in which life sows the seeds of our fulfillment."
Back to the headline with which I started this sermon -- Can consumers save Christmas? Of course not. But a little attention can save Christmas. The willingness to live more open to surprise -- of either kind -- can save Christmas. The willingness to open our eyes to the mystery within the ordinary, and allow something small and unexpected to fling open our greedy hearts -- that can save Christmas.
All of those things form the essence of the original story, after all. I don't mean the parts of the story that have become Christian theology, about God coming into a virgin and then incarnating in someone meant to be the Christ. As much as I love the power and imagery of the angels' songs and the guiding star and the carols that have been woven out of those elements, none of that is really the heart of the story.
The heart of it, and what I love best is the part that's repeated thousands of times a day in our beloved, ordinary world. A child is born into unpromising circumstances. Despite all the odds against it, he is loved and nurtured and grows into a unique mind and heart, with eyes open to receive the world. He finds the words, and is brave enough to live the life, that open countless other eyes and hearts to possibilities they did not see before. It's that bright mystery, that open possibility for surprise within this human life of ours, that turns out to be so holy. It's that miracle that's worth a special star in the sky, a host of angels singing hallelujahs, a journey of homage from any group of wise men or women. Christmas can be saved -- not by how much we spend but by how much we see, and how willing we are to have our visions transform us, every ordinary and miraculous day of our lives. AMEN.