Unto Us A Child Is Born

(Caravaggio's Nativity)

Merry 
Christmas!

Poetry Friday: On the Seventh Day of Christmas I Posted This Gorgeous Anne Porter Poem

Atticus found Anne Porter last year and she's an ongoing gift. Here's an excerpt from a Christmas poem:

Noel 
by Anne Porter

...The customary carols

They bring us ragged miracles
And hay and candles
And flowering weeds of poetry
That are loved all the more
Because they are so common

But there are carols
That carry phrases
Of the haunting music
Of the other world
A music wild and dangerous
As a prophet's message

Or the fresh truth of children
Who though they come to us
From our own bodies

Are altogether new
With their small limbs
And birdlike voices

(The whole poem is here at The Writer's Almanac.)

~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round up is at Carols' Corner today. 

A Happy, Holy, and Blessed Christmas

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
and without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life,
and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.

~~ John 1:1-5

(Painting: Caravaggio's Nativity)

I'm So Predictable

I originally ran this post in 2005, my first year of blogging. Predictably, I rerun it each year at this time.

We no longer have to hire a sitter and we no longer have to worry about keeping Ramona happy and quiet during Mass, as she manages that herself.  But the rest of it holds true.

Have a happy, holy, and blessed Christmas!

~~~~~~~~~~

My husband and I have a holiday tradition. Every year, close to Christmas, we get a babysitter, go out for Chinese food and buy all the last-minute

(WARNING: SANTA SPOILER AHEAD)

stocking stuffers and generally fall in love all over again -- with each other, with our children, and with the magic of Christmas. We talk about how our day went, about my parents, and his, and holiday travel plans, about how we'll keep the youngest child happy and calm during the long Christmas Eve Mass, and about how we can't believe how drastically our Christmases have changed over the years.

You see, when we married, we didn't want children. Children were nice enough for other people, but not for us. We didn't want the mess, the commitment, the responsibility. We were happy to be "child free" as opposed to "childless."

Then something happened. I became a Christian. Oops. Short-circuit in the selfishness department. I began to long for a child. Soon, Atticus's heart caught up with mine in the procreation department, and we set forth to create a family. After some heartbreaking miscarriages, we had Anne. But only one, Atticus said. One child is enough.

Then I became a Catholic. Oops. Short-circuit in the openness to life department. We had Betsy. Several more heartbreaking miscarriages later, God awarded us with Ramona, and here we are. Falling in love again at Christmas time, and crazy, head-over-heels in love with our children.

And all because of of a child born in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. Had Mary said, "No, thank you, I'd like to remain child-free," I would be childless. There would have been no conversion, no short-circuit, and most certainly, no joy. How does one thank God for that? I always seem to do it in the same old tired way.

I cry.

May you, too, shed some tears of ineffable gratitude this Christmas.

Why I Don't Worry About the Ways in Which We "Do Santa" Around Here

This is actually from two years ago -- I called the post, "Secular, Meet Sacred" -- but it still holds true:

Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God

(from January 1, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006 ....) :

In reviewing last year's post on this day, I see that I totally ignored my resolution to stop posting the previous year's posts.

Ah, well.

I shall not make that mistake again this year. This year, I resolve not to resolve anything about reposting because, let's face it, an old post is always a new post to someone out there, and therefore, there's no reason to resolve a thing. And so, I now present an old post with the hope that it will be of use to someone, because revisiting this post is so useful to me each year.

Have a blessed feast day!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New year's resolution: Stop posting last year's posts.

Note to self: Don't start that resolution until after Epiphany.

I dislike comparing myself to Mary, because it's akin to holding my Sculpey creations next to Michelangelo's Pieta and asking what kind of artist I am. The differences are glaring, apparent, painful to see and ultimately laughable. But, I do it anyway, because it's good spiritual exercise.

Mary was a wife and mother, as am I. Mary cooked meals, cleaned house, and did laundry, as do I. There the comparisons end.

I imagine home life with Mary and I envision peacefulness, a serene atmosphere pervading all, because she knew that the mundane tasks of each moment were a necessary part of the whole. The meal of the day, the washing, the tidying and the clean-up of dishes ... everything had import and was approached as such. She simply did it because that is part of what the mother of Jesus needed to do.

This year, I will strive to be more Mary-like in my household tasks, approaching them with greater serenity and acceptance, knowing that all things have import and that my duties as a mother and a keeper of our home are a necessary part of the whole.

I imagine affection, warmth and laughter in the home of Mary, Joseph and Jesus. (I loved the scene in The Passion of the Christ in which Mary and Jesus are joking and laughing about tables and chairs.)

This year, I'll thank God for all the laughter in our home, knowing He is the author of such joy, and I'll strive to find and hold on to the humor in those inevitable homeschooling days that crop up (you know ... the ones that will not, at first glance, seem to hold any humor.)

Mary's faith was bare and heroic. Again and again, she had to endure pain and separation and yet her faith did not, could not, waver.

This year, in my life and walk with God, when I feel distance from Him, though I can't resolve to have such faith (as only God can grant it) I can resolve to pray for it, to ask to be more like Mary in my faith.

I doubt that Mary would have blogged ... she would have pondered my mostly pitiable musings in her heart, rather than blabbing them to the world. She pondered, she prayed, she listened.

This year, though I'm not sure I can resolve not to blog (or blab, as it were) since I'm still in the throes of infatuation with this stuff, I can resolve to continue pondering things in my heart, and ask the Lord to make the answers to my ponderings clearer to me. If God however, asked me to quit blogging, I would. He'd have to be very loud and clear about it, though.

Like Mary, I pray I'll be listening.

(Painting: Polish Madonna)

It's Saturday, right?

No, wait.

Atticus is home not because we're having a freakish time warp of consecutive Saturdays, but because it's Christmas vacation.

Ah, yes.

So, we're catching up on some reading:

The Mysterious Benedict Society books (Anne, Betsy, me)

Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me (thanks, Lissa, for recommending it -- Anne, Betsy and I really loved it)

Pioneer Girl and On the Banks of Plum Creek (Ramona's read aloud) and various Christmas books 

The Titan's Curse (me -- I promised Anne and Betsy that I'd get caught up on the Percy Jackson series, as they've read them all and can't wait for me to finish them)

Nick Hornby's How to Be Good (me -- not for young readers, by the way, and a language warning for those who will want to know -- my favorite line so far {in reference to the narrator's eight-year-old daughter}: "It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.")

Atticus may be reading the Graham Greene I gave him for Christmas, or he may just be watching some sports. I think some team called the Something-Husker-Something did something last night on TV. Some Bowl thing.  I'm not really a fan.

I was reading.

from the archives: Christmas Every Day

An old post, but something I always think about during the Twelve Days of Christmas and beyond:

Christmas Every Day?

We hear it all around us: “I love this time of year -- people are so generous! Why can’t every day be like Christmas?"

I asked the same question before I became a Christian. For me, "Christmas time" began right after Thanksgiving, when I started shopping, baking and getting caught up in “the Christmas Spirit.” It held no religious meaning for me, but there was something so attractive about it ... something warm and glowing, something that whispered community and love. Whatever the something was that made people feel so good -- and in my unbelieving days I wanted to think it was nothing more than a good story by Charles Dickens -- I wanted a little piece of it.

After I was baptized, I fell in love with that “something” -- Jesus Christ. I finally knew the Source of all that community and love, and I wanted to share the good news. When people wondered why every day couldn’t be Christmas I said, “It can! Become a Christian!” Jesus was the wellspring of the generosity, the love, the desire to give. He was the very definition of Christmas that I had been missing all those years.

I started to see everything about Christmas in a new way. When the Christmas season ended and people complained of how dull and gray January can be, I thought about how we could carry Christmas into every day of the year, because Jesus is always with us. The things that make Christmas special are the things we are called to do in our daily Christian life: love, give of ourselves, share with the poor, and celebrate our Lord. However, though I tried to keep “that Christmas spirit” every day, I instinctively knew that real life wasn’t like that. “All good things must come to an end,” and so it seemed with the joys of the Christmas season.

Five years after my baptism, I was received into the Catholic Church, and I learned that we can live our Christian lives even more fully than “trying to see every day as Christmas” (which wasn’t quite working for me anyway.) Through the liturgical year, we enter deeply into every aspect of Jesus’s life. We wait with anticipation through Advent, live with joy through Christmas, fast in the days of Lent, and rejoice again in the Easter season. We experience the joy of our Savior’s birth, and we feel the desert of life without Him, the suffering of His passion and death, and the joy of His resurrection more deeply when we live our lives in rhythm with the Church’s liturgy.

The Church, our earthly mother left to us by our Lord, knows what we need. In giving us a liturgical calendar she has given us a prescription for how to live each and every day. Are we getting dry in our prayer, losing touch with God? She gives us Lent, to help us examine our lives, make a new sacrifice, renew a promise. Are we struggling through the desert? Just in time to save us, the beauty of Easter arrives, with the joy of delighting in what was “lost” during Lent. Easter is celebrated for a full week on the church calendar, an “octave”, because one day is not enough to contain this great feast. Are we caught up in the “commercialism” of Christmas? Mother Church gives us Advent, to slow us down and teach us to patiently watch and wait. She then gives us twelve days of Christmas -- again, the joy of the celebration cannot be contained in one day. Then there is the twelfth night, and the feast of the Epiphany -- we get to celebrate again, and observe the day that the Magi brought gifts to Jesus. Even in “ordinary time” there are feasts, memorials, and observances of saints’ days that help to remind us of our vocation, the state of our relationship with God, the depth of our prayer lives.

As a new Christian, I was on the right track when I discovered that every day could, in some way, be Christmas. But I was missing a big part of the puzzle. The liturgical calendar supplied the last of the missing pieces. I have delighted in the ways living the liturgical year deepens and revitalizes my spiritual life, including my prayer life.

A wise mother knows that her children can’t celebrate all the time -- every party has an end. Can every day be Christmas? No, but every day can be Christ-filled, imbued with spiritual meaning as we follow, re-enact and celebrate the events of our Lord’s earthly life. We can thank our wise mother, the church, for the wisdom of such a gift, at Christmas and always.

Get my drift?

Anne-with-an-e suggested that post title.

Because, of course, we've got drifts everywhere, thanks to the 18 inches of snow we've gotten:

 

 

And it hasn't stopped snowing yet. We'll see what today brings, but they're saying the snow should move on by tomorrow.  Plenty of shoveling and snowman-building in our future, methinks.

*****

We made it to Christmas Eve Mass.  The girls were praying all day that we'd be able to go and although the snow started here on Wednesday (I think -- at this point, it's all one huge, white blur to me) there was quite a lull on Thursday afternoon. So, we got to Mass without any real trouble, although by the time we headed home, it was snowing and blowing again. A lot.  We said a prayer of thanksgiving when we pulled into the driveway, and said quite a few more throughout the evening when we nearly lost power a number of times.  But, the power stayed on, we enjoyed our dinner of hor d'oeuvres (though I later got sick ... urgh ... must be a virus, because everyone else was fine, so no food poisoning) and Santa Claus came through. He left a lot of books this year -- always a good thing. He ate all of Atticus's fudge.  And he put Baby Jesus in the nativity set manger, as he always does.  Ramona checked to make sure of that. 

Good job, Santa.

*****

Grandma and Grandpa sent Ramona her dream doll -- an American Girl Rebecca doll. I don't think Rebecca left Ramona's arms yesterday, except for a brief art session that resulted in this portrait:

and to have her clothes changed about seventeen times.  At one point, as Ramona was showing me the versatility of Rebecca's shawl, I said, "Wow, you're pretty good at this accessorizing stuff," and she replied, "All it takes is a little imagination and the perfect doll."

*****

Happy Feast of St. Stephen!

On Christmas Day

And the Word became flesh
and made his dwelling among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory as of the Father’s only Son,
full of grace and truth.

~~ John 1:14




(painting: Adoration of the Shepherds, by Caravaggio, 1609)

Twelfth Night!

It's still Christmas!

Though we American parishes celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany on Sunday, today is the Twelfth Day of the Christmas season, so feel free to celebrate the Epiphany again tomorrow. We plan to.

We made King's Bread (aka St. Lucia bread) today and although we're easing back into our "real life" routines this week (poor Atticus had to head back to work), we'll certainly take tomorrow off.

As Connie's Daughter reminded us in the comments on this post, even though tomorrow brings the Twelve Days to a close, we're still liturgically in the Christmas season until the Baptism of the Lord, on Sunday, Jan. 11th. The Catholic Culture link from the post I just mentioned has activities and recipes through that day (eighteen full days of fun) in addition to the twelve.

We just did gingerbread houses:



and I imagine we can find a few more things to read, eat and celebrate this week.

Merry Christmas!

Poetry Friday: Of Brain Cells and Eliot

Sometimes, on a Thursday night, I plop down on the couch, look at Atticus and ask, "What do I want to post for Poetry Friday tomorrow?"

He always has an erudite reply and an intriguing suggestion. He's an intelligent, fascinating man. I used to fancy myself equally intelligent and fascinating (weeelll, maybe not equally but close enough to hold my own in a good poetry discussion), and I considered us a perfect match. Several years ago, I could keep up with all his Wallace Stevens talk. Then I had children. For a few years, when sleep was so elusive, my mind started to slip. The "Emperor of Ice Cream" began to sound like a character on the Disney channel.

Anyway, in answer to the learned suggestions of Atticus, I usually stare into space a moment, take a sip of wine and say something like, "I think I'll write a poem about Putty," or "I'll just do Billy Collins again."

These exchanges often remind me of a scene from Annie Hall in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are in a bookstore, and he says, "Here, I think you'd like to read this, uh, instead of that cat book."

So, in order not to buy a cat book today (though I must add the disclaimer that my beloved Billy Collins is not a cat book -- the metaphor refers to the state of my mind and has nothing to do with his poetry, which I much adore), I am posting Atticus's suggestion: Journey of the Magi, by T.S. Eliot.

At first I groaned, "Ohhh, Eliot ... I don't know if I have the energy for Eliot." But then, I asked myself, "When did you last read Journey of the Magi?" And I had to honestly answer myself, "I don't know. It may have been several Emperors of Ice Cream ago." So, I read it. And, as always happens, I was mesmerized. How does he do that? How did he carry around the reputation of being too scholarly and too philosophical to write poetry, and then do that? It's so good, such a perfect melding of earthly earthiness and the supernatural. Like Jesus Himself, really. Eliot captures that down-to-your-bones discomfort, the squirming and the revelation, the discovery that this isn't really my home. That knowledge which at first is both comforting and terrifying.

Go here, to the Poetry Foundation, to read more about Eliot.

Journey of the Magi
by T.S. Eliot

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
...

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;
...

The full text of the poem is here.

The Poetry Friday roundup is at A Year of Reading.

On Christmas Day

And the Word became flesh
and made his dwelling among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory as of the Father’s only Son,
full of grace and truth.

~~ John 1:14






(painting: Adoration of the Shepherds, by Caravaggio, 1609)

To Santa or Not to Santa?

There are always Santa conversations at this time of year.

We're all busy, so I'll make this quick.

We do "No-Panic Santa."

I don't worry about it. Honestly, I don't. When Anne-with-an-e was a baby, I worried (a lot) that lying about Santa would mean that one day she'd think I'd lied about God, too. When she was two years old, people would ask her what Santa was going to bring, and she'd stare blankly at them, wondering who in the world they were talking about.

But then, my own past Santa fun crept into our Christmas traditions, and so, yes, we started "doing" Santa. (Why does this blog always sound slightly confessional? "Hi, I'm Karen. And I lie about Santa.")

Well, I don't out and out lie. I imply. I play a game. We get a visit from St. Nicholas on his feast day ... we have presents from him on Christmas morning ... We wink, we leave cookies, we love the magic.

And, although I completely respect the many different ways that good Catholic parents handle this question, here's the reason I don't worry that "the Santa lie" will lead to atheism:

God is real.

My children will know, see, and feel His fingerprints on their lives. We have seen God at work, and we know He isn't the stuff of toyshops and flying reindeer.

Yes, Ramona will learn that Santa was just a lot of fun pretending. But, she'll also know that Jesus is a powerful King.

Feelings on Santa vs. no-Santa are subjective and personal, and I would never say that my way is universally the best. I can understand the other side. I'm just saying that personally I no longer fret over it. And, since there's no doctrine of the Church that says we must not do Santa, I think I'm in faithful territory.

And, sometimes, even the most roundabout of ways of celebrating things can have lovely, unexpected, faith-filled results. I thought of that when I reread this old post on Santa, at The Wine Dark Sea.

Melanie writes,

"The Santa myth can be in our secular world a sort of pre-gospel."

I completely agree. As someone who grew up with Santa, but without religion in Christmas, I can say that Santa was indeed pre-Gospel for me. Santa was unconditional love. The times I was bad? He never left me a lump of coal. Not once. (Thanks, Mom and Dad.)

And Santa was magic.

God is the ultimate Unconditional Love and the True Magic.

I know that somewhere, deep down, the child who loved Santa was yearning for Christ.

And He came to me. Just as Santa did. But when He came, the Magic was bigger, and powerful.

And when He came, the Magic was here to stay.

******************************************

12/24/08 Edited to add this great bit of G.K. Chesterton, courtesy of Chris in the comments:

On Christmas morning, he [Chesterton] remembered, his stockings were filled with things he had not worked for, or made, or even been good for.

The only explanation people had was that a being called Santa Claus was somehow kindly disposed toward him. “We believed,” he wrote, that a certain benevolent person “did give us those toys for nothing. And ... I believe it still. I have merely extended the idea.

“Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.

“Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea. Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking.

“Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic good will.”

********************************************

Aaahhh ... no one can say it quite like G.K. Thank you, Chris.

How a secular Christmas song became "our song" (or, gifts from the heart are still the best)

We hadn't been married very long and we didn't have much money. It was almost Christmas and although we weren't Christians we always gave each other gifts. The pickings would be slim this year, though, as the budget for presents was non-existent.

Atticus knew that I loved Nat King Cole's smoky voice crooning The Christmas Song. I had described it as "almost perfect." But this was in the days before digital music and mp3 players. I could hear my favorite song of the season only if it happened to come on the radio, as I didn't own the album. Atticus wanted to buy it for me, but our budget was so tight that even a new cassette tape (remember cassette tapes?) wasn't a possibility that year.

It was Christmas Eve, and I had to work. Feeling a little disheartened that we didn't have much to give one another, I was nevertheless looking forward to the meal that Atticus would no doubt have ready when I got home.

When I reached our apartment, I put my key in the lock and thought, "It's awfully quiet in there." I opened the door and found a candlelit room, heard a click, and then Nat's smooth voice. Atticus took my hand and we danced.

My dear, sweet husband had scrounged around our apartment, found a blank tape, and then waited. He had vigilantly stationed himself by the radio all day long as he cooked, waiting to hear and capture that song. He waited and waited some more, and finally hit the "record" button when the coveted song made its appearance.

He captured it; he captured me again. And ever since, when Nat starts to sing, we dance.

from the archives: I'm So Predictable

I wrote this in '05, my first year of blogging, and have rerun it each December since then.

I'm rerunning it again, because that's part of what makes me so predictable. And, it's all still true, except that Anne-with-an-e is now old enough to babysit, and Ramona gets easily through the Mass. And, this year, though our date night may not happen, since Atticus and I indulged in an overnight getaway last weekend, we'll still have the same conversations. And the ending?

Predictable and true.


**********************************************************

My husband and I have a holiday tradition. Every year, close to Christmas, we get a babysitter, go out for Chinese food, buy all the last-minute ...

** (WARNING: Santa spoiler ahead) **

... stocking stuffers and generally fall in love all over again -- with each other, with our children, and with the magic of Christmas. We talk about our days, about my parents and his, about holiday travel plans, about how we'll keep the youngest child happy and calm during the long Christmas Eve Mass. And we talk about how we can't believe how drastically our Christmases have changed over the years.

You see, when we married, we didn't want children. Children were nice enough for other people, but not for us. We didn't want the mess, the commitment, the responsibility. We were happy to be "child free" as opposed to "childless."

Then something happened. I became a Christian.

Oops. Short-circuit in the selfishness department. I began to long for a child. Soon, Atticus's heart caught up with mine in the procreation department, and we set forth to create a family. After some heartbreaking miscarriages, we had Anne. But only one child, Atticus said. One child is enough.

Then I became a Catholic.

Oops. Short-circuit in the openness to life department. We had Betsy. Several more heartbreaking miscarriages later, God awarded us with Ramona, and here we are. Falling in love again at Christmas time, and crazy, head-over-heels in love with our children.

And all because of of a Child born in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. Had Mary said, "No, thank you, I'd like to remain child-free," I would be childless. There would have been no conversion, no short-circuit, and most certainly, no joy. How does one thank God for that?

I always seem to do it in the same old, tired way.

I cry.

May you, too, shed some tears of ineffable gratitude this Christmas.

Poetry Friday bonus: Bruce and Santa

You'd better watch out
You'd better not cry
You'd better not pout
I'm tellin' you why:
Santa Claus is comin' to town ....

And Ramona and I are repeatedly listening to Bruce sing about it:

Christmas Every Day

(This essay first appeared several years ago, in Our Sunday Visitor's New Covenant magazine. It later morphed into the longer piece, Easter Every Week, for Catholic Exchange.)


Christmas Every Day

We hear it all around us: “I love this time of year! People are so generous! Why can’t every day be like Christmas ?”

I asked the same question before I became a Christian. For me, Christmas time began right after Thanksgiving, when I started shopping, baking and getting caught up in “the Christmas Spirit.” It held no religious meaning for me, but there was something so attractive about the time of year ... something warm and glowing, something that whispered "community" and "love." Whatever the something was that made people feel so good -- and in my unbelieving days I wanted to think it was nothing more than a good story by Charles Dickens -- I wanted a little piece of it.

After I was baptized, I fell in love with that “something” -- Jesus Christ. I finally knew the Source of all that community and love, and I wanted to share the good news. When people wondered why every day couldn’t be Christmas I would say, “It can! Become a Christian!” Jesus was the wellspring of the generosity, the love, the desire to give. He was the very definition of Christmas that I had been missing all those years.

I started to see everything about Christmas in a new way. When the Christmas season ended and people complained of how dull and gray January can be, I thought about how we can carry Christmas into every day of the year, because Jesus is always with us. The things that make Christmas special are the things we are called to do in our daily Christian life: to love, give of ourselves, share with the poor, and celebrate our Lord. However, though I tried to keep “that Christmas spirit” every day, I instinctively knew that real life wasn’t like that. “All good things must come to an end,” and so it seemed with the joys of the Christmas season.

Five years after my baptism, I was received into the Catholic Church, and I learned that we can live our Christian lives even more fully than “trying to see every day as Christmas” (which wasn’t quite working for me anyway.) Through the liturgical year, we enter deeply into every aspect of Jesus’s life. We wait with anticipation through Advent, live with joy through Christmas, fast in the days of Lent, and rejoice again in the Easter season. We experience the joy of our Savior’s birth, and we feel the desert of life without Him, the suffering of His passion and death, and the joy of His resurrection more deeply when we live our lives in rhythm with the Church’s liturgy.

The Church, our earthly mother left to us by our Lord, knows what we need. In giving us a liturgical calendar she has given us a prescription for how to live each and every day. Are we getting dry in our prayer, losing touch with God? She gives us Lent, to help us examine our lives, make a new sacrifice, renew a promise. Are we struggling through the desert? Just in time to save us, the beauty of Easter arrives, with the joy of delighting in what was “lost” during Lent. Easter is celebrated for a full week on the church calendar, an “octave”, because one day is not enough to contain this great feast.

Are we caught up in the “commercialism” of Christmas? Mother Church gives us Advent, to slow us down and teach us to patiently watch and wait. She then gives us twelve days of Christmas -- again, the joy of the celebration cannot be contained in one day! Then there is the Twelfth Night, the feast of the Epiphany -- we get to celebrate again, and observe the day that the Magi brought gifts to Jesus. Even in “ordinary time” there are feasts, memorials, and observances of saints’ days that help to remind us of our vocation, the state of our relationship with God, the depth of our prayer lives.

As a new Christian, I was on the right track when I discovered that every day could, in some way, be Christmas. But I was missing a big part of the puzzle. The liturgical calendar supplied the last of the missing pieces. I have delighted in the ways living the liturgical year deepens and revitalizes my spiritual life, including my prayer life.

A wise mother knows that her children can’t celebrate all the time -- every party has an end. Can every day be Christmas? No, but every day can be Christ-filled, imbued with spiritual meaning as we follow, re-enact and celebrate the events of our Lord’s earthly life. We can thank our wise mother, the church, for the wisdom of such a gift, at Christmas and always.

Secular, Meet Sacred

A No-Panic Advent, Part VIII: Why We Read Advent Books (or, "In Which I Am Imogene Herdman")

(I originally wrote this essay for Cay Gibson's book, Christmas Mosaic, An Illustrated Book Study for Advent and Christmas,which is a wonderful resource for books, activities and recipes to use throughout Advent and the entire Christmas season.)



The Nativity

I remember when I first met Him – that Child who was born in Bethlehem. I didn’t bump into Him in my childhood (though I now know He was there all along.) No, our first encounter -- the one in which I was really a participant -- came when I was older. I was a twenty-something atheist, and a Catholic friend recommended C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to me. “Pay special attention,” he suggested, “to the character of Aslan.”

My friend had a way of recommending things that dramatically changed my life, so I read the book. As urged, I “paid special attention” to Aslan, and I fell in love with him. And I fell in love with Him, though I still didn’t fully understand Who it was that I loved. But I knew I wanted to hold Aslan forever, in my arms and in my heart. Like Susan and Lucy, I wanted to bury my face in His mane, inhale His sweetness, and never let go.

A few years later, the same friend gave me Barbara Robinson’s The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, in which “awful old” Imogene Herdman (while playing Mary in the Christmas pageant) is walloped with the story of Jesus for the first time in her short, rough life. She can hardly bear the weight of the irony and the beauty. And as I read about little Imogene bawling her eyes out, I began to sob. I loved Imogene fiercely, and realized that I loved her because I was Imogene: I was that sad little girl who’d never known Jesus, but who one day collided headlong with the reality and power of Him. The God of the universe had bowled Imogene over and she would never be the same. Neither would I.

What changed the Herdmans, the Pevensies, and me? That child born in Bethlehem two millennia ago.

That child. It’s hard to fathom, isn’t it? A child, born in a stable, in poverty, to a virgin. A child raised by a foster-father in relative obscurity. A child who for many years was nothing more than a carpenter’s son. A child.

The Christ Child set a Herdman sobbing, made perfectly sensible little British girls follow a lion for the rest of their lives, and He crumbled my unbelief.

Such is the power of our precious Jesus, and of the books written about Him. Although I wasn’t raised on beautiful tales of our Lord, I know the compelling power of books. I want to share with my own children everything I can about Him. I want to give them the gifts of picture books, chapter books, the Bible. I want to give them storytelling, fine art and great music. I hope to introduce them, through these things, to the Source of all that is good, and true and beautiful. I pray my daughters will remember countless, sublime meetings with Him, and will yearn to inhale His sweetness, the sweetness of that baby in a manger.

That baby was born for us. He lived and died for us.

He loves us so much.

Let’s pay special attention.