Presiding Bishop Michael Curry

The Christmas story I re-read every year has firemen and a house fire, snowballs waiting for cats, mentions of wolves, postmen, a celluloid duck, and a possible ghost joining in for caroling. And it’s all true. Or at least remembered true.

Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is the kind of opening of nostalgic floodgates you expect from a poet’s vivid and quirky memory. And what he remembers aren’t gifts (those get a comic couple paragraphs) but the experiences he had, what he and his friends got into, uncles and aunts visiting, and what the town looked and felt like in the snow.

As Thomas and his friends walk in the snow along the shore, trying to decide what to get into, someone asks, “Can the fishes see it’s snowing?” Maybe those are the moments of true and honest friendship and the things we build our memories around.

Christmas is certainly a time when nostalgia hits us over the head like a cartoon wooden mallet, this year especially. I stumbled across this piece I scrawled out a couple years ago and if nostalgia is the path you want to run down, it might walk there with you. As I sit here with waves of Christmas memories crashing over me, I have written about for 30 or so and thought about Christmases past for maybe 45 years (the memories had to build up for the first three). I find myself coming back to the same thoughts, the same books, the same memories, and the same themes.

Clark Griswold understands the pressure of trying to create and re-create the perfect Christmas.

I’m thinking about the pressure we put on Christmas–finding and buying the perfect gifts, wanting to create the perfect memories for our families, wanting to get past the commercial and to the spiritual, communal aspects of Christmas. And I think about the fact that my Christmases as a kid are vivid memories, then not much to call up in my teens and 20s. Thinking about Christmases having young kids, crystalline again, and now the girls are well into their teens, into the age of unmemorable Christmases. And maybe I am caught in a place where the next memorable Christmas won’t be until there are young kids in the picture again (which I hope is a good ways off…).

But maybe that’s the key. Not young kids, but seeing things with eyes like that again. When he picks what memories to share, Dylan Thomas goes back to when he was a child. Because that’s where the vivid memories are; that’s where his eyes were fresh and impressionable. Maybe that’s what I/we need, especially during a pandemic year when I know my family won’t be gathering on Christmas Eve or Day.

Looking with the eyes of a child.

In his book, “Love Is the Way,” Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, writes:

“Jesus said, ‘Unless you change and become as little children, you will never see the kingdom of heaven’ (and thinking on a lecture he attended by Terry Holmes, Bishop Curry continues)… children have vivid and boundless imaginations. They dwell happily in that space between fantasy and reality. Theirs is often that land of the fairy tale, the cartoon. They fantasize, they imagine, they dream. I think Dr. Holmes was right. To behold the reign of God, the perfect realization of God’s peace, God’s shalom, God’s salaam–the dream of God–we must become as little children. We must imagine and… dream.”

I was talking to a friend recently about that exact thing, how Buddhists use the term “begininer’s mind” and Jesus talks about seeing with the eyes of a child. If re-think where I am right now and go back to my surroundings, I smell the evergreen/fir smell of the Christmas tree; I see the white lights on the tree that the girls asked for this year to replace the rainbow lights that I generally use to conjure up trees from my youth; I can smell and taste the coffee, which makes me think of my grandfather this time of year. I can see the cat and dog half-sleeping on the couch, waiting for movement toward the kitchen.

We’ve always got all the tools we need to build the perfect Christmas. If I choose to focus on sitting down to have a Sunday afternoon lunch with people I love rather than looking at what I find or don’t find shopping, I am creating the right kind of memories.

This isn’t a post about what Christmas is or what it means, but more about what lenses/eyes we use to approach the whole experience.

Our dog gets up and runs to the door or window every time the same neighbors walk by. It’s a new experience for her every time. Even she has the child-like enthusiasm and wonder idea down. I can learn from her example and reminder.

If I am open. If I see with the eyes, imagination, and wonder of a child. Maybe I won’t be stuck having a conversation with the ghost of Christmas past. Maybe I will be in the moment, caught up in wonder and conversation, and I can again ask questions like, “Can the fishes see it’s snowing?”

It’s hard to know what to say, so I can only speak from my life and experiences. And my life is one of privilege. I haven’t earned the life I live based on my own sweat and effort–I was given a gift of an upbringing and a social and economic status that I had nothing to do with. I try to live up to and into that gift, and I am grateful for it daily. I try to dream and picture what my daughters’ lives might look like, and I know they are only limited by themselves.

When I run through town, I am the maybe overly friendly guy who says good morning or hello to everyone I pass. And I have never gotten weird looks–usually a wave or smile back. People aren’t generally intimidated by or suspect of me at first encounter. Again, none of this has much of anything to do with anything I have done. If my skin were a different color, I’m not sure reactions would be the same.

In my teens and early 20’s, we were troublemakers often enough and had run-ins with police, but I never feared for my life. We live in a small community and over the years, I have come to know more and more police officers as friends, and I know them all to be amazing human beings who help people at an instant. Theirs are friendships I am blessed to have–getting to know the people and not just their jobs. And they have seen me for who I am.

Over the years my heart has hurt and my mind has been jarred by so many events on the news, or listening to others’ experiences of the world. And these stories rise up, make their rounds, and then life goes on. For those not directly affected. But each time, it is only a glimpse; only a flicker. Too many people can change the channel and not have to face something directly.

When people speak up and speak out, they are quickly silenced. Yes, you can protest, but not like that. And no, not like that. Yes, we believe in your right to be heard, but we are watching football right now. How about some other time, some other place, where I can still watch what I want and think how I want and not have to pay attention?

Right now, there is attention. We are not promised tomorrow, so right now is what we have. I can’t know or understand what it is to be black, but I can listen and I can stand.

I am a part of a faith community where I know that people of any race, culture, or religion are welcome, and I consider that a blessing. I have watched our rector befriend a Hindu man who was working in Easton and loved coming to our 5:00pm service. He was happy in his faith, he just loved the music and energy of the service, and it was a beautiful thing.

After the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests and riots, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, an African-American man, on Sunday published an op-ed in The Washington Post about choosing love over hate. He also talked about what the path of love might look like in these times:

“Love looks like all of us — people of every race and religion and national origin and political affiliation — standing up and saying “Enough! We can do better than this. We can be better than this.”

“What does love look like? I believe that is what Jesus of Nazareth taught us. It looks like the biblical Good Samaritan, an outsider who spends his time and money healing somebody he doesn’t know or even like.”

There is a way forward through this that looks like love. That looks like the self-sacrificial love that Jesus showed us, taught us, and modeled with his life. And it looks like coming together, in love.

In Bible studies over the past months, we have been studying Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, in which Paul is emphatic about the unity of the church. In his commentary on Chapter 2, scholar and former bishop N.T. Wright says:

“If our churches are still divided in any way along racial or cultural lines, (Paul) would say that our gospel, our very grasp of the meaning of Jesus’ death is called into question. How long will it be before those who claim to follow Jesus, not least those who claim also to love Paul’s thinking, come to terms with the demands he actually makes?”

The way forward in love right now is not about doctrine. If we look at Jesus, when he dealt with the hurting, the sick, the lonely, the disenfranchised–he saw them, he healed them, he loved them, he brought them into the fold. Where Jesus is love, Paul also calls that love into unity.

I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet. But I know I can’t really think or write about anything else with it so large on my heart and mind right now.

In talking about love and faith, Krista Tippett, author and the host of “On Being,” writes:

“Every time I let myself go deeper into the mess and mystery of human loving, I am hit over the head again by theology–an insistence that the love of God is so much fuller than we can usually imagine or take in… I keep pursuing faith, if for no other reason than because it is the place in our common life that keeps reminding me of the necessity of love–not the romantic love of poets, but the practical love of sacred texts–however fraught and imperfect our practice of it may ever and always be… love is not the starting point, but the goal. It is not something we are born knowing how to do, not something we fall into. It is something we spend our whole lives learning.”

That is a love I want to learn to do better. I want to spend my life learning and practicing it. Right now it feels like it starts with listening and with standing.