Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Feliz Navidad are each greetings tuned to the wayward tracks playing 8 on a tape, when time itself was an
ancient plea to grow and change, an invitation towards progress when the irreversibility of regret never loomed in the air. What a sentiment of wonder, a lost era naive to the stars aligning overhead; but even so we are just a breath in this passage on the pilgrim Bethlehem way, a blinking eye from one century to the next the curtain lifting and
falling involuntarily.
So, indeed, I say Happy Holidays to you!
This season has always been one lined with our greatest of expectations and, thus often ill-delivering as life is yet still a surprise when it brings grief, trauma, sudden turns or ends much too soon. What a remarkable gift, then, the opportunity to reorient ourselves to life with second chances, to hopes re-born into an empty trough lined with eider, to
a clock that is neither wound by human hands nor strikes at midnight when our best
attempts at being extraordinary reveal the carriage pumpkins of our humble beginnings.
Welcome to the manger, my friends.
I know that this year, like some before, I see the invitation to gather in the dark damp eve of Christ’s birthday a welcome retreat. As if hiding in the cave of wonder I am a child again pregnant with belief and mystery, filled with the fullness of Love’s magic of striped candy canes and the overgrown bellies of jolly old men. It is in the rituals of the passing of time, where reindeer’s hooves land softly upon our roofs and God’s own Spirit passes by the threshold of our human waywardness — promising delivery, once again.
Like many of you, I am hungry, nearly starving for a royal triumph, a monarchy of
magic, an indulgent yet superstitiously optimist King or Queen, a Sovereign to
dismantle the evil empire of our day, to bring the wrecking-ball from on high, to set right all that has gone wrong… and yet we wait, not for a god-man born with
gun-in-hand, but for a love brought forth— en-wombed in each of us.
Welcome to the manger, my friends, and Merry Christmas!
Come, Lord Jesus, Come,
Rev. Jenny Shultz-Thomas