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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
If The Spirit Moves You Christmas has bothered me for a very long time. Before you wince and prepare for an anti-Christmas Scrooge-a-thon, let me assure you that I have NO problem with the fondness others show for this annual occasion. It is undeniably an excellent time to gather for a meal [or many!] with those we love, seldom see, or to chow down with a festive menu across from those we see every day. Many families I’ve known make a practice of inviting, on purpose, someone not immediately connected to their tribal unit. Because of course this can be an intensely lonely time of year for all kinds of reasons. Far from home. Widowed. Economically distressed [also known as flat busted broke or closer than many of us will ever get to it]. Jewish but curious about insane WASP customs. Gay and young and kicked out of the family home for that very [STUPID] reason. Agnostic but nevertheless up for a comp feast. Visiting from another planet with a mysterious hole in the agenda that day. To me this practice comes closer to the meaning of Christmas than any other. Marathon sessions in shopping malls may stimulate someone’s package, but generally, the practice of increasing your personal debt-load was probably not in Jesus’ plans for mankind. If you believe in Jesus, that is, which lots of people celebrating “Christmas” do not. Apparently, they believe in shopping. Fervently. I could rant [for hours] about the clever ways in which we fill up the garbage dumps under the false guise of “occasions.” But I won’t. Off the top I mentioned that Christmas has long bothered me. The feeling does not stem from childhood feelings of deep confusion when, each Christmas dinner, my much-beloved grandfather thanked us all for coming out to his birthday party. For lots of reasons, my grandfather *was* the joy in Christmas and if he wanted to equate himself with The Big Guy, even in jest, I was fine with that.
My unease with the whole Christmas experience crept in even before we lost my Grandpa. It was partly that my father fell slightly away from the earth each December, a little further and more painfully each year it seemed, and also because I really craved a spiritual component to the event. Spiritual, not churchy. Some of my Catholic friends went to Mass on Christmas Eve. I would have envied them this ritual but that they never darkened the door of their churches any other day of the year. That seemed suspect to me from early on in my life. A longing to connect with the divine was there from early days. Since I stood in the dark at the top of a hill, trusty toboggan poised, the slope of white possibility curving steeply before me. Surfing down without incident or accident. “Thank God,” we say when something goes right or less horribly than we imagined.
One of the ways in which I recapture my toboggan-hill connection with something ‘other’ is by listening to Luciano Pavarotti’s soaring rendition of Ave Maria. Every Christmas, without fail, for many years now. Ideally without headphones on to keep my embarrassing need for [spi]ritual connection at Christmastime to myself. Instead: loud and many times over.
Reviewing the waning year in spiritual terms is a powerful exercise that anybody can try, even at home. Unfortunately the very notion of quiet reflection terrifies a lot of people. And for others, the word spiritual has painful connections with extreme religiosity. But for me, Christmas isn’t really worth engaging in if this practice isn’t tended to. Standing at the top of the toboggan hill in the dark, under stars I can now see because of where my life has taken me, is essential. Most everyone I know and love faced some kind of massive challenge or other this past year. It isn’t to say that more suffering equals spiritual superiority or super-enlightenment. Hardly. Sometimes in our greatest depths of pain we can be our most disconnected from the divine. Luckily it doesn’t require anything but superhuman courage [and the luck of what I call privileged geography] to hang on for the next wave. So whether it is Ave Maria or the soundtrack from Hairspray that you blast at top volume this Christmas, I wish you an ecstatic journey into reflections on the year that was, as they all are, unlike any other before it. And yes, the odd tasty morsel here and there, for sustenance on the childlike trudge back up the hill.
Listening to: If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again, Mavis Staples
Reading: re-reading the last two chapters of Toni Morrison's A Mercy, which blew my head off, beautifully
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