The Christmas IJ column-Jesus and Santa

With no Santa, there's more room for Jesus

Published: Dec 22, 2007 12:01 AM EST
LANCASTER COUNTY, PA -
Santa has left the building.
But hopefully there will be a little more room for Jesus in our household this year.
The jelly-bellied old man with his reindeer fleet has gone, never to return to our rancher.
I'll miss him.
But I know that part of the challenge of raising children is helping them discover that sometimes truth is stranger, richer, more evocative and less tangible than fiction.
Colin, my 10-year-old son, lost his faith on a Brooklyn, N.Y., street last month, days after my dad died. Distracted and upset, I responded to a question by admitting that, yes, his dad and I bought the presents that appeared under the Christmas tree.
In the taxi taking us to the train station on our way back to Pennsylvania, his freckled face looked sad.
"I'm glad I found out now," Colin said, with all the gravity of a man of 50. "When I have my own kids, I won't forget to buy them presents because I think Santa is coming."
We haven't strung the lights on the windows or gone down the road to choose our tree at Farmer Messner's place.
A defect in the solar Christmas lights I strung on the pine tree we recycled last winter makes them flash madly — as though Christmas was coming on steroids this year.
A Christmas cookie exchange? You've got to be kidding. It's already Wednesday night. I'll be lucky if I get gifts to my daughter Sian's teachers before school ends (gulp) for Christmas break tomorrow.
Like you, I could let my losses and disorganization and frustrations define the season for me.
Or, like you, I could listen for the voice of truth in the cacophony, look for the glimmer of light in the winter darkness, praise the small moments of grace in the chaos — all signs of the incarnate Christ, the child born in Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago.
We don't know the season in which Jesus was born.
If Mary and Joseph had to spend the night in a manger with a baby wrapped only in swaddling clothes, it probably wasn't in the Judean December, where they would have been competing for room with field animals brought in from the cold, not to mention the shepherds.
Whatever the season, we do know that he came into a world and a culture rent with war, oppression, venality and hypocrisy — a world and a culture much like our own.
Naked and helpless like every other baby, he came as a vulnerable icon of contradiction to those who dreamed of influence, ambition and autonomy.
Jesus must have cut an odd, even intimidating, figure among the Pharisees and the Zealots and the Romans, men so bound to working the system to the first-century realpolitik.
No more domesticated today than he was 21 centuries ago, Mary's son brings disorder as well as healing, doubts yoked to certainties, anxiety and tranquillity.
Like a character in a short story by the great American writer Flannery O'Connor, he provokes, challenges and baffles us.
If we are open to letting our lives be transformed by his message of humility, love and nonviolence, he can enter into our daily lives and release us from captivity to all that hurts us and makes us hurt each other.
As my kids prepare for the Feast of the Incarnation, I hope they meet this idiosyncratic God of ours amid the cookies and the wrapping paper.
It would be wonderful if they stumble across him when they most need his grace.
I want them to see his glory in unexpected places, those not usually patronized by the complacent and the prosperous and the respectable.
Judging by history, those are the kinds of settings in which he is likely to show up.
But I'm not in charge of that. He is.
I hope that you and your families will be open to celebrate the coming of this wild Christ among us this season. Swing open the doors that confine your bruised and broken hearts, your dusty dreams, your passionate love for this world he has made and let him enter in.
One thing is for sure: He's going to surprise you.
Elizabeth

Glued

I used to worry that my two kids weren't going to be close. When Colin was born, Sian seemed to see him mostly as competition rather than as a younger hatchling she had to care for. The two of them have developed a joint story, a folktale, to cover this period in their lives, the years when they weren't tightly knit to each other-it is the time "when Colin threw his rattle at me", accounting for years of distance, if not hostility on Sian's part.

Colin was perpetually disappointed. He would constantly be kind and generous to her-and couldn't figure out why she responded with anger. He gave her presents. He defended her when her dad and I accused her of childish felonies. He forgave her. Although she spurned his offerings, he seemed to think if he only found the right combo, it would be OK.

Now they get into the car and rag on each other continously-but the general dynamic is so different I sometimes can't believe they are the same kids. Oh yes, they do annoy one another-and occasionally the adults who are rearing them. Sian teases him-but like she thinks that's her duty as a big sister.

Last night, as I drove them home, Sian insulted Colin and he hit her on the shoulder. Naturally, she shrieked-then explained that she just happened to be a little bruised because he had smacked the shoulder that a school friend had hit her on. "Ok" he said seriously. "I'll hit you somewhere else next time."

Talk about brotherly love.

In the 19th century, a tribe in Fiji ate a missionary-cooked him in a brick oven. A few or so ago, the boyfriend of the mother of a 14 year old named Ebony, a young artist who wanted to attend Villanova, where her dad worked, allegedly strangled her by tying her pajama bottoms around her neck. A mother and her daughter's friends gang up on a 13 year old who has a history of low self esteem in a series of emails and drive her to suicide .

As the cat sleeps on my bed and my 12 year old makes a gingerbread tree in the kitchen sink (so as not to get the icing all over, of course) these events seem very far away. But they are not-the lion that lurks at the door, the drumbeat of plotting in the adjoining village, violence is only as far away as our next door neighbor's argument or the latest Coen brother's gorefeast at the multiplex.

To say we are flawed is a gross understatement. We are savages, sinners so broken we can't fix ourselves. When the evolutionary biologists and psychologists argue we are evolving in a beneficial way, we have to ask-into what?

Without divine intervention, we are lost-cannibals all.

Sola gratia. Sola gratia. Sola gratia.

Just back from the mall and a fairly expensive run through Aeropostale, I brewed a cup of tea and sat in the wing chair by the computer. For some reason, my kids seem to like sitting in a wing chair instead of a wooden one when they are playing Virtual Villagers or Toontown. Often I will walk through the living room and observe, with some amusement, Sian and Colin and their friend Tyler shoved up against each other. Tyler and Sian are about a year apart-I wonder how long they will remain unself-conscious about that?

Then the phone rang. Around here, this past fall, the ring of a telephone past ten could only signal really bad news. When I picked it up, it was Sian. Sobbing, she said to me that she hadn't been able to sleep last night because of the fight we'd had.

For Sian and for her parents, coping with her ADD is often mentally exhausting. Several days ago she sat in an ADD doc's office and agreed (so I thought) to get her homework book signed by her teachers in exchange for computer and TV time. I speculate now that it was just her mother who agreed. At any rate, she didn't get her books signed, didn't do the math homework-and told the teacher her group would present first on a project. A project she really hadn't done a whole heck of a lot of work on-due in two days.

How strange, I thought when I heard her shaky voice as her dad sped back to his home in the darkness. My Sian is such a strong-willed girl that I hadn't realized our disagreement had affected her at all.

Boy, was I clueless.

I told her that although she needs to get her book signed, I'd overreacted. I told her how much I was looking forward to having time with her on Saturday. I told her I loved her-and then got off the phone, wondering what I could have done differently.

The tipping point

When I get together with friends and we talk in generalities about guys we have met online, they are often surprised by the "unconventional" tastes and personas of the guys with whom I strike up conversations.

Recovering alcoholics. Swingers. Actors and TV pitchmen with father issues.

I don't know if I tend to attract guys who are a bit idiosyncratic or are drawn to them. Probably a mix.It may be that men over 40 just tend to have issues (as do women, of course).

I don't know if I appear slightly eccentric myself, and so they feel safe opening themselves up to me. To be perfectly candid, I don't know if my friends aren't also meeting peculiar (different, not bad) guys, and are so odd themselves that they wouldn't know "normal" if he came up to them with flowers and a box of dark chocolate.

I like complexity in men. But even I have a limit to my bent for Baroque-shame on me that it took me a year or so to discover what it was.

Who has the bigger stick?

So now Dick Cheney (aptly named) is questioning the masculinity of some Democratic pals in the Congress because they decided to go along with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on energy bill. Read the opinion column by the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus linked above and shake your head in disbelief. Or maybe you won't.

The Veep doesn't seem to know any other emotion but anger. He appears like a guy who has contempt for anyone who doesn't agree with his view of the world.

But Cheney accurately reflects the tenor of the White House. They plot out every legislative fight as though it was a battle out of "Left Behind."

Total compliance from conservatives or unconditional surrender (from liberals) are the only options-only sissies compromise.

Yes, his comments were deeply sexist. But more than being offensive to women (who cares what Cheney thinks of women?) they were painful symbols of the way he and his DC mafia let nothing get in their way in pursuit of their paranoid ideas-and miss no opportunity to lash out and hurt anyone, including their former colleagues.

One can only speculate on the events that shaped Cheney and made him the kind of fellow who frightens little children. Let's leave it to the historians.

The illusions of grief

When I called my dad's home (I still cannot speak of the house as his "former home") today, I got the answering machine. I've been able to leave messages for my sister before when dad was ill-this time, however, I lost it. How cruel it is to hear that distinctive voice, and yet know that in this life we will never hear it again.

The kid's dad told me that when he lost his father, he kept looking for him on the street in the eyes of strangers.

I can't stand the idea of deleting the tape-although I know that time will come.

Those of you who haven't lost a parent or a sibling-make sure you have recordings or other ways in which you can remember a mother's silvery laugh, a father's flat Michigan "a's"...or his horrible puns. Those twists of personality that used to irritate you so much? You would give practically anything to have them, and the person who made was so much richer and strange, back.

Choking back the sobs, I called my sister again-on her cell phone.

Full fathom five, thy father lies...