Brueggemann: Gift of the Christmas Season on its Fifth Day

Brueggemann: Gift of the Christmas Season on its Fifth Day

“Christmas is especially for those of us whose lives are scarred and hurt in debilitating ways. Of course, that means all of us. Christmas is about a word from God addressed to the world in its exhaustion. ..Behold I am doing a new thing. Christmas is a day to stop and notice the newness that God is giving that lets our life start over in a fresh place.” Walter Brueggemann, Devotion for Advent, Celebrating Abundance. pp. 68-69

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So much of our life has been connected to schools and colleges. The twelve days of the church’s Christmas Season and especially the time between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day is traditionally a slow down time for higher education where people are on vacation or are less busy. It is amazing how my body and my mind have been conditioned over the years to live at a different pace during this Christmas Season. It is a Christmas gift. The days are shorter. I can sleep until seven am and go to my window and still watch the world yawn and wake up around me.

This morning is rainy and wet with a dense fog. There are fewer leaves. Even with the thick mist, I can see at a greater distance with a wider world view. I watch the deer gallop away together by my window back to the woods as they hear the sound of cars. The busy territorial squirrels chase each other up and down trees. The cardinals and woodpeckers come to the feeder by my window and share space with smaller birds whose markings I cannot read.

I have time to listen to the rhythm of the rain. It is as hypnotic as ocean waves, but the ocean is like a Souza march keeping perfect time while the rain changes and is slower and then faster and then softer and then louder like the improvisation of jazz.

I switch gears and turning inside, I open my memory book to Christmases in the past, re-enter those scenes and bring them alive. Traveling to the beach. Shopping with children and grandchildren. Going to movies. Ice skating. Family dinners. Watching slides. Leftovers. Reading new books or old ones I have in a to-read-list stack by my desk and bed. Writing. Visits to and from family we have missed seeing during the year. Spending time with old and new friends I have neglected because of my busyness. Resting.

The church year gives us a few more days at the end of our calendar year for this short Christmas season and extends it to Epiphany, the celebration of the arrival of the Wise Men on January 6. My prayer today is that I will open this gift and treasure the precious present of these 12 days of the Christmas Season.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Paying it Forward

Paying it forward

“It is important that we learn humility, which says there was someone else before me who paid for me. My responsibility is to prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who is yet to come.” Maya Angelou

At Christmas, I often remember special friends who have died. I remember Sylvia, whom I dearly loved for many years. We worked together early in my ministry, and she taught me about servant leadership. She was a single mom, a nurse and a care taker like none other. She was a visitor from our church to the sick to say prayers, but she become more like a parish nurse being an advocate in the hospital for the medical condition of those with whom she said prayers. Sylvia would go to nursing stations and let anyone there know what “her patients” needed.

We started a 12-step group at our church which only lasted for about four months, but Sylvia was one of the first people who came to it and was in recovery for the rest of her life. We always believed we started it just for her and never regretted the effort we put into it.

Sylvia loved us but more than us she loved her grandchildren whom she talked about almost constantly. She died too early while her grandchildren were still young. Somehow I stay connected to her family and know a little about her oldest granddaughter. I intermittently write to Darcy and let her know some of the stories about her grandmother, but I especially tell her how very much she was loved and adored by Sylvia.

I honestly believe that Sylvia has in some way still been “suggesting” that I do this the way she made “suggestions” so well in her physical life. This is exactly what she would tell me to do if she were physically beside me. Sylvia wants her granddaughter to know how much she was and is loved, and in turn Sylvia is reminding me that I have that opportunity to do the same.

When I remember Sylvia’s untimely death, I am moved to call or text or email or visit with my own grandchildren and remember what a privilege it is to let them know they are loved.

This was my Christmas present this year and many years to come from Sylvia.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Rohr, Poe: Seeing

Richard Rohr, Poe: Seeing

“Most people do not see things as they are because they see things as they are!” Which is not to see at all. Their many self-created filters keep them from seeing with any clear vision.” Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation, Richard Rohr ‘s Daily Meditation.

Edgar Allen Poe also gives us more clues about seeing in “The Purloined Letter.” The Paris chief of police asks a famous amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin to help him find a letter stolen from the boudoir of an unnamed women by an unscrupulous minister who is blackmailing his victim. The chief of police and his detectives have thoroughly searched the hotel where the minister is living, looking behind the wallpaper and under the carpets, examining tables and chairs with microscopes, probing cushions with needles, and finding no sign of the letter.

Dupin gets a detailed description of the letter, visits the minister at his hotel and complains of weak eyes so he can wear green eye glasses and disguise his eye movements as he searches for the letter. There it is in plain sight in a cheap card rack hanging from a dirty ribbon. He leaves a snuff box behind as an excuse to return the next day and switches out the letter for a duplicate.

Rohr is calling us to put on a new pair of glasses, perhaps 3 D glasses, to see the depth of what is in plain sight immediately around us in the present moment. We will meet God in the present moment. This is the call of the Christmas Season.

Joanna joannaseibert.com