Thoughts Happen

Epiphany in Music

I love to sing. But sometimes I forget that. Daughter said she wanted to go to the Epiphany Eve Carol Sing at our church, so we went together, but I ended up enjoying it at least as much as she did, and not only because of the cookies and cider afterwards.

Epiphany eve, sometimes called Twelfth Night, marks the official end of the Christmas season. Epiphany is the day the Three Wise Men, or Magi arrived to visit the baby Jesus, and falls on the 12th day after Christmas, January 6. (You knew those songs about the Twelve Days of Christmas and We Three Kings went together, right?)

The service was billed as the last opportunity to sing favorite Christmas carols. I love singing Christmas carols. It’s true. I love their familiar tunes and cadences and the continuity they bring to the years. Over time I learned the alto harmony to many of them, and I love singing next to my sister and mom on Christmas Eve, trading off melody and harmony, hearing our three voices weave in with the rest of the congregation. But there’s just one problem; there’s never enough of them.

To get in all the traditional favorites and still leave enough time for the rest of the service, we usually only get to sing at most one or two verses of the same carols every time. I feel like I’m just getting warmed up and we are off "Angels We Have Heard on High" and on to "Joy to the World".

But the Carol Sing was perfect—it could have been called the “All Carols All the Time” service. We called out requests, and while we still didn’t sing every verse, we got to sing more than just one from each carol. We even did a few I had never heard before: “When Christmas Morn is Dawning” and “Jesus, Our Brother, Kind and Good.” We stumbled through the Spanish verse of “Fum, Fum, Fum” and all got to sing the solo parts of “Oh, Holy Night.” At the end we lit candles just like we do on Christmas Eve and sang all the verses (including one in German) of “Silent Night.”

I tipped my unlit candle into Daughter’s flame and realized I was happy. I had my daughter next to me, wonderful music all around, and I had remembered again how much I love to sing.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattwright/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The Not-So-Perfect Christmas

 My mantra for my personal life this year has been, “It doesn’t have to be perfect, just good enough.” While that’s a hard concept for a recovering perfectionist to wrap her head around, it’s stood me in good stead when I’ve remembered to apply it. I’m thinking of it particularly this year as we get ready to host Christmas for my family. This isn’t the first time our home has been Holiday Home Base, so I’m a little more relaxed about it than previous years. I don’t feel I have anything to prove as a hostess, and my main concern is that everyone is comfortable, well-fed, and enjoys each other’s company. To keep my goal in mind I find it helps to acknowledge the ways our Christmas will be not-so-perfect, and then let them go.

• The house is not spotless, but it’s clean enough
• Our meals will not be gourmet feasts, but I’m accommodating both a high-protein and a vegetarian diet with tasty yet healthy food
• The Moravian Star is still in its box, and we’ve gone another year without outside lights, but the house is reasonably decorated and the tree looks beautiful
• We do not have any plans for holiday festivities, but we’ll have plenty of puzzles and reading material at home
• Not everyone is as healthy as they could be, but it looks like we’ll all be together for another year, and for that I am truly grateful.

Sometimes it’s hard to let go of that Perfect Christmas ideal, especially so if you're spending the holiday away from family or without a special loved one. But, to paraphrase yoga instructor Cyndi Lee, “While your Christmas will never be perfect, at the same time, it already is.” 

 I know this is a busy (understatement) time of year, but I’d be interested to hear comments about how your Christmas was “good enough,” this year. 

 Wishing you a very Merry Not-So-Perfect Christmas, -Louise

Photo courtesy  of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jumpyjames/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

What's Your Story?

I love, love, love StoryCorps. That’s the oral history project started in 2003 and probably most well known through its weekly podcasts on NPR and the compilation book and CD, “Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project.”

StoryCorps provides permanent and mobile recording studios around the country where people reserve a spot to interview someone they know for a 40-minute session and come away with a broadcast-quality recording. The recording also goes into the archive of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. 

Most people interview a family member or someone who is an important part of their lives. The results, which are excerpted for the podcast, are gems. Two cousins reminisce about the daunting Miss Devine who took them to Sunday School, a hospital worker tells her friend how she prays over every surgical instrument pack she assembles for patients awaiting surgery, and a garrulous old man talks about how he met his wife of 75 years.

 I rarely make it through a podcast without getting choked up, and I dare you to make it through Chloe Smith recently interviewing Willie Jefferson, the custodian at her school, without getting a little teary. (Scroll down the Listen page to find Chloe's interview podcast, "Custodian of Grace"). I think what gets me is the privilege I feel at witnessing people's willingness to open themselves to each other. There must be something about the intimacy of the recording booth that lets people be more relaxed about asking and answering questions about their lives.

There are several people I wish I had had the opportunity to interview, one of whom is my grandmother on my mother’s side. I would ask her what it was like to move her three children all the way to Japan by herself when my grandfather was stationed there after WWII. I would ask her how she started drawing and painting, and what she thought of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

My grandmother isn’t around anymore, but my parents are, as well as many of my other relatives. I recently toted a video camera to my folks’ house to record some information about where key papers are kept, but also snapped it on any time a family story came up. I was so glad I did that I’m going to do it again while we’re all together this Thanksgiving weekend.

Families traditionally being together over Thanksgiving is why StoryCorps has designated the day after Thanksgiving, November 27, as National Day of Listening. Even if no tapes or cameras are rolling, asking the important people in our lives to tell us their story and really listening to them is one of the greatest ways to show our love.

The Tenth Day of Christmas

I thought I knew what to expect when we headed out to Christmas Eve service at the Lutheran church near my sister’s new house in Sacramento. There was just one service that night, at five o’clock, so it would be a small congregation, maybe an older crowd that doesn’t do much driving at night. 

Not wanting to jostle for a seat at the last minute, we arrived about fifteen minutes early, and immediately our group of seven almost doubled the population in the sanctuary. Hoo boy. Lutherans have a reputation for not wanting to stick out, but that’s hard to do when the guests outnumber the parishioners. Fortunately it filled up more as five o’clock approached, until there were about 70 people. The place could easily have fit at least triple that number. 

Instead of pews there were hotel banquet-hall style padded chairs arranged in two columns of about six rows each on either side of a center aisle, with lots of room to spare. The room was big and boxy, with a high ceiling that accentuated the cavernous feeling. 

Before the service, projection screens showed a Christmas slide show interspersed with announcements for a Sacramento Kings charity event and a men’s fellowship breakfast that aimed for inclusive but sounded a bit pleading—“All men are invited to the fellowship breakfast. Everyone is welcome. Bring your friends. Bring your sons. (please).” 

Okay, that is not an exact quote, but I could sense the imploring undercurrent. I figured that this was probably an older, struggling congregation that, like a lot of churches, is trying to find ways to stay viable. I felt a little uncomfortable—I didn’t want any desperation to rub off on me.

I glanced through the bulletin and was relieved to see all the standard stuff. Christmas hymns, call and response readings, prayer, communion, the Christmas Message and for the finale, a candlelight “Silent Night.” Yup. Been there, done that, familiar with the routine.  

An older pastor conducted most of the service, but when the time came for the Christmas Message, the vicar, a white-robed young man with close-cropped auburn hair and a neatly trimmed beard came to the front. (A vicar is sort of an apprentice pastor—not, as I previously thought, someone who presides over a small village church in England like a character in a P.G. Wodehouse story.)  

Instead of beginning in the familiar Christmas Eve way with angels, shepherds, Mary and Joseph and the manger, he started to describe the Last Supper—Jesus taking the Passover meal with his disciples. 

I’m sure I’m not the only one who was a little surprised. Umm ... aren’t you in the wrong holiday? Maybe he grabbed an Easter sermon out of his folder in the church office by mistake. He’d gotten my attention, though, as I wondered where this was going.

He talked about how nobody sharing that meal had expected things to turn out the way they did, and they certainly had no idea what was to unfold in the coming days. “This isn’t what we expect to hear about on Christmas, is it?” he said. No, it certainly wasn’t turning out like any Christmas Eve sermon I’d ever heard before. 

He went on to describe how the prophets had told of a savior, but no one expected him to come as a child. “How often is our experience of God limited by our human expectations?” he asked.

Whoa. 

All of a sudden the Christmas Eve sermon was starting to seem very relevant to me. When was the last time that happened? 

I mean, call it God or call it Life, the same applies. How often have my own expectations of life limited my capacity to just experience it as it is?

The holidays are a prime example. My family gets together and does things pretty much the same way we always have, everyone behaves in the same way they always have, and I know how it will turn out. 

We go to Christmas Eve service with all the predictable elements and hear the same story we have heard for years—yes, yes, there was no room at the inn, uh huh, and they laid the baby in a manger and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, hmmm, hmmm. 

All the tradition is certainly nice but it can numb me out to the fact that I’m friggin’ alive, and that the people around me, instead of being predictable patterns of packaged behavior, are actually one-of-a-kind bundles of mystery and wonder, and isn’t that miracle enough? 

As the vicar concluded the sermon and the service wound down, my mind spiraled in and out, excitedly grabbing bits of the quoted scripture and weaving them in with scraps of Alan Watts, walking meditation instruction and random snippets from my life—it had been a long time since I had felt inspired by a Christmas Eve service.  I felt aware of the humanity around me and was appreciative to be part of it. 

The service concluded after the candlelight “Silent Night,” and after a moment’s hesitation I walked up to say hello to the young vicar, to tell him I enjoyed his sermon. This modest church that I thought I had pegged even before I walked in the door gave me an opportunity to reconnect to the everyday extraordinariness of my own experience, and a bit of connection seemed appropriate.

The Gift of Waiting

A small, smooth river rock with the word “wait” written on it sits in a dish on my vanity. A woman I know gave it to me during Advent a few years ago. Most days it attracts little notice, nestled among some glass pebbles, shells and other stones I’ve accumulated. But this time of year I start thinking more about waiting and its role in my life, and the fullness of that single word becomes more apparent. 

In the Christian tradition, Advent is the time of waiting, symbolizing the anticipation of the arrival of the Christ child. Any parent who has gone through nine months of pregnancy—or waited for an adoption to go through—can empathize with the need to wait. 

And like a child counting down the days until Christmas, our waiting is not so hard when fruition is in our sights. But sometimes the outcome is not so certain, and questions about what the future will bring linger on our hearts. 

Will we find a partner to love, or find love again after a loss? Will our parent come home from the hospital? Will we be able to have another child? Will we ever completely recover from an illness or injury? Will a child lost to addiction ever find peace? 

Sometimes there are no answers to our questions—just more waiting. It can be so, so difficult when we have done all we can do and must simply wait. It is during these times, when the waiting seems most unbearable, that how we choose to wait comes to define us. 

We can let the waiting feed our anger, resentment and bitterness, or we can instead choose to let it nourish our patience and openness, softening us up instead of hardening us. 

In her book "When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times," Pema Chodron describes patience as one of six transcendent actions that give space to our situation, that open things up and let them breathe. When we encourage patience in ourselves, she writes, we don’t just gut it out, but in any situation we can instead “chew it, smell it, look at it, and open ourselves to seeing what’s there.” Patience is not something we either have or don’t have, but rather it is a journey. Chodron writes, “The journey of patience involves relaxing, opening to what’s happening, experiencing a sense of wonder.” 

When the outcome is the most uncertain is when we have the opportunity for the path we choose to be the most fruitful. Can we be with the uncertainty of the waiting and not close down? Can we aspire to develop an abiding patience with the precious mystery of life? Can we experience not knowing how things will turn out as the extraordinary gift that it is? 

If we can, then the true gift of waiting is not what we were waiting for, but who we have become in the process.

Arlington

Arlington National Cemetery was just another sightseeing stop to me when our family stepped on the Tourmobile bus in Washington, DC a few weeks ago. In the city on a week-long vacation, we planned to spend our first day taking in the monuments. Since Arlington was on the route, we might as well go see it. The bus crosses the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac, and the tour guide brings our attention to a pair of huge, gilded equestrian statues we pass between known as “The Arts of War,” named “Valor,” and “Sacrifice.” By the time we would return across that bridge, my perspective would have changed. 

As we drive in, our guide gives us some history of Arlington and reminds us to be respectful, as we are on hallowed ground here. He points out the different areas of the cemetery for veterans of different eras, and then the bus pulls around to stop at the Tomb of the Unknowns for the changing of the guard.

I am usually a bit ambivalent about displays of military pomp and circumstance, but as the crowd gathers around on the steps, I notice that this feels different. The sense of sacrifice is palpable here. Knowing that these volunteer sentinels perform the same ceremony 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in the freezing rain at 2:00 a.m. in January and in the sweltering heat of midday in August makes me feel that I’m witnessing something that’s actually quite private—it’s almost intimate. I take one picture, but then put the camera away. It seems disrespectful, somehow, to treat this place, this occasion, as a photo opportunity. 

I watch the sentinel on duty stoically marching back and forth in his measured, rhythmic steps, and suddenly I am choking up a bit behind my sunglasses. I find I have to put my hand over my mouth for a minute to compose myself. Another sentinel marches out and asks us to stand. I solemnly watch as the guard-changing ceremony unfolds in front of us, performed exactly the same way so many times that a path is worn into the stone by their footsteps. It feels like watching another culture, and I suppose, in a way, it is. 

The next stop on the tour is Arlington House, the former home of Robert E. Lee, located on the highest spot at Arlington with spectacular views of the city. I notice the flag is at half staff, and ask the ranger why it is lowered. “Well,” she replies, “we lower the flag whenever there is a funeral here, and lately that’s been pretty much every day.” I remember the tour guide telling us that between WWII veterans, family members, and war casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan, most days there are usually three or four funerals. 

After getting back on the bus we cross back over the Memorial Bridge and see a second pair of gilded statues perpendicular to the first. These are known as “The Arts of Peace,” and named “Music and Harvest,” and “Aspiration and Literature.” 

I think about the sentinels. Regardless of one’s personal opinions on the political motivations or effectiveness of any war, it is hard to not be moved by the knowledge that these young men, seemingly so different from myself, would, if asked, sacrifice all so that I can be free. They practice the arts of war so I can be free enough to take for granted the opportunity to cultivate the arts of peace. 

Later that day we go to the Korean War Memorial and see the stainless steel figures eternally on patrol, watched over by ghostly faces of support forces etched into a polished granite wall. Nearby the numbers of killed, wounded, missing in action and POWs are etched in stone at the Pool of Remembrance. So many wars, I think. So much sacrifice. 

 Back home, at church this past Sunday, the names of members of the military killed in Iraq and Afghanistan last week were read during Prayers of the People, as they have been every Sunday for at least four years now. Since we started I cannot remember a Sunday when no names have been read. So many wars. So much sacrifice. 

I don’t want to waste my opportunity to cultivate the arts of peace. This Veteran’s Day, I think, “Dear God, what can I do to keep just one more name off that list?”