The Ghosts of Christmas!

The Ghosts of Christmas

“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now

and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six….”

I return to these words of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales every year at this time. Or, at least I mean too. I at least take the book out. It’s because my mother sent me the little blue New Directions paper edition for Christmas 1975 since I was half a continent away from home, as I was most years back then. I wasn’t yet a priest in the church in 1975, but rather was off playing music. Usually in Maine where it really does begin to look a lot like Christmas. My bandmates and I would sometimes stay at a farm near Winslow and China, Maine, with no electricity, no running water, no telephone. Just the honking goose and ramming sheep in the barnyard, goats in the barn, and the good company of the woman who lived there with her daughters after taking off in an old school bus from Virginia and just kept driving until they found that place. A hand painted sign out front read, “Da Farm,” and the woman, who sometimes made the news in Waterville, was oft times simply referred to as the Winslow Woman!

One year she arranged for us to play at the Augusta County Jail on Christmas Eve. My bandmates played guitars, banjo and mandolin while I made do with washboard and spoons. The inmates sang along and were among the most appreciative audience we ever played for these past 50 years we have been playing. When I think back on it now after years of preaching and teaching, it must have been something like this for Saint Paul and his jail-mates who refused to give in to their imprisonment, would pray and sing songs, so moving that the jailers would join in! One time an earthquake sprung the jail doors open, but Paul did not leave. He didn’t want the Roman jailers to get in trouble. Nothing quite like that happened in Augusta that night, but it sure did feel like Christmas with the men who were being held there.

John Shea tells the story of an old priest who had one Christmas Eve sermon. Every year, people flocked to hear it again. He would seem to be talking to himself about the birth of Christ. He began softly, a low rumble like that of the distant trains I hear outside my bedroom window late at night. But this train was in the church. People had to lean forward just to hear him at first until soon he would bellow, “The wood of the crib is the wood of the cross!” A seemingly odd thing to say on the night of the child’s birth, which took place in a place not unlike Da Farm in Winslow, Maine. His mother and father certainly would not have been thinking of the seemingly tragic end of his life on a Roman cross. No doubt they were just happy to be together. And now – most of all – they were a threesome. At least for the next 30 years or so. And all these strange visitors. Shepherds of all things! Not just shepherds, but shepherds with tales of angels singing and a message about the child. And just like that they were gone and Mary and Joseph and the child were a threesome again.

Strange of the old priest to imply that this child of whom angels sing was born to die. But that would be the point of the story we come to rehearse year in and year out. God in this child comes to live among us as one of us to shed a little light into the darkness of this world. At the Council of Nicea, so the story goes, when Arius declared that Jesus was not divine, St. Nicholas, they say, swept across the room and slapped him. For that outburst Nicholas was put in jail until Mary appeared in his cell and freed him, for Mary knows the nature of the son she bore, and she was not going to let his defender languish in jail! In the less-fun world of theology, Mary was given the title “Theotokos,” or “God Bearer”! Thus, theology and legend combine to hold together the Christian rhetoric of Incarnation.

That same council gave us the words that “he suffered, died and was buried.” We repeat them every Sunday. That is, Christ’s human nature was not a sham. Unlike the Gnostics who would say that at the first moment of pain and suffering he magically left his body, climbed up to heaven to watch and laugh at his tormentors, we believe in his full humanity. Like each and every one of us, he was born, he lived and he died. He cried out in pain on the cross as any of us would. His full humanity is demonstrated by the very fact that he freely faced what we steadfastly try to avoid – suffering and death. The wood of the crib is the wood of the cross.

The old priest was on to something, for as in Dickens’ tale, Christmas time is when the dead seem to return – though usually friendlier than those who take after Old Scrooge. I have found myself thinking of Christmas nights at my Grandma and Grandpa Cooper’s house in Maywood. Roy Cooper had been something of a giant in his day, working in Mr. Wrigley’s downtown Chicago bank. One of his jobs was to oversee the cash take at Wrigley field. He would take my mother to the games. He would just sidle up to a side door, knock and say “Tell them it’s Roy,” and they would go right in. But on Christmas nights that I recall he was greatly reduced by the effects of his Parkinson’s, sitting in his armchair overseeing the family opening presents around the living room. His sister, my Great Aunt Grace, would always give us “men” in the family a stick of Old Spice deodorant and after-shave! I still have to keep some in my medicine chest if only to remember her and her 50 years at Marshall Field’s flagship store. What I remember most about Roy is that he always insisted on getting the parson’s-nose off the turkey, and that no matter how advanced his disease was, he always smiled. Something we could all do well to do – smile that is!

The wood of the crib is the wood of the cross. He was born to die. Those of us who know the rest of the story know that neither the crib nor the cross could contain him. Herod sent his troops to kill all the infants around Bethlehem two years-old and younger, his entire cohort! Yet, ironically, he survives, hiding in Egypt of all places. And he says, “I am with you always to the end of the age!” This not only means he is always with us, but that we cannot get rid of him. As John Donne once preached on Christmas day: ‘His birth and his death were but one continuall act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day.” The miracle of the Incarnation means to shout out: I am there. I am with you. I am your life. You are my beloved. I was born to die and rise again. Just like all those who return to be with us on Christmas Eve. It turns out that “born to die” translates into “accompanied by love.” Born to die proclaims the non-abandoning presence of God. God does not let go of the human person – not ours and not his own!

“Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night,” concludes Dylan Thomas. “I turned the gas down. I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

God bless us, every one!