Only 358 Days Until Christmas

I didn't sleep much last night.  Nothing was wrong - no medical malady or nagging annoyance.  No light was on; no faucet was dripping; no branch was scraping the window.  It's just that the kids were leaving well before daylight this morning to get a few hours down the road while a toddler still slept, and I couldn't bear the thought that I wouldn't get up to see them off.  Never mind that I had set the alarm.  My mind completely trusts the technology, but clearly my subconscious has its doubts.  So I tossed and turned and watched the clock until I decided it was close enough and gave up, shut off the alarm and got up.  And waited.  And felt.

This isn't my time of year.  It has nothing to do with the weather.  I rather like the cold, despite the fleeing from it so common among my geographical peers.  My aversion has to do with the holidays.  I hate to see them end.  After righteously forestalling Christmas music until after Thanksgiving, we go into full aural saturation mode for the ensuing weeks.  There follows decorating, partying, shopping, remembering and planning.  But all the aforementioned fit neatly under the heading of "anticipating."  And we do.  We don't tend to think much about Christmas and New Year's throughout the rest of the year, but during the season of Advent and the celebration of Christmas we cram in a lot of anticipation.  I won't speak for my beloved, but between the nostalgia of remembering and the giddiness of anticipating I spend the entirety of the season emotionally drunk on it all.  We cook special meals, we wrap special presents, and the space beneath the tree grows crowded with its own visual manifestation of anticipation.  Family logistics are coordinated, laced with still more anticipation.  The house is readied, the beds are made, the party mix set out in a bowl, the cars pull into the driveway, and all the anticipation becomes present tense.  Embodied.  Incarnate, just to keep with the season.

And then...

And then the space beneath the tree is empty once again.  The driveway is emptied.  The beds are stripped and the sheets stuffed into the washer.  The dishes are washed and the trash taken out.  The few errant pieces of party mix are swept up, and the resident toys put away.  There is an emptiness that remains; a silence, despite the instrumental Christmas songs lingering on the stereo.  And a lump in my throat.  It's a common problem with me.  I'm prone to this kind of melancholy.  As I have learned about personalities I've come to understand that different ones of us are oriented differently to time, and I tend to be oriented to the past - oftentimes to the neglect and detriment of the present and future.  And "the past" is full in my heart as this morning labors to get underway, even if it is only a matter of days since we gathered around the tree; a matter of hours since we closed the door and waved goodbye.  Melancholia.  Perhaps even something of the "acedia" the ancients used to name.  It is, for me, that odd - bizarre, even - intersection of gratitude, joy, contented happiness and profound sadness at the sudden "pastness" of it all; the completion of all that anticipation.

And then...

And then I read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "The Meeting," the last few stanzas of which observe:

We speak of a Merry ChristmasAnd many a Happy New YearBut each in his heart is thinkingOf those that are not here. 

We speak of friends and their fortunes,And of what they did and said,Till the dead alone seem living,And the living alone seem dead. 

And at last we hardly distinguishBetween the ghosts and the guests;And a mist and shadow of sadnessSteals over our merriest jests.

And I think to myself how lamentable that sounds.  And that I would opt for a different spirit; that I would rather pay more attention to the guests than the ghosts; be mindful and appreciative of, and celebrate these present moments and and upcoming ones with those around and beside me instead of focusing mournfully on absentees.

And then...

And then I tuned in to Chris Botti singing his simple holiday song, "Perfect Day" on that lingering holiday playlist, and hear him say to his beloved, "With you by my side, it's gonna be a perfect day.  How blest I've been that I can truly say, 'with you it's Christmas everyday.'

And I thought, "yes, indeed."  That perfectly describes my good fortune.  This day has much to savor, to experience, and yes, to anticipate.  Tomorrow certainly will as well.  There are wonderments in store of myriad descriptions over the coming months weeks and months, and I am excited by the thought of them - the wonderments, themselves, but also the ones with whom I will share them, and I dare not distract from them by simply remembering.

These have been precious days, filled with precious moments, animated by people precious in my life.  I will savor them, but I best not belabor them because this, too, will be a perfect day and I would hate to miss it.  Botti has it right as far as I am concerned:  spiritually, relationally, experientially, romantically, "it's Christmas everyday."  The thought of it makes me smile.

I think I'll put a few more things in the washing machine, and then go downstairs to exercise.  After all, I need to stay healthy for all that's on the way - even Christmas, only 358 days away.

And then, perhaps, take a nap.  I have some catching up to do.

Come for the Grief and the Grace, But Not for the Refreshments

I held a funeral this week.  As far as I was concerned it was awful.  I did the best I could, but all I had to go on was a cursory obituary about this person I never knew.  The deceased family - a large and local assortment - never responded to repeated requests to meet for planning.  I have no explanation.  I don't mean to cast aspersions.  I don't know if they were too busy, didn't care, had no thoughts the matter, or simply couldn't confront the finality of their mother's death.  I only know it made for a lean service.

I have a fondness for funerals.  I officiate for a lot of them.  In earlier times, most people had ties to a worshipping community and called upon their pastor for leadership in such times of need.  That is less and less the case, leaving funeral homes to scramble with lists of available or retired pastors willing to stand in the breach with strangers.  Most of the time it's a privilege.

Like many pastors, I can trace the eventual inversion of my initial excitement at the prospect of officiating at weddings and dread of officiating at funerals.  It didn't take long to learn that weddings are seldom much fun - populated, as they are, by stressed couples and over-expended families and magazine stereotypes of what "our perfect day" should look like.  Weddings, quite often, convene our most artificial selves for an event in which the things that matter most usually matter least.  There are beautiful exceptions, but the exceptions tend to prove the rule.

Funerals, on the other hand, tend to be gatherings of raw authenticity.  The death of someone we love strips us bare and leaves us broken, raw and beautifully open.  There are certainly exceptions to this as well.  Years ago I wore a bullet-proof vest under my robe at the urging of the funeral director (whose staff was similarly protected) because of ominous portents circling around estranged family members.  Indeed, I wondered about similar precautions while preparing for a more recent funeral home service.  Again, however, the exceptions prove the rule.  Death drives us to a vulnerable "realness" in a way that matrimony oddly fails to accomplish.

All that, and life is precious.  And so I have valued funerals and felt privileged to lead them, graced at the opportunity to honor someone I have loved, or to meet a deceased stranger after the fact.  Once, when a local newspaper quoted me in a story about how families can prepare for such experiences, my son was horrified.  "Dad, is that the way you want to be known?  As 'Doctor Death'?"

Well, I thought to myself, there are worse ways to be known.

But funerals are having a crisis of identity; identity, but also character and even purpose.  As a culture, we are increasingly allergic to any and every kind of discomfort.  It's as though we have made a conscious decision not to be sad, pained or subject ourselves to any unpleasantness.  When threatened with any such ignominy we anesthetize it, inebriate it, ignore it, lipstick it, or flee it.  Especially when it comes to death.  Note the increasingly common abandonment of any organized service at all as reported in newspaper obituaries.  Funerals, after all, are sad - predicated on grief and loss - and we have little tolerance for such feelings or profundities.  So, we simply don't have them, or don't attend them, preferring instead to sign in at the "visitation" but eschew the actual service.  Or, as is increasingly preferred, occasion one of the now popular "celebrations of life" that have largely supplanted funerals as punctuational experiences at the end of a person's life.  But it's not quite the same.  While funerals as I understand them can be celebrations of life, Celebrations of Life are rarely funerals.  And I think that's a loss.

I'm using the word as it has come to be known.  The word itself, "funeral," simply and etymologically means "rites for the burial of the dead."  Admittedly, that description has been fulfilled in all manner of ways.  My first adult experience with a funeral came while I was in seminary.  As a student, I paid close attention.  A formal, liturgically structured service, it was flawlessly executed - beautiful, I suppose in its own way - but never once mentioned the deceased by name or by story after announcing with the Welcome the reason for our gathering.  Utterly cold and impersonal, the whole thing rang empty and flat.

But if that example stands extreme in one direction, our modern "celebrations" simply move indulgently to the opposite extreme.  Perhaps as a consequence of the church's default to narrow rules over deep meaning and "good times" hucksterism over life-changing "good news", fewer and fewer families approach funeral planning with an interest in matters of faith, preferring to simply convene and splash around in a localized pool of memories and disjointed stories, unevenly told.  I'm increasingly amazed at what we wear to such services - or don't wear, or can't be bothered to remove while the service is in progress; and I marvel at the existential shallowness embodied in the moments.  Lost, among other things, is any tethering of this one particular story to anything larger.

Sure, we make room for playing a recording of Elvis singing "The Old Rugged Cross" or AC/DC singing "Highway to Hell" (I'm not making this up), but such are typically the only subtle, if perfunctory, nods to anything eternal.  Surely there is something missing in all this.  Surely there is more to be said about a life than the cookies baked or the fish cleaned or the rounds of golf played or the football teams cheered on.  Surely there is more to be included than anecdotes.

That, for me, is how a funeral differs from mere "celebration."  Funerals reach for something higher, deeper, and more.  For the increasing number of "Nones" among us - those who express no religious identity - that "moreness" will necessarily look for differently expressive vocabulary and forms.  At the very least we could talk about legacy and lessons learned and the augmenting value of others in our lives.  Life, we like to argue, is important; but surely it means more than the sum of our quirks and quips and favorite things.  If we believe that lives are consequential, surely this is a moment to say it out loud, and ponder the significance of how that is true in this particular case.  For those still theologically grounded in and shaped by some understanding of God's presence and purpose and ultimate plan, surely the plot line of a service ought to trace some intentional arc toward that context - toward the implications of eternal life and love - how this one, small story fits into a profoundly larger story.

Surely.  At least.  And let's accept the fact that, while we may chuckle and smile at a memory or expression, it very well may be sad.  And that that is as it should be.

All of which is to say that I would like to think there is more to be said in such moments than a colorfully illustrated version of, "this person lived; this person died; stick around for refreshments."

I hope so.  Because trust me, the refreshments usually aren't that good.