Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
This Season
Lights are strung everywhere. Lamp posts in towns everywhere are wearing wreaths and garlands. Churches celebrate Advent. Trees are in living rooms glowing through the night. Muzak is playing songs of this time of year in stores and offices. Streaming services are charging money to watch Christmas movies that are ordinarily free to view. Catalogs for toys and food and wine and winter clothes are landing in mailboxes every day. “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…”, as the song goes.
I go to church these days to be reminded of the Christmas miracle that launched a worldwide spiritual and religious movement. Two humble citizens travel to Bethlehem to obey a government edict and the Christ child is born. This man’s spiritual teachings and his social justice movement efforts allegedly lasted about 3 years and out of that brief span of time came revolutionary new ideas spoken to people being oppressed by a mighty empire. Thousands of years later, Jesus still speaks to us – if we are willing to really listen.
I was talking to a friend of mine for whom the Holidays are not pleasant. She is not alone in this. There are plenty of people who find the season hard to tolerate and hard to live through. Perhaps their memories of past holidays are scarred by the loss of someone precious, without whom there is less joy in the world. Friends have recently lost their soul mates and the challenge is to balance the grief and sorrow with the required festivities. Just this week I have gotten two new young clients whose spouses died this Summer. So, in addition to their immigration issues, they have to make their ways through the celebratory days to come.
My friend, whose statement set me to thinking about all this, has lost a mother and a brother in the last few years. Although this is enough to cast a somber mood, she is also affected by the crass commercialism surrounding the season. People may be spending money that they really don’t have and are piling debt on plastic cards that promise everything: cash back and travel points, for example. She comes from a large family of in-laws and step children and step-grandchildren. Satisfying everyone’s gift list would break the bank. Just fixing food for all the festivities is expensive and exhausting.
My own grandsons need re-educating. When asked why we celebrate Christmas they both immediately and excitedly said that toys are the reason for the season. Oops. And this was compounded when they were asked whose birthday we celebrate. Their answer was the name of a little girl who is having a birthday party this weekend. Now, they are only five and almost four, but still….so their mother took them to church last Sunday. I’m not at all sure what they got out of that experience, but at least they heard the name, Jesus.
Sometimes friends and family with whom we would love to spend the days live at a distance and the gift of getting together is not possible. That is my case. I have a child on each coast and we will not be spending any part of Christmas with them. My best friend will be out of town over Christmas, so we will have to celebrate when she gets back. A dear friend is making her way through this time having just lost her husband in October. I can’t imagine the pain that goes with that kind of loss.
My friend for whom the holidays are painful opened a place in my heart this week. When she said what she did about how she is affected by the span of time from Thanksgiving to New Year’s I felt her sorrow. We talked last night. All I can do is listen to her and then pray for some peace and comfort to make their way into her heart.