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ANOTHER SIDE OF CHRISTMAS |
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Christmas is a time of
celebration. Bright packages and ropes of pine, starched red bows and ribbons, eggnog and
plum pudding, all promising we’ll be touched by something extraordinary.
But Christmas is a time of memory as much as celebration. For some it is memory of loss,
intensified because, for all our lives, we’ve seen it as the season of promise. So
much promised by friends and family, so little given in the rush. Christmas is and can be
lonely. A loneliness that crowds us like no other as we turn inward, farther from reality
than at any other season.
Just once we ought to set about preparing for the downhill run that nearly always
accompanies the tinsel. The only way to do so is to get outside us and think about the
infant in the manger long ago. Not just remembering His birthday, but remembering the
trials and truth that marked His life and, down these many years, also mark ours. We are
better because He was the best. Throughout His life He carried the passkeys to His
father’s house, then threw them to us from the cross. Whatever went before, life only
started when His life began.
God may have been the architect, but He sent Christ, His only son, to be the builder of
bridges, people to people. He showed us in a thousand ways that none of us need fear
again, that worry is worth nothing, loneliness is self - indulgence, and death is only a
passport to everlasting life.
This year, as Christmas makes it’s round again, resolve to smile inside and out.
Carry kindness to its farthest edge, compassion still beyond. In the process you may even
come to know yourself and like what you find. Then, reaching just a little farther through
the mists and myths, maybe even grasp the outstretched hand of God. -
adapted from "An Outstretched Hand", 1980, 1998 |
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Robert Bly o
Jose Greco o Harry Guardino o Corey Haim o Tim Hardin o Elizabeth Hartman o Paul Hornung o
Floyd Kalber o Susan Lucci o Ruth Roman o Vincent Sardi Jr. o Helmut Schmidt o
Harry Shearer o Joan Severance |
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We must continue to
believe that many are the men of peace
who from time to time will set out to walk among us.
If you loved my face as much as you love Christmas, I’d
be safe from year to year.
Christmas is more than a celebration, it is a time of summing
up.
You get a lot more if you’re willing to settle for a lot
less. |
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A MAN |
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To think that down through all
these years
these stumbling, dancing decades
these hours given
to spend the way we wish,
that people of goodwill
in country, countryside,
metropolis, and hamlet
come together / stay apart
but hold the selfsame ritual
as winter starts,
the celebration of an ancient birthday
deep in dark Decembers
too numerous to count.
He must have been extraordinary,
quite something,
to command the whole world pause
to celebrate His coming..
- 1956, first published in "A Book of Days," 1981 |
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