A little more JOY this Christmas...

Sometimes, Madison Avenue is scary BRILLIANT!

No, I haven’t gone off-the-rails and become a conspiracy theorist. I’ve simply LISTENED to a holiday commercial on television tonight…really listened to it.

Now it is obvious that I haven't been watching much broadcast telly this season ...because I just tonight, December 16th, noticed this advertisement.  Otherwise by now, I might already have heard it for the hundredth time, and been rendered immune. And that, my friends, would have been a loss, because this really is advertising genius.

I was working on kids' gifts so it seemed appropriate to have an old classic buzzing away in the background... A Charlie Brown Christmas. And I'd just stopped to pay attention to the section I love the most… where tiny, world-wise but security-blanket dependant  philosopher Linus takes the stage and tells C.B. the true meaning of the season by quoting a bit of the gospel message from the second chapter of Luke. I can hear it in my head on a continuous loop from childhood and I always hope somebody ‘gets it’ this year! At the break, this catchy tune came on … when I looked up, though I’d missed the beginning, I saw the commercial’s jingle was accompanied by pictures of a family prepping for the holidays. There was the obligatory montage of adorable kids and cute pets, cookies and lights that we’re bombarded with this time of year. I went back to what I was doing... it was all jolly and fun and background noise and then….

…and then I started listening to the lyrics. Some sly Mad Men type had done his best to push the message that Corporate Greed wants, nay needs us all to swallow...especially this most wonderful time of the end of the fiscal year…JUST... A LITTLE... MORE!

Now, the retailer is pushing it as “A little more JOY for Christmas”…and it all begins innocuously enough… kids so cute it hurts to look at them, festive decorations, giggle-inducing animal antics. This one’s really good, but you’ve seen it all before. It’s all about getting ready for the American dream holiday we Americans are supposed to be, well, dreaming about. And while it’s been decades since I had anything like a Norman Rockwell, TV Christmas-special holiday myself, I know that a lot of the season IS  family traditions and the things that secular carols are about…the eggnog and lights, the family get-togethers, the secrets and surprises, the hustling and bustling. I buy into a bit of that for myself, and without a few presents to find and wrap and give, it would seem like I was missing something of the nostalgic Christmas of my own childhood memories. I try to keep a spiritual focus at the holidays, but I don’t celebrate like a monastic and ‘any reason for giving a prezzie’ is practically a life motto. I’ll also admit right here that at the end of this fiendishly-crafted advert, they add a line about ‘more hugs’ just before  wrapping the whole thing up in a bright big bow of a tag-line: “just a few more little touches and a lot…more…love!”  So what’s the problem? Why do I have to be so cranky and complain about this happy little ad?

Well…the first line I really noticed, was early on: “another dozen cookies, just in case the neighbors show” which is all about hospitality, of course, but the humourous overflowing of the cookies on the counter told me there was something more going on here.  At this first viewing, I hadn’t SEEN the very beginning of the ad, and so I still didn’t know the sponsor,  which is cleverly, silently only at the beginning and the very end. And since I hate spoilers, I’ll save the credits for later, if you don’t already know. It doesn’t really matter the retailer...it’s their message.

The next verse gets more to the point. After the family dog playing in a little more tinsel, we get “another nutcracker because the last one caused a fight…”  Now it’s an established fact that nutcrackers have been causing  chaos between children since Christmas 1892 when P.I. Tchaikovsky made note of it in his eponymous ballet. Just ask the Mouse King what havoc the gift of only ONE nutcracker can cause an otherwise peaceful household at the holidays. Whatever was that eccentric uncle thinking!

So sure, parents, we know you’re harried. You work hard. You take them to soccer, and ballet, and rehearsals for the school play and every other more, more, more thing in their lives. Your kids have the social calendars of Will and Kate, or a Kardashian. You’re happy to get through another traffic jam without them killing each other in the back seat! And odds are, you have an actual paying job too, which expects you to show up a few hours a month. Why, you haven’t had a moment of “me time” in weeks! The last thing you want to do at the end of the day is PARENT! So, instead of dealing with the sibling rivalry by discussing it, or giving a time out; taking the damned nutcracker for safe keeping until your little darlings can learn to SHARE (just when exactly did a nutcracker become a TOY, anyway?)  or taking a page from Solomon and sawing the blasted wooden thing in two…just get  ANOTHER ONE! That won’t screw up your kids. Why, you can just BUY your way out of it! If Uncle Dusselmeyer had only known, he'd have brought one for each child and saved us all a lot of trouble! We might still have a Czar in Russia!

The image that accompanied the next phrase: “another circuit breaker for my Christmas lights” was a frightening shot of an extremely dangerous electrical situation. A scene to strike terror in the hearts of firefighters and insurance adjusters alike. Funny…until the house burns down! Now we’ve all seen it, either in some sitcom or our own Christmas zeal, but my point isn’t to take the humour out of this…really, I’m up for a good laugh. Especially at the holidays. My problem with this commercial is about the EXCESS we’ve come to expect of the season...which is shown in a whopper of an outdoor light display on a smallish, ordinary house (more power/less taste seemed to be the theme) that ends this verse. And with that we’ve gotten to the root message.  More… more …MORE is what we need to have Joy at Christmas!

Now the little ditty has us right where it wants us. We’re laughing, we relate.  ”A few more little presents, so the stocking’s nice and stuffed, another Lego set, cause a million aren’t enough…” Aside from the accompanying nightmarish image many parents  have actually lived...stepping on a carpet covered in hundreds of tiny, weapons-grade plastic Legos in the middle of the night…herein lies the real danger. Listen to the WORDS: “Another …cause a million aren’t enough!” SERIOUSLY?!?  I mean, I have friends with kids with Lego addictions and there is as yet no known cure, no twelve-step program. So I get that it’s possible to actually believe that you can never have too many Legos. (It may well be the new too rich or too thin that our society knows to be unattainable!)  But this isn’t just about wildly expensive tiny blocks of plastic from China invading our living spaces and causing late-night visits to the emergency room for surgical removal.  This, dear readers, is much more insidious.

This is the kind of pablum we’ve fed from the high chair. Our parents, reacting to the their own folks growing up wanting in the depression and suffering through the rationing of World War II... decided their little angels would never know want. And we ate it up…more, more, more! That’s what will make us feel better, stop our crying, mend our broken hearts. CONSUME!!!!! And this generation has become even more afraid of allowing our offspring to want for anything at all! Instant gratification is ingrained in a people who incessantly depress the elevator button, scream at traffic signals and will yell at the microwave or the Keurig to HURRY UP!  (Confessing here!) And the economy this corporate greed culture fostered taught us well. We became consumers in everything! Just look at us! We have to have it ALL. Every last one of the limited edition things. in every color. We’re drowning in our STUFF. Even our Art is consumed, mass-produced, trivialized! And I highly suspect that our kids’ entertainment is often written around the possible merchandising, instead of development being the other way round. We are insatiable. And it’s killing us!

And in this season of Peace on Earth, it begs the question: can’t you just see that “million aren’t enough” philosophy in the billions and trillions spent on defense…because we already have enough weapons and bombs to annihilate life on the planet, many times over…but we need MORE!  More will make us safe. More will bring Peace. More is better. We need MORE. Not to mention the myriad other useless wastes of funds in government? In every financial scandal in the news. In our own personal debt crises. The answer is easy. The solution is MORE!

But back to the commercial, because we’re not finished quite yet. In fact, the point at which I began really listening, is still to come. I have no issue with a little more garland... festoon away, I say. But  the line that left me frozen to the spot was: “Why stop at three wise men when the mantel fits nine!”

Now you’ve gone and done it! Before, this was about the secular Christmas, the mall Santa Claus, maybe even the  Jimmy Stewart and Clarence the Angel Christmas and I could laugh about that, but now you’ve gone and hit the real Reason for the Season part, and my conscience just can’t let it go!

The argument is not one of historical accuracy here. There is nowhere, in any Biblical text, or commentary, or papyrus in any jar, anywhere that tells us definitively that there were indeed THREE potentates from the East who visited the Christ child. And while the ludicrous image of nine, redundant wise men figurines crowding the Holy Family in the tiny creche on that mantel (not to mention the fact that said Eastern dignitaries didn’t arrive until much, much later, and that we celebrate THAT on Epiphany, it’s very own holiday... a couple of weeks after Christmas) probably WAS the tipping point for me on this whole thing; this isn’t about any perceived desecration of a holy shrine! Or even aesthetics. It’s not really a religious issue for me. And in Eastern Christianity, the Magi do sometimes number as many as twelve...so it’s not even about doing the math.

This whole tradition of three, is usually attributed to the number of gifts mentioned in Matthew’s gospel: gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and so they were given three names. Melchoir, Balthasar and Caspar, back around the sixteenth century.  Then in 1857,  John Henry Hopkins, the  rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania penned his own little Christmas ditty about THREE kings from the ORIENT, put it to music and it was set in stone. (He did graduate from General Theological Seminary, but back then, that was prestigious, not problematic.)  So, while I’d personally prefer your wise men don’t arrive at the creche on December 25th; you’re free to have as many Eastern royalty or magicians or wizards or astronomers or mystics as you desire and you can call them whatever you like. But that’s not really the point here. Our Madison Avenue Magi are conjuring something much simpler and sinister than a Nativity traffic jam on your mantelpiece.

It’s about MORE!

You don’t have enough...cookies, or lights, or presents, or nutcrackers, or wise men, or patience, or time, or love and understanding, or friends, or peace of mind and you certainly don’t have enough JOY.  But they will sell you...just a little more. Just one more. Just a couple more. Just some MORE. And then…

And then, dear friends….you will be right where you are now...only a little poorer, a little more frustrated, a little wearier, a little more scared, a little more jaded and disappointed and depressed, anda  little less right with yourself and others and the world. Because deep down in your heart you KNOW that MORE is not ENOUGH!

It really isn’t about MORE. Not a little more, not a couple more. It is about stopping the madness! Because there will NEVER be ENOUGH. Not like that. Not material things. Not the accumulation, collection, one-with-the-most-toys wins way. Just watch one episode of Hoarders and that will become abundantly clear!

But all is NOT lost...

The hopeful truth is that we DO have ENOUGH. That we ARE enough. Just us! Imperfect, dimly lit, unfestooned, only can find two wise-men, ran-out-of-cookies us! We are enough, because God made us...just as we are!

And he doesn’t want more of our stuff. He just wants more of US. He wants us to BE more US than we can ever be in the rat-race of gathering more, more, more of the stuff the retailers are selling us ...with their hollow promises of more hugs, more love, more spirit and more JOY.  They don’t care how many hugs we get, or if our neighbors show up. Actually, it’s to their advantage that we’re left wanting, and miserable, and scared, because after Christmas, they sell asprin and antacids and security systems, and a lot more stuff they need us to buy.

But all we really need for Joy at Christmas, is all around us. Each other...our families, our friends, our communities, our church...and GOD.

Remember Him. The one this holiday is really all about.

We celebrate because God gave us the one and the only gift that can ever possibly satisfy that craving inside. Because what we really crave...is HIM.  Because He is LOVE. And because He loved us so very much, He gave us everything! And then, when that wasn’t enough for our insatiable appetites, He gave us His only Son. And that’s what this is really all about!

And as far as the world is concerned...there IS more.

More hopeful truth in all this. We really DO have enough….we have enough love to figure out this racial divide that threatens to rip our society asunder...the violence that terrifies us daily. We just have to start seeing each other as God’s children. As family. Each and every one of us on this planet. At least that’s the start. And He must love variety, because He made us all different, special, tall, short, fat, skinny, and every color that human skin can manage.

And as for the rest...we actually already HAVE enough. Enough ideas, ingenuity and work to be done to keep us all employed for a very long time.  Enough brilliant minds to solve our medical puzzles and climate scares, if we could only stop chasing the greed of having more than the other guy, because there really IS enough for everyone. And we have enough food to feed the world, if we could figure out a way to mobilize and distribute it…but that, would take really learning that lesson about SHARING. Unfortunately, our folks just bought us another nutcracker and ended the chances of THAT.

So...if you happen to catch my now-favourite holiday commercial from the people at Walmart, promising you more JOY at Christmas...just remember...their promises are hollow, foreign-made by slave labor, will probably break by December 26th, may be toxic, could be recalled...but they are definitely NOT the way to more JOY this Christmas.  

That, my friends, is in receiving the Gift that has already been given...to you, to me...to all of us. In a manger, in Bethlehem. And THAT is the way to JOY for you...and the whole world!

When will I ever learn...?

My mother's last Thanksgiving was twenty-five years ago.

I can't say that was when I stopped celebrating this feast of gratitude and gluttony, but that one is a fixed point in time. I can go back, but I can't change a moment in my memory.

We'd always shared cooking tasks for Thanksgiving. And a shared kitchen is a sacred space. 1989 I was basting and baking and mashing with Mama on the sofa, watching and putting on a good face despite the pain and forced exile. Me? I was a mess...anticipated pain is always worse, future loss keen. I dealt with it characteristically. It all had to be perfect...and of course, it never could.

Table set in autumnal colors, cloth napkins, leaves from Daddy's Maple formed chargers beneath the pottery plates, candles...three places set. What a dreamer I am! The food...was as near perfection as my culinary skills have ever managed. Turkey moist, gravy free of lumps, potatoes with bits of well-scrubbed peels, Mama's famous cranberry 
relish jello salad...made by me for the first time. I ate...but I don't think I tasted a bite.

For all our plans and hopes, Mama couldn't manage sitting at the table...but thankful for an open floor plan...she had a much smaller plate at the sofa and we were a family at table...one last time. The "what are you thankful for's" were mercifully omitted in unspoken solidarity that we WOULD get through this holiday despite the clouds looming.

Mother praised the meal. She hadn't had an appetite in months and the lengths I'd gone to get her to eat during that time bordered on the desperate. When she asked, I gleefully spooned out tiny bits of her favorites for the obligatory second helping on this holiday of over-eating...victorious with the thrill of a moment of normal that only a house marked with looming death sentence can understand.

Later...leftovers packed away, dishes done, I went into her room and lay across the foot of her bed...another sacred space in those precious last days. The talks we had, the confidences, curses, promises, and silences that room...now my room...had kept sacrosanct. She critiqued each dish, one by one, pronouncing the feast a success. I choked back tears, the unspoken finality between us...thick with ache and love. 

Then she groaned, and I snapped into action...what was wrong? 
What hurt? What could I do? 
She chuckled and said, "I ate too much!" 
I relaxed and said I had as well. It was Thanksgiving...it's what you do. 
She said "I shouldn't have had seconds. When will I ever learn?" 

Silence. 
Tense with the enormity of the future racing towards us...and how absolutely familiar and common, that moment.

And then...the laughter came. Both of us...lying on the bed...laughing at the silliness of looking into the darkness of impending death and seeing the comedy. And we laughed until our sides hurt. We laughed as the two of us had giggled and snickered and howled together all my life. I reached for her hand and the laughter slowly dissolved into tears and a long, lovely, awful, terrible, precious silence. No more need for words.

She passed away within the week. And Thanksgiving was the last close to normal day she had ...fighting the pain. 

I have tried to keep Thanksgiving in the years since. Once Daddy and I decided we'd go out, but we had never been a family for spending that holiday, or any really, in a restaurant, no matter how elegant and vast the menu. It was lovely and thoughtful and there was no clean-up...and I sobbed silently all the way home. 

And so I've cooked every year since, inviting friends or accepting invitations out...even making a full course meal for another family once...who didn't eat turkey! Most years it's been eating alone after working my shift...but always cooking a bit of those shared recipes, even if they were eaten alone or as "left overs" ...and always remembering shared kitchen rituals and the secret ways of mothers and daughters for centuries before us. And how precious and painful and hilarious life is.

This year's been particularly difficult. The BIG NUMBER sense of twenty five years hit me months ago, but in the past weeks the world has made everything a struggle. Shootings and looting and politicking it to advantage. Too much death and sadness and injustice and madness...words simply fail. I find myself taking long, wrenching sighs...much too deep and way too often. And soldiering on. Like many who feel the world more than is entirely good for us. It isn't that we aren't grateful, but we're just so weary of the enormity of it all!

This year I worked, as I always do, even though I'd hoped to take time off, to make a place for people like me to come together and be a community. Those plans weren't to be. And there were invitations to join friends that simply didn't mesh with my work schedule, but gave me some sense of being welcomed. So as usual, I prepared to 'feast' alone. At the last minute, schedules were altered and I joined a friend at her table, and enjoyed the company of someone a long way from his family, and met some new friends who made it all much more bearable, in ways they will never know. I survived ...

I miss you, Mama...ever day... in a dull ache kind of way...too often in a deep silent sob...and sometimes...in ridiculous laughter only you would understand!

A Psalm of David...

Psalm 5:1-2

   For the music leaders. For the flutes.  

            A Psalm of David.

Hear my words, Lord. 

Consider my groans.

Pay attention to the sound of my cries,

my king and my God,

Because I am praying to you.    – Common English Bible

\

A loose translation might be...

“Pay attention God! I’m talking to you! 

Oh great king…LISTEN to MY voice!”

Seriously, David!?!  Get over yourself!

Don’t get me wrong, David, King of Israel…slayer of giants, is one of my favorite characters in the Bible… has been since I fell in love with him as a young girl.  He ran neck-and- neck with Jesus Christ himself for a few years, I’m slightly ashamed to admit, because…well, let’s face it…Jesus was Divine…Son of God…perfect, sinless, blameless, etc…and David was human.     

                                         I could relate to David.

Besides, what’s not to like…handsome, athletic, talented musician, rich young ruler, heart for God…every female church-nerd’s dream! And confidence is always attractive – going up before a giant with a slingshot, alone…that’s borderline arrogant, perhaps, but we’re told it was because of his faith in God, and we women are suckers for le grand geste.

My youthful self always pictured him as the epitome of male beauty. Not that smoldering, tall, dark, handsome, dangerous kind some girls go for...but the clean cut, dependable, unlikely hero type.  When we’re first introduced the Biblical narrative says: “Now he was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome.” (Sigh!) Come on! Even Michelangelo was a fan!

And being short of stature myself, David circa Goliath became an icon of ‘little but mighty.’ In college, while I was editing the student newspaper, our cartoonist, a genuinely gentle giant, drew a frame of David standing between the upturned soles of defeated Goliath’s  sandals (the Biblical hero looking suspiciously like cartoons he’d previously done of me, from the back) with the caption, “For all the reasons you want to be taller.”  It was during a period of great strife between the paper and the school’s administration; and the sketch, which ran on our front page without further comment and therefore sailed quite over-the-heads of said administration, and then hung above my desk; warmed my heart…and won the Collegiate Press Association’s award that year! But I digress…

So David is a long time interest for me. I studied everything I could about him during my adolescent crush with the Old Testament hottie. Yes, you may be sad for me, no Davey Jones, or David Cassidy on MY bedroom walls…but if the Bible Bookstore had carried posters of Jesse’s shepherd son…they would have had a customer. In the interest of FULL disclosure, there were other, live, present-day idols who caught my eye…but this thing was David was pretty heavy. I remember a heated discussion with my clergyman father about why the book of Samuel didn’t contain more about David and Jonathan’s friendship or David’s romance with Princess Michael. And, God rest his soul, the poor man fielded more than a few of his teenaged daughter’s questions about what… for a long time in our house was referred to mysteriously as “that business with Bathsheba”. I vacillated between serious disappointment in my clay-footed hero’s carnal weakness, and contempt for some roof-top bathing temptress without the modesty to keep her clothes on when she clearly HAD to know that His Majesty could see her, a married woman, from his palace window!

                             Yes…Davey boy and I have history….we go waaaay back!

And so something has bugged me a little, especially in the last several months, as I read my (nearly) daily office.  I often feel like Ole King David is a bit of a drama queen…eh… monarch anyway!

Let’s face it, in a large portion of the Psalms, he’s asking for God to bring vengeance down on his enemies in some pretty frightful ways: everything from your garden variety “smite them on the cheek bone” to head crushing! And when that isn’t the content, David can come off as kind of a whiner.  Sure, Saul spent most of his own reign trying to kill the boy who’d saved his bacon out there on the battlefield with the Philistines, but come on, fellow… give the lamenting a rest! Don’t you ever get the idea that God has heard it ENOUGH? And I’ve got to admit that my adult reading of the poetry of my beloved teenage heart-throb can occasionally give new meaning to the words narcissistic, self-centered, and self-absorbed. If these were excerpts from his prayer diary, I’d dismiss that feeling immediately, protesting right along with the cranky Poet King at the outrageous lack of privacy given to religious celebrities! Agreeing wholeheartedly with the pontifical tradition of burning the pope’s journals after his death, to avoid voyeuristic speculation, like poor Mother Teresa suffered when hers went public! The man is speaking to his creator here…perhaps we shouldn’t listen-in. It just isn’t cricket!

But many of the Psalms of David are addressed to the palace choirmasters, with musical notations for public performance! Clearly, he wanted them to be heard!

So David may have been the first of the “put it all out there” poets, baring his soul for his art and the audience.  And as I read, day after day, how he complained, and cried…how he begged for divine retribution…and how sometimes, like in Psalm 5, he DEMANDS of God… I’m puzzled, to say the least.

Oh there is glorious poetry in them. Nobody can speak of the majesty of God’s creation, the height and the breadth of God’s love…nobody can pen “Come on all you people, let’s praise the Lord!” like the Psalmist David! And the imagery, the heart tugging beauty of the phrases, perfection of expression… it’s all there. And sets itself easily to music!

However, it still occurs to me, from time to time, that David pushes and pulls at his God…crying, wailing, be-moaning his plight…and even to the point of calling out “Hey! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!” to the High King of Kings, the Creator of the Universe. He basically has a temper tantrum!

                              …and you know what?                 

God does pay attention.

God shows up, despite all those “where are you God, why have you forsaken me” psalms. He’s there, listening to the gut-wrenching fears, to the numerous confessions of failure, to the perhaps pompous proclamations…for ALL of it…God is right there…listening…to every word…every note of the poet David’s beautiful, baffling, bipolar offering. Even after Bathsheba!

 Why?  Because, as God said of him: David was a man after His own heart...who shared His desires.                

                               God loved him. And that…was that.

So I continue to read the Psalms, because there’s no better way to rail at the injustice, to whine about the loneliness, to complain about our enemies. And though sometimes I laugh, or roll my eyes, or wish my long-time hero would “take it down a notch” (some days they actually make me cringe, “How do you talk to the Creator of Everything like that!?”) …David got it right! At least right enough that after everything, an affair, betrayal, killings, wardrobe malfunctions…God declared that David was a man that He loved. Unconditionally loved.

And so, I pray that something like that might be said about me…despite my lack of faith, my cries, my failures.  And so…I continue to read David’s Psalms.