IT SURROUNDS ME LIKE WEATHER

Another year,
Another Christmas.
It’s different than so much of what I remember in years past,
But still beautifully simple.
There are things in the world that are dissonant;
Not the peace we are longing for.
But there is anticipation.
And hope for wholeness.

There will be no Christmas tree in Georgia.
We’ll put it up later in North Carolina.
And our precious Christmas things are there as well.
But the here and now world holds Christmas symbols,
So I gather them close,
And bring the outside in.
Greenery on the mantle.
A homemade pinecone wreath on the door.
A circle of evergreen on the table.
It’s a gift that the things that speak Christmas are within arm’s reach;
Like the earth itself understands Advent ….. the approach …. The arrival.
And I remember another’s words.
Walter Wangarin, in “Preparing for Christmas”.

“Throughout my life, it has been my good fortune to experience the story of Jesus with every turning of every year. The number of years of my unfolding age is also the number of times I’ve traveled with my Lord from his birth to his death to his triumphant rising again.

And because the story has been more than told to me; because it has surrounded me like weather; because it comprehends me as a house does its inhabitants or a mother does her child; the life of Christ has shaped mine. My very being has been molded in him.

And because my response to this story has been more than an act of mind, more than study and scrutiny; because the story invites my entering in and my personal participation; because I have experienced the life of Christ with deeper intensity than I have my own daily affairs, the Gospel story now interprets for me the world’s story. It is through the Gospel narrative, as through a window or a template, that I see all things; that I relate to them and come to know them. In every sense of the phrase: I find myself in Jesus. As I enter his story, I enter him. As his life embraces mine, he embraces me, and I am his”.