Christmas Reflections

Merry Christmas, and praise God for his gift of JESUS CHRIST that we celebrate today!

Round two of blogging for the day - earlier I stumbled across that nice quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but I can't resist a quick Christmas blurb to cyberspace. It's an ingrained habit, learned from countless repetition since childhood: for me to remember life's significant moments, I have to either talk endlessly about them or write about them. Like studying for a final - without the review, slowly, the little details go. And the little details are what I like to remember.

Like the chill of our still, dark house when I woke up at 7 - amazingly, I was the first person up. Never in my life have I been the first one awake on Christmas morning. Since I'm almost 20, I guess it's about time; still, usually I wake up to the sound of my mom and dad clattering in the kitchen. I boiled water for Russian tea on the stove and brushed my teeth. Greeting the silent, cold morning alone was rather... melancholy. When my parents padded up the stairs in their pajamas, the lights on the tree winked a bit more happily. Christmas truly is about family.

Details like cuddling with my 16-year-old fleece-covered sister - who was wearing Hello Kitty footie pajamas - wrapped in a blanket as we opened our stockings. Watching the yule log flicker, like we do every year, and pretending to feel the warmth from its TV image.

Like my sister parading around the house in her footie pajamas, holding her guitar strapped to her body with a new black, glittery guitar strap. Like my mom staying in her bathrobe until noon.

Like my dad pouring over his new Oxford world atlas on the living room sofa for hours this afternoon, like a child with a new toy. Rarely do books capture attention like that anymore. I love it.

Like my mom cleaning up from our late-afternoon meal sporting an apron... and ipod headphones. The grand surprise this Christmas was my mom's gift of an ipod from Santa Claus. Of course, with Ashley's help the ipod is chock full of games and music, and my sweet overwhelmed mother is still learning how to turn the thing on.

December 25th is a special holiday. I know that Jesus was probably born in the spring, and that our beloved Christmas traditions have pagan roots. I realize that America has commercialized and cheapened the sacred elements of the holiday. But I also know that as my family enjoys the relatively routine and traditional elements of Christmas - a candlelit church service, dinner out, games by the fire, Christmas picture books, delicious food, a tromp around the block in the snow, time to relax and reflect - there is a liturgical beauty to it all. The routine is our way of celebrating Jesus's incarnation. Through our traditions we remember his coming. Perhaps the ham and twice-baked potatoes, the elaborate tree, the Frank Sinatra in the background are peripheral elements to what should be a more spiritual holiday. Yet, I celebrate Jesus in it all, just as I hold all those things good. Jesus has made this possible - family, the enjoyment of what he's given us, thanking him for the beauty of a winter day - and I am indebted forever.

Jesus came to give us abundant life, to be "the image of an unseen God", to live and love and die so that God was glorified. In this, we have hope.

Christmas Food for Thought

"No priest, no theologian stood at the manger of Bethlehem. And yet all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders: that God became human. Holy theology arises from knees bent before the mystery of the divine child in the stable.

Without the holy night, there is no theology. "God is revealed in flesh," the God-human Jesus Christ—that is the holy mystery that theology came into being to protect and preserve. How we fail to understand when we think that the task of theology is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason! Its sole office is to preserve the miracle as miracle, to comprehend, defend, and glorify God's mystery precisely as mystery. This and nothing else, therefore, is what the early church meant when, with never flagging zeal, it dealt with the mystery of the Trinity and the person of Jesus Christ … . If Christmas time cannot ignite within us again something like a love for holy theology, so that we—captured and compelled by the wonder of the manger of the Son of God—must reverently reflect on the mysteries of God, then it must be that the glow of the divine mysteries has also been extinguished in our heart and has died out."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This reality

The engine starts, the moment hangs,

and the suspension of two conjoined worlds trembles

like my hands holding the disposable coffee cup

that was not coffee, but cocoa -

a sugary countdown of finite sips until

the immediacy of

goodbye.

This reality is cut and pasted

from another time and place

of you and me, when

soft laughter and happy eyes

did not conceal saltwater,

and when one hour

held the promise of many more.

Catch the bubble before it bursts -

that is what I want to tell you,

but the chance is lost. The light is

fading now

as you fade down the highway.

I want to rewind to the second before

we tossed those empty cups

into the wastebasket,

marking this separation.

Winter is radiant.

I wonder where you are going,

and then,

wonder the same for me.

If God paints the sky with his brightest colors

swirls the fuchsia with the cobalts and mauves

and lets the light shimmer through

as if the sky was the sun's candleholder,

I imagine that the future's outlines -

cast in rough draft behind all this sorrow -

are no less beautiful.

What have I managed to do today besides homework?

Work out at the Dow.

Shower. Always a good use of my time.

Don a cute outfit and braid my hair.

Throw some laundry in the washer, then throw it in the dryer. (This included my pillow. It needed to happen.)

Have lunch with a friend and exchange Christmas presents. Received a fuzzy blanket!!!

Visit another friend in her room. Dropped off some goodies for another friend.

Sit in the basement of the library, start my History of Christianity study guide, and get hopelessly distracted.

C'mon Brooke, get motivated. In one week you'll be driving through Chicago at this time, heading home to partake of Christmas cheer and eggnog and quiet, comfy slumber. Only 1 test, 1 paper, 2 juries, and 3 finals to go. Now is not the time for procrastination or distraction. Now is the time to dig in and be insanely productive.

Now that I've thoroughly chastised myself, I think I'll get back to work.

Research, research, research

I am sitting at Martha Miller with my friend Michelle and eight chunky books (all friends as well, of course). We are progressing rapidly on that huge obligation we call homework. Michelle is listening to her ipod as she types. I sip my coffee. In the middle of the rotunda is a gigantic Christmas tree, glimmering dimly even in the daylight, covered in red bows. It is peaceful here.

The next task on my life agenda is to start my research paper for American literature. I've spent the morning researching; how I wish I could just keep researching forever and never start writing. I think the transition between interpreting another's work and outputting your own is one of the hardest. Even now I don't feel like I've internalized these eight friendly books enough to write 8-10 pages; however, necessity compels me to write (in the form of my beautiful family, coming to visit me tomorrow and staying all weekend, and four Vespers performances that will consume my weekend!)

My paper is about Calvinism and American Literature. I chose this topic because Professor Pannapacker mentioned in class that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a Calvinist. Funny, says I, I would like to hear Trygve's take on this. Because Hawthorne is the grumpiest Calvinist I've ever read, if he is one. Going to school at Hope, which is in the Reformed tradition, I guess maybe my views of Calvinism are more modern, more limited to what I've learned in class and experienced in chapel. It's funny to me that America chose "The Scarlet Letter" and then "Moby-Dick", two of the most depressing books out there, for the literary canon. Hawthorne was a wishy-washy Calvinist. Melville, inspired by Hawthorne's genius and desirous of imitating his seemingly easy balance between man's simultaneous innate depravity and inherent rights, wrote with Calvinistic themes - predestination, sin and damnation, orthodoxy, Biblical authority. But he was not a Calvinist. I think both books illustrate the heart of the struggle between liberal thought and orthodox Christianity in the context of their day, and really, in ours too. And really, who hasn't struggled with the idea that we are "saved by grace"; that nothing we do can earn our salvation - yet we are supposed to "work out (our) salvation with fear and trembling?"

Melville and Hawthorne emit the scent of reformed thought, but they are not optimistic enough to be truly reformed. They never find the joy of God's grace. There are hints of hope, however; Hester Prynne accepts her lot and repents of her sin, and she looks forward to a day when the world will be brighter. Ishmael is the lone survivor of the wreck of the Pequod, saved by the coffin his friend Queequeg made.

Ugh, so much to think about. On to writing!