Keeping Christmas

Just because Christmas Day is past is no reason for us to forget its wonder and  mystery. I remember Fred Craddock, great preacher telling about the family that spent all summer putting up vegetables: peas and corn and tomatoes and other things from their garden. Some they froze and some they canned but when winter came and the garden was long gone they would open up those cans and unfreeze those packages and enjoy a feast as if it was still summer. I think we can do that with Christmas and it may just give us light and warmth for some hard days ahead.

One of the gifts my son gave me this year was a CD he had made of some wonderful music. I will plug in my ipod (yes--I have learned how it works--mostly)--take a jog and the music I need to hear will wash over me. Leonard Cohen's "Alleluia" is something. I play it over and over. This is one way I will try to keep Christmas.

Digging through the Christmas cards we have received this year again takes me back to other times and other places. I am reminded of the people from all over who have graced our lives with their love and laughter and friendship through the years. Many send pictures and letters--but we love hearing from our friends far and near. Just rummaging through those cards is a great to keep one of the Benedictions of Christmas alive--Christmas cards.

But I also recommend Jim Wallis' great Christmas article which he reprints every year on his blog. It tells the story that comes out of World War I in the year 1914. On Christmas Eve in the middle of the war, for one night in one little place the Germans and British and French soldiers put down their weapons, crossed enemy lines and began to celebrate Christmas as if they were friends. It is a true story. In this season when we are at war we need to be reminded that we have lost 461 of our own this year in Iraq and Afghanistan. This true story Wallis tells is worth retelling in these hard days. I recommend these powerful words--for they are as good a way of keeping Christmas as anything I know.

I bumped into some words some time ago which I clipped and seem appropriate for this passing season.They were written by someone whose name we do not know. The prose-poem is entitled: "There Are Years."

"Your way through life
will not remain the same.
There are years of happiness and years
of suffering.
There are years of abundance,
and years of poverty,
years of hope, and of disappointment,
of building up, and of breaking down.
But God has a firm hold on you
through everything."

(The photograph above I took at Coventry Cathedral. The ruins of the old Church destroyed during the Second World War remain next to the new Cathedral. This picture is a wonderful scene of reconciliation which stands amid the ruins of that first Cathedral.)