Finding Merriment in Dark Times

December 24, 2023

December 24, 2023

Before me is a huge sky-blue tractor trailer truck, a swish of arrow like a feather and the word Prime painted on its side, plowing through the flooded black river of I-95 like a wild beast, spigots of water thrown up from under its wheels blinding me to the way forward. Last Monday we drove home from a trip to visit friends in NYC through a fierce rain and windstorm that lashed the East Coast. On Dasher, on Prancer, on Vixen, like a modern-day Santa’s sleigh the giant truck flew past us on its way to unload its stash of plastic toys and fast fashion down the chimney of some giant distribution center. 

On this eve of Christmas, I am searching for stories in an effort to bring coherence to this moment in time when rampant consumerism seems to have taken hold of our holiday and wrung it dry of the real meaning of giving; when the news brings pictures from the Holy Land of a Palestinian grandfather holding the body of his dead child in one arm and his dead grandchild in another; when a man who may be president next year claims that immigrants seeking refuge from persecution and famine are poisoning our blood and must be met with massive military resistance; when here in Maine many of us are just recovering a storm that brought the 2^nd worst flooding in the state’s recorded history: a ferocious warning from a warming planet. 

The story of Christmas, of the birth of Jesus, is so fraught, so entwined with colonialism and patriarchy and plunder that I find it hard to even say Merry Christmas, for what is merry about so much of the brutal history of Christianity? At a choral concert in New York City last week, I listened as a brass quintet accompanied by fifty voices filled the marble belly of the Judson Memorial Church with Christmas music. But instead of feeling uplifted and exuberant as I once did, “Oh Come all ye Faithful” filled me with an awful feeling of shame and grief. The institutional and cultural pillars I once relied on for coherence of self and time have crumbled in the face of what I’ve learned about how Christianity enabled both the genocide of Native Tribes and the violent suppression of enslaved Blacks. 

I know there are good Christian Churches and ministers working very hard to undo the harms done in the name of Christianity.  I attended one such Church in Brooklyn last weekend, the First Presbyterian Church, a church dedicated to diversity and inclusion, a Church with one of the finest choirs in the city where jazz and gospel music pair with Handel and where the interim minister, a young, handsome Irishman, sometimes preaches in a dress.

In this Church, a beloved home for old friends of ours, love, connection, forgiveness and joy are enacted in their songs and their care for each other.  The members of the Church have taken an institution fraught with harm and a history of slavery and transformed it into a true community of trust, respect, and responsibility to justice. 

This story is important because it reminds me that out of these broken institutions, new forms can and are arising. To quote Christiana Figueres, an internationally recognized leader on climate change, our job now is to name, to step into and claim the reality that “the old world is passing and a new one is being born.”

..climate change is the gym in which we as human beings are strengthening our muscle to be able to evolve to a much higher sense of awareness, consciousness, action, than we were before. …the way that we understand that is measured in the way that we understand our relationship with nature.

The day after we drove back from NYC, when the winds had died and the rivers were boiling over their banks, I was a passenger (and a grateful guest) on another long car trip, this one to a sacred mountain in northern Penobscot County. After a few hours we left the paved highway and drove through forests just recovering from severe logging practices until we reached our destination: the not-yet-officially-opened Visitors Center at Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, the only monument in the National Park System designed entirely by Indigenous Tribal leaders for whom this land is sacred.

Inside the stunning new building a glass wall faces Mt Katahdin, awkwardly snowless for this time of year and capped by a flat swish of cloud.  Standing before this sacred mountain, nothing before me but tree and river and sky, I felt the long expanse of time dissolve the heaviness of the present moment.  Here in the heart of wilderness it is possible to feel the heady joy of human insignificance and give oneself over to the wondrous powers of nature.

With the story of the transformation of the First Presbyterian Church and the story of wilderness preserved by the generous gift of one woman, Roxanne Quimby, who began her career with a swarm of bees, I say to you, Merry Christmas!!  May your holiday be filled with the gifts of kindness and connection and good food and merriment!! 

At Christmas at our house, each person brings a poem to the Christmas feast. I offer you this poem by Denise Levertov to inspire you to drift for a moment into cloud and bird.

SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD
by Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension—though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal—then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
—but we have changed, a little.