These are Plum’s presents to his Granny. The one on the left is a keychain he made at the school’s Christmas fair. There was a police booth there – one of those friendly community outreach efforts – where kids could get fingerprinted and create a memento . Easy-peasy toddler present and he was over the moon about it. So we wrapped it up together and put it under the tree. But he wasn’t finished. It turns out this wrapping game is a lot of fun, so he found a bit of baking parchment left over from Christmas cake preparation and wrapped up the present on the right. Yes, it’s one of his blocks. The Granny in question loved it.
We’ve been having a happy three-generations Christmas here. My parents tackled the long flight and we all shuffled over to make room. It’s fantastic to have them here. I love watching my kids showing their grandparents their new home, watching them sharing books and cuddles, watching us all finding ways of being together. These are good days.
I was doing the dishes the other night – a full house does create mountains of dishes – and while I scrubbed away, I listened to a podcast from CBC’s Writers and Company in which Eleanor Wachtel interviewed Cees Nooteboom, the Dutch novelist, poet and travel writer. At one point in the conversation, she read this quotation from his book Roads to Santiago.
“I wish my entire life were a provincial Spanish Sunday morning and I the sort of man who belonged there.”
He reflected on a desire to be completely in a scene and not observing it, to be entirely present and at peace. And I thought Yes.
That’s what I want, too.
In the midst of the full days of holiday, this desire fills my all-ready full heart. Among the to-do lists and the to-clean-up-after lists, the up-and-down moods of the children to sooth, the moments to celebrate, to hold, to endure and never to waste, never to let slip away, among these crowded, fleeting days, I am filled with a desire to belong to each moment. To be that sort of person in the depth of these days.
But we are. We all are.
There’s Christmas, isn’t it? Because God gifted his very self to us, we become the sort of people who belong. We are not distanced from the days we live. We are not abstracted through fear. We are safe and present.
Shadows remain. Of course, they do. Echoes of fears and dislocation remain, but deeper still, we hear a calling to another way.
Christ called it the Kingdom and each generation found new metaphors for this new way to know life. The Way. The Faith. Even the Church is a metaphor. We are a family, a company of pilgrims, a nurtured garden, a growing tree, a cloud of witnesses. We are one body, belonging.
That is our giftedness. And sure, we can look shabby, or at least make-shift and parchment-wrapped. But our messy daily life is honoured and made holy because of the birth in the barn. Christ was born into the messiness of our world, belonging to the world so that we might belong to him. We get to be that sort of person. And that is very beautiful.
May these Christmas days bring you peace and belonging and may the New Year bring joy.
