As I get older and as my life strays farther from what I once imagined it might be, I find, curiously, that I need the holidays more than ever. Not necessarily “The Holidays” as the dominant culture would have me experience them (Black Friday "doorbusters" and all...) – but in some more specific, internal way that involves intense incubation of deep-seated holiday nostalgia, coupled with fervent tending to the hibernation instinct, and a longing to strum the chords that connect me to my clan. I suspect you are familiar with this primal urge of which I speak? It is ancient intelligence and profound desire, ignited by shortening spells of sunlight, plunging temperatures, and the death that turns leaves to dust and grass to clacking straw and bleeds the color from all things. The twitchings of this inner divining rod tend to drive our unique strain of mammal to draw close to a hearth, turn the lights down low, beswaddle our bodies in woolen layers, sip steaming beverages from cavernous mugs, and decorate our homes with lights, light-reflective things (ornaments, mirrors), and with plants we’ve reclaimed from the increasingly-foreboding outdoors.
At this time of year, moreover, I feel called to count and account for my loved ones like beads on a rosary. This act of accounting allows me to draw a circle only I can draw – a circle of divine and chance connections that conspire to shape the truest home I know. As much as my work and circumstances have isolated me from friends and family over the years, I have always valued my relationships far above possessions, professional achievements, or supposedly-definitive investments such as a house or a car (neither of which I own, anyway). More, even, than I suspect my closest friends and relations know, my relationships with them have sustained, buoyed, and redeemed me. They have pulled me out of myself – beyond myself – into a dance and a communion in which I have had the vinegar-and-sugar, deliciously messy privilege of becoming part of something larger than me.
The self can grow so tiresome. It is both an entity we must love, befriend, and honor if we hope to seek sanity or peace, and a real bore and tyrant if it ends up being the only real company we keep. I think we were designed as social creatures by a trickster-like intelligence that wanted us to find ourselves between a rock and a hard place: unfulfilled alone, and yet deeply challenged by our attempts to navigate the Rube Goldberg machine of human relations. And while the joke may be on us, our awkward, frustrated fumblings toward each other serve to elicit the nectar of divine laughter, which showers the whole affair – the fumbling, the connecting, our spirits’ straining like taffy or taut wires in the mix – with the strangest kind of grace.
It can be hard to spot the secret shimmer of this grace from within, say, the boisterous arena of a large family gathering – especially when you find yourself cornered by that one relative who spews sarcasm with every exhale, or who drops passive-aggressive judgments on your life like crumbs from the cream-cheese-and-cranberry crostini they’re gumming as they speak (scarcely two inches away from your face). It can feel onerous to crank open the rusty handle on the pipeline of this grace as you force yourself to lift the phone to call that loved one you know you need to call, even though you don’t feel like being anchored to a phone for the next, precious hour of your life. The very notion of this grace can seem like ersatz pie in a madman’s sky as you venture out to check the mail and realize your irrepressibly chatty neighbor has spotted you, and is making a beeline for you while shouting what is no doubt only the first chapter in a dense, multi-volume saga regarding the family drama of another, recently-deceased neighbor. I didn’t reeeallly need this student loan bill and faux scratch-off ticket from the local car dealership right now, now did I? you think to yourself, realizing it’s too late.
But even now, as you succumb to the lengthy neighborly chat you were not at all in the mood for, you catch a glimpse of this grace in the softening corners of your maddeningly charming neighbor’s eyes, and spot it again when, twenty minutes later, she tells an unrelated story about pulling over to urinate at night on a rural road outside of town, only to be joined – precisely at the moment of scrambling to pull up her pants – by a patrolling policeman who figured her for a motorist with car trouble. There’s this place her face goes as she looks into the grainy distance of her memory, crinkles her nose, and cracks up all over again – at her own embarrassment as she scrambled to finish her business as the headlights approached, at her husband’s disbelief at the timing of their police encounter, and at the policeman’s awkward response as he rushed to normalize and dignify the moment. There, in her bemusement and admission of her own awkwardness, you see – of all things – this grace suddenly flicker and dance like a thousand, unexpected fireflies across her face. Suddenly, something in you softens and floods with warmth. It is as though some strained emptiness in your chest (of which you were, until now, unaware) has just been pumped full of melting caramel by angelic pastry chef-ninjas who somehow managed to ambush your annoyed resistance, transforming it into heartening goo. You no longer regret your cumbersome detour to the mailbox.
At this time of year, moreover, I feel called to count and account for my loved ones like beads on a rosary. This act of accounting allows me to draw a circle only I can draw – a circle of divine and chance connections that conspire to shape the truest home I know. As much as my work and circumstances have isolated me from friends and family over the years, I have always valued my relationships far above possessions, professional achievements, or supposedly-definitive investments such as a house or a car (neither of which I own, anyway). More, even, than I suspect my closest friends and relations know, my relationships with them have sustained, buoyed, and redeemed me. They have pulled me out of myself – beyond myself – into a dance and a communion in which I have had the vinegar-and-sugar, deliciously messy privilege of becoming part of something larger than me.
The self can grow so tiresome. It is both an entity we must love, befriend, and honor if we hope to seek sanity or peace, and a real bore and tyrant if it ends up being the only real company we keep. I think we were designed as social creatures by a trickster-like intelligence that wanted us to find ourselves between a rock and a hard place: unfulfilled alone, and yet deeply challenged by our attempts to navigate the Rube Goldberg machine of human relations. And while the joke may be on us, our awkward, frustrated fumblings toward each other serve to elicit the nectar of divine laughter, which showers the whole affair – the fumbling, the connecting, our spirits’ straining like taffy or taut wires in the mix – with the strangest kind of grace.
It can be hard to spot the secret shimmer of this grace from within, say, the boisterous arena of a large family gathering – especially when you find yourself cornered by that one relative who spews sarcasm with every exhale, or who drops passive-aggressive judgments on your life like crumbs from the cream-cheese-and-cranberry crostini they’re gumming as they speak (scarcely two inches away from your face). It can feel onerous to crank open the rusty handle on the pipeline of this grace as you force yourself to lift the phone to call that loved one you know you need to call, even though you don’t feel like being anchored to a phone for the next, precious hour of your life. The very notion of this grace can seem like ersatz pie in a madman’s sky as you venture out to check the mail and realize your irrepressibly chatty neighbor has spotted you, and is making a beeline for you while shouting what is no doubt only the first chapter in a dense, multi-volume saga regarding the family drama of another, recently-deceased neighbor. I didn’t reeeallly need this student loan bill and faux scratch-off ticket from the local car dealership right now, now did I? you think to yourself, realizing it’s too late.
But even now, as you succumb to the lengthy neighborly chat you were not at all in the mood for, you catch a glimpse of this grace in the softening corners of your maddeningly charming neighbor’s eyes, and spot it again when, twenty minutes later, she tells an unrelated story about pulling over to urinate at night on a rural road outside of town, only to be joined – precisely at the moment of scrambling to pull up her pants – by a patrolling policeman who figured her for a motorist with car trouble. There’s this place her face goes as she looks into the grainy distance of her memory, crinkles her nose, and cracks up all over again – at her own embarrassment as she scrambled to finish her business as the headlights approached, at her husband’s disbelief at the timing of their police encounter, and at the policeman’s awkward response as he rushed to normalize and dignify the moment. There, in her bemusement and admission of her own awkwardness, you see – of all things – this grace suddenly flicker and dance like a thousand, unexpected fireflies across her face. Suddenly, something in you softens and floods with warmth. It is as though some strained emptiness in your chest (of which you were, until now, unaware) has just been pumped full of melting caramel by angelic pastry chef-ninjas who somehow managed to ambush your annoyed resistance, transforming it into heartening goo. You no longer regret your cumbersome detour to the mailbox.
It is out of some kind of deep faith in this relational grace that I feel called to account for my friends and family at this time of year, and, moreover, feel called to devise tokens of appreciation for many of them. This is no small feat – at last count the list toppled 60 (and still there are 20 more I’d like to add if I had more hands, means, and time). But this is sacred work and I know it, even if I must continue to apply tremendous discipline and discernment as I field the cultural pressure to equate “showing holiday love” with “buy people flashy crap”.
Whether I buy or make a given gift, I am working to forge my own approach to accounting for each inimitable bead on my rosary of traveling companions. For me, this ritual has come to involve a modest offering that shows the recipient not only that I love and appreciate them, but that I wish to gift them with something that has a little bit of them in it, and a little bit of me – with, in other words, a sort of material shorthand for our bond. I hope for the gift to be something that delights the recipient, and I want it to reflect something of what I uniquely know and understand of them, and, perhaps, what I am uniquely able to give them.
As I assemble and craft these gifts over the months and weeks leading up to Christmas, I feel as though I am erecting an altar to the people who have sustained me, helped me to know myself, and who have shown me redemptive grace and kindness across the nearly forty years of my life. It becomes clearer and clearer that this yearly ritual, labor- and resource-intensive as it can be, is a spiritual necessity for me. I dare say it enriches me more than it does the recipients of my no doubt humble and, at times, misguided gifts.
The goal of this ritual, above all, is to call each of my loved ones vividly into consciousness, and then to transmute my love and appreciation for each of them into material form. This conversion of heart-centered energy to matter takes place - at its best - by virtue of a process I can only describe as a sort of earthly reverse-transubstantiation: instead of the humble bread and wine made sacred flesh and blood, the sacred understanding and appreciation of another is converted into a material vehicle for these transcendent sentiments.
Whatever humble vehicle I conjure, in each instance, the form will not matter so much as the gesture and its intention: to retrace the thread that connects us, and to honor the place each connection – through choice or chance – occupies on the prayer bead necklace of my one and only life.
Whether I buy or make a given gift, I am working to forge my own approach to accounting for each inimitable bead on my rosary of traveling companions. For me, this ritual has come to involve a modest offering that shows the recipient not only that I love and appreciate them, but that I wish to gift them with something that has a little bit of them in it, and a little bit of me – with, in other words, a sort of material shorthand for our bond. I hope for the gift to be something that delights the recipient, and I want it to reflect something of what I uniquely know and understand of them, and, perhaps, what I am uniquely able to give them.
As I assemble and craft these gifts over the months and weeks leading up to Christmas, I feel as though I am erecting an altar to the people who have sustained me, helped me to know myself, and who have shown me redemptive grace and kindness across the nearly forty years of my life. It becomes clearer and clearer that this yearly ritual, labor- and resource-intensive as it can be, is a spiritual necessity for me. I dare say it enriches me more than it does the recipients of my no doubt humble and, at times, misguided gifts.
The goal of this ritual, above all, is to call each of my loved ones vividly into consciousness, and then to transmute my love and appreciation for each of them into material form. This conversion of heart-centered energy to matter takes place - at its best - by virtue of a process I can only describe as a sort of earthly reverse-transubstantiation: instead of the humble bread and wine made sacred flesh and blood, the sacred understanding and appreciation of another is converted into a material vehicle for these transcendent sentiments.
Whatever humble vehicle I conjure, in each instance, the form will not matter so much as the gesture and its intention: to retrace the thread that connects us, and to honor the place each connection – through choice or chance – occupies on the prayer bead necklace of my one and only life.