...to all our silent nights

Moon over Marina Bay

My friend, Mary, emailed after I posted “I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose”. This followed her trip to the Middle East in August. Here is her message:

I stood on the Jordan side of the Dead Sea as the sun rose.  There was a hill behind me that it had to clear.  I was told that at the right moment, I could see Jerusalem, and the sun would reflect off the Dome of the Rock.  There was a haze.  Through the lens of my camera, across the Sea I saw two dim gold reflections.  The light was catching the Dome of the rock, and the spires of the Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mt of Olives.  I snapped a few shots, then put my camera down to look.  Without it I couldn’t see them and I wondered at the fuss.  Then, for a few seconds, the angle of the sun, the Dome, and my eyes were just perfect.  The Dome became an expanding starburst that grew and then shrank with the speed of the sun’s movement.

I felt the earth turn.

One of those once-in-a-lifetime intersections. I daresay that if Mary stood and waited, watched, even managed to see this display again, the effect wouldn’t be the same...watered down by expectation, stripped of surprise. 

But the unexpected can be a sucker punch as well. I am reading Patricia Gilman’s book, The Anti-Romantic Child. Rather than describe, here is the first page:

“A poem . . . begins,” Robert Frost once wrote, “as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness . . . It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

“This book began as a lump in the throat, as a homesickness for the magical world of my childhood and for the home life I was looking forward to with my child. It began with a sickness of love for a child I adored but did not understand, a love searing in its intensity, overwhelming in its sense of longing and vulnerability, a love I feared would never be reciprocated, and worst of all would never make an impact. It began with a pining for contact with the spirit or essence of my child, a wrenching fear that perhaps everything I did and said was in vain because he was unreachable and unimpressionable, a fierce devotion to a child I would do anything to save.

“This is a story of the relationship between literature and life, the ideal and the real, of poetry vs science, magic vs measurement, honoring mystery vs unraveling it. And at its heart this book is a love story: a story of two very different people learning to accept and affect and make space for each other in mysterious and powerful ways.”

While I write this, John Boswell’s arrangement of “Silent Night” is playing. A quiet, poignant version I love...the silence is heard as clearly as the notes. More than any song I know, this one transports me to places of the heart, to places where dreams and life intersected. Or just plain collided. 


Here's the link. You know you want to hear it. Besides, it took me a good thirty minutes to get this thing to load. Had to lie down a couple of times and then stretch my neck and back. The doggone thing is opening in another window and I don't have the time to diddle with it anymore. But if you read blogs, you know how to click on the blog tab and get back. Or play it after you finish reading.  Humor me, please.  Thank you.

 Silent NIght by John Boswell

I discovered that, out of the wreckage, acceptance is born. The acceptance of things just as they are. And with this, peace. In my case - in the spirit of full disclosure - this follows a long, arduous labor. After I walk into wall after wall, fall down repeatedly, I eventually relent...even though I know that when I let go of “my way”, something finer is born. The “something finer” is not necessarily softer or gentler. Unrecognizable for while, perhaps. But definitely finer than my own design. 

So, at the end of the dream, in the middle of the muddle: a beginning. Having written this, rest assured that, when Google comes out with a Life GPS, I’ll be the first fool in line at the app store. I’m in the remedial class. I know the truth but I really like a good shortcut every now and then.

So here I sit with a cup of coffee. I’ve now selected “repeat one” on my iPod. The song is looping. I can’t help myself. Yes, I’m jumping ahead to Christmas Eve. Yes, I wrote a blog about not skipping Advent. But at every turn of this journey, the past and present intersect. Advent seems to find thoughts which seek words. I recall a Christmas eve in a church basement that smelled of strong, dark coffee. People sat in a circle and spoke in turn. I listened as they told their stories...humble, vulnerable, honest. Most of them. Some lied. Their time had not yet come.

When my nephew, Darin was little, he went to his mother’s room. Glenda loved on him, as we say in the south, then told him to get back into his own bed. 

“No, mama. I don’t want to go back to that room. It has nightmares in it.”

That meeting room in the basement had dreams in it. Many of them born of nightmares.  I doubt that any of those dreams were actualized as envisioned. But I am glad I was present, glad that I heard hope stream from one dark story after another. Humbled that I was invited to the birth. At the end of the gathering, the Christmas Eve service in the sanctuary above drew to a close and “Silent Night” fell down upon us. No one moved. Or spoke.

Several years later, in the upper room of another large church, I sat alone and waited. Another Christmas Eve. I had worked until two-thirty. Cooked dinner for friends and family. Cleaned the kitchen. Wrapped a couple of gifts. By seven-fifteen. Later we would attend the 11 p.m. service at our church. The book I brought with me remained unopened in my lap. I closed my eyes and listened. In the room below, more stories were told. In the sanctuary, a Christmas Eve service drew to a close. “Silent Night” again. As I walked toward the stairs, the Reverend John Claypool came through a side door, headed to his study. The man must have been exhausted after multiple services and the pressures of the season. The next morning, more would follow. But he stopped in front of me and held both of my hands. His blue eyes looked directly into mine. “I hope you have a blessed Christmas, Celeste.” We stood there for a moment in the dark hallway. A brief but sincere intersection, a deep blessing visited upon me by one acquainted with grief. 

So many Christmas Eve services have passed. Some rich and hopeful, others an exercise in exhaustion. The details are dim now. But a collective memory weaves them together: the sound of “Silent Night”, the smell of evergreens on windowsills, the flicker of small candles that each of us carried out into the cold midnight...light going out into the world.

Light going out into the world. We are carriers...or nothing at all. With every baby, the miracle is born. As we grow, we manage to make a muck of it. All of us. To one degree or another. This year I wish for you the vulnerability of those who told their stories in the church basement that night; who believed, hoped, dreamed of second/third/fourth chances. Let your dreams be worthy and your disappointments, blessings in disguise.  May you hear a melody that carries you outside your self, one that takes you to that uncommon place called Grace. 

And wherever you are, whatever you believe, I hope you look up at the stars in the silent night. Feel the earth turn. Sing and shout. Or sit in the deep quiet and rejoice. In the middle of the muddle, good news: we get a do-over.

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