communion of saints

February 11, 2010

The kids are asleep, or at least quiet for the moment. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a bar of dark chocolate. It is my guilty pleasure, the nearest thing to an escape—when there are so many things I should be doing (like the mounds of dishes spilling out of the sink on to the counter and across the kitchen.) But instead I sit and write.

It is clear today, and very cold. A relief after yesterday, so windy the trees were shedding branches, and some giving up the fight entirely and laying down across the road in exaggerated surrender.

A piece of dirtied cloth, a rag of some sort—nearly transparent from use—flew down our lot and lodged itself in a tree in our backyard. Audrey spotted it this morning, asking me if daddy could get out his ladder, climb up and get the cloth down so she could use it in a skit that she and some of her friends are going to perform at minnows. She wants to tie the cloth around her, she told me, as a costume. It is, quite frankly, the dirtiest piece of torn-up cotton you have ever seen, and its origins I don’t want to begin to guess—my most tasteful guess is that someone used to to change the old on their car, left it outside and it blew away in the wind—but there could be other explanations…

But being four, Audrey couldn’t think of a single reason why it would be unsavory to climb up and take a dirty rag from a tree and parade around in it as a costume. And that is what frightens and bewilders and awes me about my children.

February is the hardest month of the year to be a Christian. Listening to advent music in February is bittersweet at best, and at times, downright painful. January is bad enough, but then you have all these excuses: post-Christmas blues, ate too much, paying too much for the gifts that were put on visas, the whole New Years thing. But February—here we are, supposed to be moving on in to spring, the marketers tell us—spring clothing out in the catalogs coming in our mailboxes, flowers in pots in the grocery store, and of course the proliferation of pink and red everywhere. But here we are, cold, perpetually cold. The earth is still dead and hard; there is not even a scent of spring in it. We feel so far from spring, and even farther from Christmas. Why is it that no one even talks about Christmas in February? It seems almost taboo —

O come, Emmanuel, rescue captive Israel… and we are still captive. We have not really made any progress since Christmas, have we? Here we all were: full of good intentions, gifts, parties, cards, saying our best and looking our best and being jolly and together and so very merry. We prayed and went to church and looked and waited and expected—and then Christmas came and went and here we are, still broken-hearted, still wanting our marriage to be better and our children to be better and there to be more money and less pain and no more cancer. If God is here, then why is life still so hard? This is an old question, I don’t pretend to be original. But it bothered me anew the other night: I had gone to play for a group of patients staying at a hotel-type home while receiving cancer treatments at the hospital. Most of them were far from home, some had family that had come with them and were staying there as well—and all were fighting some type of life-threatening cancer. I am always happy to bring my music in to those kinds of situations, because words are so small and cumbersome. They are too small to answer the big questions of “what next” and “what if,” and when employed as agents of comfort, they are ill-fitting and unwieldy at best, offensive at worst. And then I, being a creature of words, feel at a loss. Music, this other language we all share, fills that gap—though it is interesting how much it seems to be a forgotten language anymore.

As I stepped out of the warmth of the building to carry my things in from the car, I was struck by the cold, the distance of the tiny beady stars, and how hard it all seems. If we waited, and if God came, and is here, doesn’t it seem like things could be a little bit better? This earthquake in Haiti; these patients enduring the torture of chemo, hoping for a cure—

And I know all the usual answers, and most of the time they are enough, but this night, they were not enough. God is here, our comforter; he has taken our sorrows upon himself…is present with us. I want to see more of God here. I want to touch, and feel, and see with my eyes, so that if there is this overwhelming hope, I can honestly and with candor translate it to those who can’t see. Or maybe I am the one that needs God's obvious presence translated to me, as I am, at times, quite blind to it. I suppose that is why, in all wisdom, God gave us the communion of saints.