This is a Coup

Last night, I went with my family to a Christmas Eve service. This being California, rain - and not snow - fell in sheets outside the windows, and, conspicuously to my eyes, no one had to remove scarf or gloves before sitting down in the aisles.



The service began with up-tempo carols - "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing", "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and "Joy to the World". It was all in the vein of my upbringing. Energetic guitar strumming. The congregation singing back in full voice, children and adults together.



Next came a duet by two very talented sopranos. They sang a song that was new to me, their voices soaring in the rafters with trained virtuosity (sometimes in Italian, no less), but the longer they sang, the higher heaped my dismay.



These were the words that they sang:



"Let this be our prayer,

As we go our way.

Lead us to a place;

Guide us with your grace,

To a place where we'll be safe.



[. . .]



We ask that life be kind,

And watch us from above.

We hope each soul will find

Another soul to love.



Let this be our prayer

Just like every child

Needs to find a place

Guide us with your grace

Give us faith so we'll be safe.



And the faith that

You've lit inside us

I feel will save us."



It was a beautiful song, beautifully executed, but there my praise for it must end, since it was, from start to finish, a load of hogwash.



"Give us faith so we'll be SAFE?" Is that the point of advent, then? Is that why Christ came? To be safe? To make me safe? Have the authors of this soaring anthem so entirely forgotten that the child Jesus did not, in fact, find any place but a feed trough to receive him?



Nothing could have been less safe than that night in Bethlehem. The great I AM makes himself infinitely vulnerable in the shape of a squalling infant. A worn-out pregnant teenager, with none to attend her but a coarse-handed carpenter, lays her head-covering, perhaps, over the animal dung to have a place to wrestle through the contractions. And in the capital city, a paranoid tyrant is plotting the child's murder.



This is not about safety. This is an act of desperation by a God determined to reconcile to Himself his estranged, rebellious creatures. In the great war for men's souls, this is Omaha Beach, the toehold from which God will reclaim out of enemy hands all that He has made.



The earlier songs, though perhaps homelier, spoke far more truth:



"God rest ye merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay. You know that Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day to save us all from Satan's grasp when we had gone astray!"



"Joyful all ye nations rise! Join the triumph of the skies!"



"Let earth receive her King. [ . . .] No more shall sin nor sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make His blessings known, far as the curse is found!"



This is no silent night. This is a coup. We have long lived in occupied lands, but the real king is coming to take back his own.



Ranting aside, the song does speak some truth. In the end, when Christ comes again in final victory, He will grant to us shelter at His table, in His home. When once are souls are bought by Him, no power can do them harm. In that sense, we are "safe". And even in this life, in His presence, there is a security, a peace, a joy, that no evil circumstance can touch. But let us not deceive ourselves. The battle has not ended, and we should not act as though it had.



When Christ has laid himself out for us in the vulnerability of human flesh, being born and dying like us, shall we then, before victory is final, ask him, simpering, that life be kind to us? That we all find a hand to hold and a bunker to hide in? Would it not be a more fitting tribute to Immanuel the Infant King, on Christmas Day and each day, to offer Him a life yielded for His purposes, though like Him we have no true home on this earth, though like Him we may face dangers and indignities, though like Him we may still do battle in a world that is decidedly unsafe and unkind?

The World That Has No Covers

As a little girl I was never without a book. I took them with me in the car, into bed, and into the bath (I would have taken them into the shower if my ingenuity could have devised a solution). Late at night, my mother used to rap her knuckles on the outside of my bedroom door, nudge it inward on its hinges, and chide me to turn out the lamp.

“You have school tomorrow,” she would say.

“Just let me finish this chapter,” I would answer, my eyes returning to the pages even before she could shut the door again. I would go on until my eyes burned and my head ached. Once, I went until the sun rose, and I closed the book with genuine surprise to see dawn supplanting the lamplight.

I loved best the old, hard-cover books bound in cloth. I loved the world-weary smell of their slowly moldering bindings, the soft, whispering, rent-fabric sound the pages made when I turned them over. I loved their heft, their immutable solidity, and how, when it was full of them, my book bag strained against my shoulder blades like the weight of a pair of wings.

I read new, glossy paperbacks, too, and I read them over and over again until the covers fall apart like old wash rags. Indeed, for all the love I bore my books, I treated them roughly. I broke their spines. I dog-eared and creased the paper. I smeared the pages with chocolate, grease, and sometimes tears. I made them my bedfellows and rolled over them in my sleep. I loved them not like deities, but like extensions of my own family: Brother and Sister Book.

Not that I lacked for siblings. I was sandwiched between two sisters, and I spent hours with them at girlish games. But somehow I always wound up with my books again, skinny, scabbed knees drawn up against my chest, the book supported between the palm and thumb of my right hand, and the sticky, oxidized brown core of an apple long forgotten in my left.

Reading was a bonfire with me, and I found it hard to come up with enough new books to feed it. I “stole” books from my older sister’s backpack, reading her literature class assignments two years before I would go through the same curriculum. I feasted my bibliomania at the library from time to time, but, given the tendency of books to get lost or damaged under my guardianship, I preferred to own instead of borrow. After Christmas and my birthday in August, with gift certificates burning holes in my pockets, I would spend hours examining the shelves of the retail bookstore for the treats I would take home and devour.

Mostly, though, I re-read books: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne books, Jean Craighead’s My Side of the Mountain, Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows, Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano d’Bergerac, Carol Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn, Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, Hannah Hurnard’s Hinds’ Feet on High Places, plus Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare in their glorious canons. I read the Bible in its sonorous entirety, putting a small dot and the date next to each chapter as I completed it.

I would read my favorite books twelve or thirteen times, until whole paragraphs played in my mind with the resonance of liturgy, until the authors’ voices leaked out of my pen (Thanks to Dickens, I am still trying to exorcise the Victorian narrator wont to show up in my writing). If my family taught me English, books taught me language – its rhythm, its variety, its power – and I have never forgotten the lessons, though my self-guided tours were not without peril. To this day, I still come across words that I pronounce incorrectly because I have never heard them – only read them. Until I was fifteen, I thought that “unsh” was a verb, meaning, onomatopoeically, to scrunch up one’s face to hold back emotion. I derived it from the phrase “unshed tears.” How I mourned the loss of that word when I discerned my error.

The books I re-read offered me some kind of emotional release, some field on which to play out the conflicts of a reserved, bookish child. I identified especially with female misfits – Laura Ingalls, Caddie Woodlawn – and all the more so with bookwormy misfits – Jo March and Anne Shirley. Over and over again, I would cry along with their travails and self-doubting, at how the world misunderstood them, and over and over again, I would hang in anticipation for the moment when love vindicated the heroine. In more cynical moments, I longed for the resigned, self-effacing sweetness of Beth March or Mercy Wood.

It seems likely, looking back, that the books kept me sane. Into them I funneled my unresolved complexity, to be faced at my own pace, and with the buffers of vicarious distance and melodic language safely in place. If I sometimes disappeared for days, my family seemed to sense my need, drawing me up from the pages only often enough for food or sleep.

As an adult, I still spend occasional afternoons ensconced in the pages of a book, but I no longer read with my former rapacity. I grow bored. Sometimes I skip to the end, scanning for interesting chapters, and sometimes I put a book down forever, unfinished. As a child, I never missed so much as a preposition, cleaving to my books with the fidelity of a soldier to his squadron. The books have not changed; it must be me.

While this change feels strange to me, I try to take this as a good omen. If I find myself less absorbed in the makings of an author’s mind, I will hope that the traffic has improved between me and the world that has no covers.

On the First Cold Morning

On the first cold morning I walk
Through the crinkly decadence of trees
Heaped into bags
Like the papers of an old professor
Who has died
Obscurity
profanity
and ingenuity all together
Fit only
In the end
For love
Or burning

After a while I pass a
A mother with a bicycle
And two children
That she tries to keep from freezing
And a woman with a coffee cup
And roses in her garden
That she tries to keep from freezing

And I think as if for the first time
That trees die in winter
From yearning for the sun

Go Vote

Congratulations. If you are reading this blog, you (probably) live in a country that has enjoyed 44 consecutive bloodless power transitions*, a feat unreplicated in the history of mankind. However you feel about the present state of national affairs, and however you feel about who wins tonight, get out there and exercise your civic privileges, and afterwards, celebrate that tomorrow there will be no civil war.

*I do realize that the American Civil War was a bloody and drawn-out exception in part touched off by Lincoln's election to the presidency.

Gilead's Balm

Sometimes we come suddenly face-to-face with our own brokenness, and it's as though we could feel its seams like the raised skin of a scar beneath our fingertips, and we are only too aware that we cannot heal ourselves.

There is a song that I like for such days. 

There is a balm in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.

There is a balm in Gilead

To make the wounded whole.

Sometimes I get discouraged

And feel my hope's in vain.

But then the Holy Spirit

Revives my soul again.

There is a balm in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.

There is a balm in Gilead

To make the wounded whole.

If you can't preach like Peter,

If you can't pray like Paul,

Just tell the love of Jesus

And that He died for all.

A Poem Written Long Ago in a Legal Pad on an Occasion I No Longer Remember

Mantengo mi silencio come la nieve
Que cierra las montañas
Una belleza escondida, tranquila, olvidada
La belleza de monjas rezando
Es mi silencio
Mi silencio una pregunta, una duda, un pacto
Esperando
Mi silencio mantengo

(I keep my silence like the snow
That closes the mountains
A beauty hidden, still, forgotten
The beauty of nuns at prayer
Is my silence
My silence, a question, a doubt, a covenant
Waiting
I keep my silence.)

In Defense of Fake Cheese

I believe that Kraft macaroni ‘n cheese is good for you – or, at least, it’s not going to kill you tomorrow. Here’s why: I have two sisters, and when we were growing up, my mom sustained us on a relativelt healthy diet, punctuated with our favorite stop-gaps: Bisquick pancakes, beef-flavored Top Ramen, and, yes, Kraft macaroni ‘n cheese. I still remember the royal blue cardboard box. The noodles, innocuous enough, had a semolina base. To the boiled noodles you added milk and butter, but the true magic lay in the cheese packet. You ripped open the package with your teeth, and out came a clump of powder glorious to behold, better to taste. God only knows what the fine folks at Kraft put in their fake cheese (fire hydrant paint, from the color of it). Whatever plants or animals it came from originally, upon consumption it was processed, hydrogenated, and emulsified into a vegan’s nightmare. Paradise on a plate. Julia Childs it wasn’t, but it filled me up, and the preparation was simple enough for me to slay my third-grader hunger until dinner time.
Many would gainsay me, among them, presumably, the designers of the food pyramid and legions of parents. I see their point. I’ve downed my share of square meals, and I like it when my food has ingredients I can pronounce. Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are massive health care concerns, and they must be addressed with improvements to our overall lifestyles. But I think, sometimes and in some places, we’ve gone over the edge. I have seen juice cups wrested from the hands of babes. I encounter parents in the aisles of the supermarket, angst-ridden over the choice between seven-grain Kashi crackers and organic carrot sticks. Don’t we have enough to feel guilty over? Aren’t their enough menaces to truth, justice, and the American way with finding them in the peanut butter jar?
My sisters and I have grown into intelligent, active, cancer-free adults. The occasional enjoyment of fake cheese did not permanently stunt our development, but we might well stunt the rising generation in more grievous ways if we expend our energy on minor battles instead of major challenges. A warming planet will kill us. Multi-resistant TB will kill us. Wars of religion and ideology and oil will kill us. Give the mac ‘n cheese a break.