A GIFT

This is a story about a Christmas from about 60 years ago. The context of the story is centered on how my family celebrated Christmases for a few years when we children were quite young. We celebrated Christmas Eve with Grandma and her sisters at their house which, as I remember it, was cozy and old-fashioned, a house perhaps built in the 1930s. There was all about abundant dark wood wainscoting and Persian rugs over hardwood floors. The rugs were spacious and resplendent with their indigo blues, soupy creams, and blood-red threads. The adults sat in overstuffed chairs and it was dark enough in the main room to show off the Christmas tree with all its lights, brighter because of the dimly lit room. When one is young enough, it is the sensual pleasures of the holiday that gather attention and so it was for me to be enveloped in the warm and the dark. But at this time of year in a Quaker household the emphasis on Christmas Eve was the ceremony of readings and silent prayers. We read the Christmas story from the Bible in the book of Luke and then Henry Van Dyke's essay, Keeping Christmas, from his1905 collection of seasonal essays, The Spirit of Christmas. (His impressionistic image appears here.) This year, I was selected to read the Van Dyke piece and can remember the dread I had of stumbling and the embarrassment before all the adults when I actually did hesitate and backtrack with the unfamiliar text. Of course, the silent prayers that followed always took too much time for a young kid. Yet, it was in this stillness that I grew to understand more of the depth of the holiday, which I yearned for in poorly articulated ways. It was in this stillness and in this depth that there emerged more of the story of one particular Christmas those few years at Grandma's.

It was very intimidating to be among so many adults acting so seriously at a joyous time of year. It would take many years for me to grow into that particular holiday mood but the germs of it were planted those years with Grandma and her relatives. The time of year, the early darkness, the serious story about Jesus and his complicated entry into life were juxtaposed with all the mythological and illogical aspects of a confusing holiday. Life at school with my peers had us focused on holiday foods, on glittery decorations, on long gift wish lists, on someone called Santa who made some arbitrary decisions about good and bad among us with all the implied consequences if one fell on one side of the calculation and not on the other, and on the exhausting build-up of anticipation.

My relationship to Christmas was a complicated one as long as I can remember. I think I caught on to the mythology/reality of Santa pretty early and tried hard not to infect my siblings with the reality as the years rolled on. Perhaps it was my exposure to deeply religious elders at a young age that angled me away from the secular elements of Christmas that never seemed to jibe with the rich symbolism of the ancient story. When I got older, it was difficult for me to tell my parents what it was I wanted for Christmas. I remember one year when I tried to steer them away from all the gift-giving, the heaps of presents that took my mom weeks to wrap in secret in the basement. It wasn't possible for them to understand how uncomfortable it was for me to sift through all the presents and not get to what I really wanted for Christmas. What I really wanted was for the family to gather together in the lights of the tree in a time of sacred meaning. The mountain of presents on Christmas morning and my dad's absence when he was called away to the hospital for one of his obstetrical patients prevented that from ever happening. I admit that even when our own children were growing up presents from a wish list were what we gave. But we also gave them the readings that had become a tradition and a symbol of the sacred meaning so important to me.

One of my Grandma's oldest, dearest, and most loyal friends was a woman her age who asked us to call her “Nana.” Her name was also Byrd Lomax. She was from Texas and I think she and Grandma became linked for life there in the early years of the 20^th century. Nana might have been someone who nursed Grandma through a serious bout of tuberculosis those early years. When Grandma got old and debilitated from a series of strokes, Nana moved from her home in Texas to Boulder, Colorado, to be a live-in caretaker for Grandma. That is when I got to know her better. But when I was about 11 or 12 years old, the one Christmas Nana shared with all of us, I received a gift from her that I have to this day on my dresser. It was in the embracing aura of the age-encrusted old house and after all the readings had been completed that we received the presents from Grandma. I don't remember what Grandma gave us that year (it was actually dad who decided what presents we should receive with Grandma paying for them), but I will never forget what Nana gave me. It was a very small package, the size of which appealed to me in the face of the mountain we had piled up at our house. I didn't understand what it was at first and reflexively thought it to be such a small and insignificant gift, but then it opened up like the wings of an angel and inside this small nut-like housing was a miniature detailed carving of the Madonna. The housing was as dark as walnut but the Madonna was bright white in contrast. (An image of this magic gift is attached here.). She glowed in her long gown and her head was encircled with a halo, all carved in detail, etched in its own way. I don't know what Nana's religious tradition was and the Quakers had never made any fuss over the Madonna, but I felt an instantaneous affiliation with the spirit of this gift. I felt that Nana had actually seen me in my sadness and a precocious overreaction to the over-glow of an exaggerated and misplaced consumption. I felt she had reached down to me and placed in my hands a gift of great value, perhaps a gift she herself had cherished on her own personal altar and had thought I might also cherish. I have cherished it all these intervening years and not just at Christmastime. The intervening years have been filled with Quaker traditions and commitments, studies of all the major faith traditions, as well as training as a chaplain in Zen Buddhist forms. Yet, this little Madonna shines today just as she did when I opened the wings of her grotto. She houses Nana's sensitivity to one young boy's deepest need many years ago and represents an ideal for me today as I strive to be faithful. When I think about it now, the gift was a miniaturized version of the room in which we all sat. Just as the room and its deepened dark had opened up to this wonderful gift, so the gift itself had opened up into a mysterious realm when its shell-like doors had swung open on their little hinges. The lights of the tree and the glow of the Madonna in her retreat had opened up into a newly forming consciousness.

I would like to think that I have the sensitivity to know what another little child's deepest need is at any time but particularly at Christmas when the magic of a spiritual life began. But we don't know what is in another person's heart or what a small gift at a certain time will mean over a lifetime. We can listen and keep our eyes open and make the best guesses we can. We can lean down and notice and consider. We can celebrate and make joy and love the greatest gifts. We can be ready for not-knowing and for the mystery at the heart of things.