It is Christmas Eve morning, and I am sitting in a warm living room with a fuzzy purple blanket over my legs. Two dogs are lying next to me, and, in two armchairs are two cats, one asleep and one keeping watch through slitted eyes.
It is Christmas Eve morning, and the world here seems wrapped in that Christmas haze of good cheer and carols and the promise of hot meals, later, when the house is awake and laughing.
Right now, the house is not awake. It is only me, here, trying to reconcile this current peace with the story I’ve been telling this week — the story of slaughtered children both now and millennia ago. The story of people fleeing their homes, huddling in doorways, waiting for the kindness of strangers which, all too often, does not come.
How do the two fit together and what story should I be telling on this the second-to-last day of waiting for dawn?
Perhaps both. There is something in my mind, forming itself, trying to be born. We will see what sort of midwife I am, on this Christmas Eve morning when the house is asleep and the world is waiting for what will come next.
What will come next? Perhaps the thought I had out walking the other night when the neighborhood was lit with colored lights. I thought about the baby leaping in Elizabeth’s womb, and of Anna and Simeon in the temple: old woman prophesying, old man whose eyes had seen the savior. All that joy juxtaposed with all that pain; all that love and all that coming loss.
It occurred to me then that the two are never so very far apart. The baby who leapt for joy was leaping into a desert and an early death. The child in the temple would rend his mother’s heart, hanging from a tree.
What we love we often lose, and, because love is like a root grown from our soul, wrapped in tight embrace around the beloved, the loss is a mutilation, a terrible hacking with hatchets and saws. We shrink from it. And yet —
And yet. For God so loved the world, he gave.
He gave.
He gave.
He gave.
That is love. It is giving — our body, our flesh, our souls, our time and treasure, lives and very selves. All joy, all loss, all gift, all love, all paradox and mystery, which, unless we leap for joy unto death, we cannot comprehend. We cannot, without that leaping into dark, know how love with all its losing fills us up with joy like living water, rich draughts we drink and find we do not thirst again.
Last night, Dawn wrote to me, and I was glad to receive her message. You see, I was lying sleepless, thinking about the sleepless nights she spent back in Romania. Some of the families she had worked with, Ukrainian families fled over the border to safety, found they loved their home perhaps more than they loved their lives. They wanted — they needed — to return. And so they did. So Dawn, who had loved them, lay awake with worry, imagining bombs falling, mutilation and a terrible hacking. She shrank from it, and yet she gave.
She gave to two Romanian mothers, Alina and Anca, day after week after year, pouring into them the love poured into her. She gave to Oksana the Ukrainian woman with her two sons, and yesterday, on the day before Christmas Eve when I was too tired to give my writing, those two mothers gave, a Christmas visit to Oksana and Vitalik and Slav. Love poured out, poured out again.
Tomorrow, on Christmas, when dawn has come, I will write about giving, and how we can give to the people like Dawn who are giving each day of themselves, but today it is Christmas Eve and the house is awake, and it will be enough for me to try, as best I can, to love.
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