The Table of the Star

I started my holidays with sad people.

Every year, my friend Pat the Funeral Director invites the families of the recently-deceased to a Christmas reception. There is a prayer (which was my job) and a little meditation. At the end, Pat reads off the names of those he helped bury over the past year, and one by one, the families come up to receive a little ornament to hang on their Christmas Tree, a bittersweet ivory and silver memento mori bearing the late name, like a tombstone, to be suspended in evergreen by the retro-50’s bulbs and winking suns of blue, gold and red.

A pair of late-middle-aged men strummed holiday chord progressions on their amplified acoustic guitars, occasionally breaking into clarified carol themes. The newly-minted widowers who dressed for Christmas in their suits without help for the first time this year, sat lost and listened, hoping that their windsors looked something like those neat knots, sculpted by those arthritic lover fingers for decades, gone.

The ladies looked less out of sorts, most of them having taken the time and thought during the pre-arrangement days to prepare for the adjustments in attention, and household management, and the halving of the refrigerator, the table, the sofa and the bed.

Daughters, the new matriarchs, walked briskly, tearfully and certain, to the front where my friend met them, ornament in hand. They know, this year, that sadness has a taste: the magical days of winter lights have passed from the sparkle of champagne to the musky burn of port, heavy, purple, the grapes of heart.

Sons, who generally do not know these things, mostly stumbled, unconvinced by reality, interrupted by pathos, shocked by the hot and salt precipitation from their own blinking eyes.

The holidays will be difficult, we told them. This Nativity Season will be the first with an empty chair that is empty, for once, for real. The emptiness of the Elijah place setting is always a happy mystery: but the emptiness that accrues from absence sounds the echo of abandonment and doubt.

The Table of the Magi Star always bridges this year to the next. It is a diachronic nexus, the agora of ghosts and a festival of sentiments. This year, we told them, your sadness will recall every other grief: it is the secret, unavoidable track of Holiday, the conference of years, the path through the leaves that must be taken, and may not be traversed without risk and change.

There is no terror from the spirits, and the bitterness is sweet. Incompetent hands, now, brandish the carving knife and cannot make the gravy in the roasting pan. The laughter, too, is shy, experimental. And the trials lead, like drama, into reminiscence and story, narrating the old lesson of time: first there is fellowship, then there is remembrance, and the memory grows like an oak out of an acorn’s dream, and the eternal memory of God is sung through the soft murmur at the Table.

The First Star will not be found in the outside sky this year, we told them, but it is the single light in your window, to tell the world that life is still, in your heart this year, by this candle flame.

“They are at another Table tonight, this year, and we miss them, but for their felicity we are glad.”

Ah, yes, Christ: He came for these sad people, and for all meetings such as these.

He came for all who have had enough of the ornaments bittersweet, and who have spent too long at the confluence of ghost and nostalgia.

There is something about the winter lights that speak of forever, wistful, a something that wrings the heart like the chill of twilit snow, but glints of the fire hearth and brandy at midnight. There is something in the air at meetings of the sad and holidays, something that strips away all the Macy’s Parades, red fur hats and the clamoring society of tinsel.

There is something, with these funereal survivors, who arrive still on the midnight clear, who wait with the flocks by night.

They wait, hushed, with the lambs for the angels, for the handing out of salvific ornaments, bestowed from the Table of the Star.

I started my holidays with the sad people, and with them I found Christmas’ end.

Comments

[Grumpy Old Man]

This was a very moving post.

Thank you.

[Steven Paul]

Having lost Grandpa last year and just receiving news of a nephew who committed suicide last week, commemorating the ten year suicide/drug overdose of my best friend, yes...The Birth of Life who comes to die in order to kill death is a wondrous event.
Thanks.

[Fr. Fred Pfeil]

Thank you for helping me with my homily this year. If ever there were a parish matriarch, then ours lost her this past September. We move on, with her shadow at every corner, every event, every divine service. Perhaps we can all arrive together at the Table of the Star this Nativity, and be blessed...