The impossibilities

This is a season for the making of lists. We pull out our stubby No. 2 pencils and Big Chief tablets, and scrawl out deep desires. 

Once upon a time, the tablet held things like a Red Rider BB Gun with a compass on the stock. Or electric race tracks and chemistry sets and Estes model rockets. Or, for the distaff side, dolls and frippery and Fisher Price paraphernalia. 

In all these things, there was no hesitation to ask for the impossible. There was a humility and a wonder, and hope, even, that on the long-awaited morning anticipations would be fulfilled.

It was easy to be childlike then, after all, because then we were real children.

I wonder, as we get less younger, whether this is a property essential to childlikeness and synonymous with wonder: that we used to know, once upon a time, that impossible things could be hoped for; and that on a following morning, that anticipations could be met with surprise, and by a fulfillment that overflowed the banks of desire.

I remember, in an indeterminate time, a very concrete moment when, in the chilly red-gold of evening, I ran into the towering pine trees, jumping and waving my arms, just because the ecstasy of joy had beamed down with the gleaming of the chortling, dusking sun.

That meekness, that openness to joyful ecstasy, is the property of childhood.

I have the title deed to that property somewhere, I am sure. But it is surely one sign of the times that we have mislaid it so.

At Christmastime, I would like again to ask for impossible things.

In recent Christmas lists for Santa, I took great care to appear adult and virtuous (and, truth be told, witty and educated -- sometimes, I know, the two do not go together).

But this year, having re-adopted the rubric of willfully breaching impossibility, I’m throwing caution down the storm drain (like the one that gurgles in the street by the rectory).

First off, I wish for a righteous new bishop, one who would follow the footsteps of my missing master, +Metropolitan Nicholas, thrice and nice blessed. I have written much about this missing and I’m sure you think it maudlin already. So I’ll simply say this is an impossible wish, and thus I open my hands and let it ascend, like incense, to the stars. E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

Second. I wish for peace at the hearth. I do not wish for peace on earth, because I do not know what this means, or what it would ever look like. I have been disappointed by every historical armistice. At every one, there was always someone who exploited and distorted the terms of the treaty. There were always carpetbaggers who took advantage of the soldiers and civilians, both victor and defeated. I am deeply cynical about war: that is the main reason why I do not define peace negatively, by the absence of war -- which, you must admit, is not nearly a proper opposite of peace.

Do not mistake me. I am happy at war’s absence: anyone who likes war, who rattles sabres, has not been there enough to dream traumatic dreams. 

No: I wish for peace at the hearth. I want twentysomething young men to grow out of their elongated adolescence. I want children to grow up under the roofs of married parents, and to listen to stories from grandparents who are not lurching from one entertainment (or complaint) to another. I want arguments to be settled by reason and forbearance instead of demands percolating from les enfants terrible, or simply surrender by one party to the willingness of the other to elect the nuclear option. I want people to stay and grow, pray and forgive, rather than to abandon and tumbleweed from one place (or relationship) to another.

I wish for peace in the church. At the risk of sounding naive and childish, I must say that it is melancholy, to say the least, to have journeyed from a Billy-Graham-and-bible-school setting to one where ecclesial denunciation has become such sport. Truth be told: it’s not our ethnicity that’s the problem, it’s our damned crabbiness -- and in that, I wish for peace. This old former evangelical wishes for that first love again, for that enthusiastic awareness that Orthodoxy is the completion of evangelicalism, the resolution of all good religion … that the episcopacy is apostolicity, that Santa is Nicholas and rides again.

Do we, in our demotic quotidian, show Christ as really born?

For that matter: really crucified?

Really risen again?

Did the Prince of Peace really show up? Counselor? Everlasting Father?

Mighty God? Ischyros? Kripkyj?

I wax childish here, I know. It’s the real world and all that. We’re grownups, having grown accustomed to the news that there’s no such thing as Santa.

But did not God, for the love of it, send His Only-Begotten to one such cynical world as this one? To such a heart of disappointment as this?

On Christmas Eve, I will go out before the showing of the First Star, and I will feed the small animals. I’ll pour seed and dried fruit into the feeder and suet in the little wire cage. I’ll throw crusts on the rose bush bed, right in front of the ground hog tunnel under the wooden fence. I’ll make sure my Yorkie and Aberdeen terriers get their little biscuits that they treasure. 

Then, our Holy Night Supper, with the straw at the corners, the Nativity Icon, and the tropar. The bean soup, the bobalki, the fish, the warm unabashedly sentimental expectation and the candlelight.

Then, later, “God with us.” S’nami Boh.

We have walked in the darkness of disappointment, and that darkness is the touching of  our soul to the iron cold of determined impossibilities.

We have walked in the darkness.

It is time, brothers and sisters, to see the Great Light.

Comments

[David]

Another thoughtful and wonderful essay! Thanks Father, and my friend!

[Darlene]

"This old former evangelical wishes for that first love again, for that enthusiastic awareness that Orthodoxy is the completion of evangelicalism, the resolution of all good religion...that the episcopacy is apostolicity, that Santa is Nicholas and rides again."

Could this be true? Oh, how I wish it to be so, Father!

[James the Thickheaded]

I like the peace at hearth. Very good.
Also like peace in the church. Always thought those who relished a good fight had a cell or two missing. Still do. Peace is peace.

Especially like the reference to "crabbiness"... 'cause fussy personality seems to trump intentional theology almost every time. Sigh.

[Fr. Jonathan]

Thank you, David. I think of your father (and my exemplar) often during this season.

Darlene -- in the Church, where we in our finitude intersect always with the everlasting, the "should" really can turn out to be "could": such a turning waits, always, on our "would." It happens now, and will always be -- just not in the notice of worldly attention.

You're right, James: "fussy personality trumps intentional theology" -- that is always the way of toxic passion.

Merry Gregorian Christmas to you (except you David: we're on the slow plan).

[Ben]

"I want twentysomething young men to grow out of their elongated adolescence."

This hits home every time it is mentioned. Care to enlighten one as to how it is accomplished?

[Ben]

I know you're probably busy but that question was in earnest...