Midwinter revels

And the meaning of Christmas

During intermission at Midwinter Revels last week I sparked connection with the man next to me at the sink while we washed our hands. When he bent toward the faucet, his glasses slipped from where they were perched on the top of his head, and he caught them midair.

“Nice snag,” I said to him. 

He chuckled. And I chuckled.

While we dried our hands at the paper towel dispenser I pointed at his lapel.

“What’s that on your pin?” I asked.

“It’s a dragon,” he said.

“Oh, that’s awesome,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “My one true love gave it to me.” 

And he smiled and I smiled, and we parted ways.

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God I love humans.

Back in October I got to see Yo-Yo Ma play with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I sat by a woman named Carrie who loved the orchestra. She had season tickets.

Carrie pointed things out to me in-between movements. She told me the name that she had made up for her favorite bassist, the one with the red sash who never used a stool. She told me about all of the percussionists, and that that guy who was seated in the row behind us was one of the percussionist’s dads. She told me the best place in New Orleans to get praline, and the best bars in Cambridge to get beers. She pointed out the prowess of the woman with the piccolo, which I had already noticed. (That woman could play the piccolo! How excellent of humans, that we invented the piccolo. And that someone came along—her, in particular—who has it in them to fill a hall with that pitch and passion.)

Carrie shared a full slate of her observations with me that evening. Then, at the very end, after the orchestra finished a concerto by Shostakovich, Carrie glanced over at me aglow, with a countenance of content and soulful longing, and said while clutching at her heart, with a deep sigh, “In a past life I really think I must have been a Russian peasant.”

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I just love us. So sincere. So silly. So tender. So mighty. So creative and full of life.

Saint Iraenaus made this bold theological assertion: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

I think that the glory of God—such as it is—is more vast and varied than man’s fullness alone. I think humans of all genders, and creatures of all sorts, and vegetables and minerals for that matter, all sing in their fullness to the glory of whatever continuous and creative genius vibrates behind the dynamic and evolving stuff of life. 

But I take Ira’s point, and these passing singular encounters back it up: God is glorified when you and I—and Carrie, and the man with the dragon pin, and the man who gave it to him, and Yo-Yo Ma, and the piccolo player, and every last peculiar and particular one of us—are fully alive.

And that full life goes by different names, wears different clothes, strums different tunes here and there and now and then. Maybe it peeks at you when you hear a time piece ticking, strumming the bass note of every second that backs up every moment of your full life. Maybe it’s the bit of eternity you hold when you touch the hands of someone you’re in love with. Maybe it’s composing or playing or reveling in ensemble music. Maybe it’s the light making the sky a color that feels, somehow, somewhy, important to notice. It's the beauty of simple things—or of complicated things given actual shape—these moments of aliveness.

It is a taste, a hint, a glimpse, a memory of something divine made immediate. For those who believe in God it is all the power and wonder of grace. And for those who don’t, I'm not sure that it's anything less than that anyway. 

That’s my favorite thing about the theology of Christmas (tucked in, cozy, over there in a corner of truth behind the hubbub, behind the carols, behind the tinsel, behind the Christmas morning breakfast casserole—which I am definitely behind—and all of the other traditions that tumble us along toward the end of a year):

Abstraction, when it comes to the divine, doesn’t quite cut it. 

Divinity, instead, is found in particularity. God dancing with us in the dusty constraints of the time-bound, material world. And us, dancing God back to God.

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I’m going to go do some of that dancing now. Going to bask, for the rest of December, in music and family and true love and good light.

Merry Christmas, to those who observe. And happy solstice on the way.

I’ll see you again, back here, in the new year, eager to share some of the other creative contributions that I’ve been brewing for this world, so ripe with the divine.