Hanukkah Blessings



Source:  www.kochivibe.com

Artist Unknown



To enjoy this wonderful song:  gaze to the right and click "play".  Read the lyrics. 



For years, this catchy song has held pride of place in my Christmas Playlist.  Always in the top three of songs to play, it speaks of ancient traditions in ways fresh and new.  I like that.

 

I also like to celebrate Christmas by tipping my hat to the faith and traditions that Jesus would have been celebrating this time of year.  Jesus would have been remembering how, thanks to God, one day's worth of lamp oil kept the temple alight for eight days.  Striking, isn't it, how easily the lyrics of this song relate to Christmas?  God lifting us out of darkness.  Light and peace coming to a world that often finds itself in darkness and anxiety.  Freedom from slavery, from sin.  Taking darkness and casting joy.  God exceeding our plans and expectations.

These lyrics strike me in a different way each year.  This year, I'm questioning the temptation to let Christmas be December 25.  Come the 26th, it is too easy to let "normal" life resume.  Night after night, one by one, the candles are set alight.  Maybe joy and light are like that.  Maybe light, freedom, and peace require more than frenzied weeks of preparation for one night and day.  (After all, it is the twelve days of christmas, isn't it?)

 

I don't know about you, but I feel called to continue enjoying the lights of Christmas.  I'm perfectly willing to let the jingle bells, TV shows, and the noise of Christmas pass.  After one day, I've had my fill.  But, let the lights linger.  Nature supplies dark evenings that allow me to reflect on an ornamented tree that is a sign of God's activity in the world, bringing light to darkness.  There is an invitation in our very orbit about the sun to turn off our overhead electric lightbulb suns, let nature's darkness be, and let the natural light of candles cast their light. 

God is at work in the darkness around us.  God turns the fear and darkness in our lives into mystery, and -with time- illumination and joy.  Reflecting on such things takes more than a day.  It takes repition. 



Twelve days of Christmas?  Then it isn't even half over! 

I hope you have only begun to see the light!

Silent Night

For a refresher, you can find the lyrics to Silent Night here.   To listen, look to the right and click "play".

Have you ever have a Christmas song that ...just ...gets ...on ...your ...nerves?  That one carol that rubs you the wrong way?  A Christmas song that even Stevie Nicks can't fix?  I usually reflect on songs I have a postive response to, but sometimes it is worth reflecting on lyrics that provoke a strong negative reaction.  Silent Night is my yearly dose of fingernails on a chalkboard.

The lyric is just so much wishful thinking!  Like a mirage, it is an image of what we wish the birth of Jesus was like:  a lush image that, ultimately, is not rooted in the reality of incarnation.  Calm and bright?  Tender and mild?  Heavenly peace?  Silent radiant beams of glory?

Give me a break!  First of all, I was raised in farm and ranch country.  Mangers and stables are NOT silent and peaceful.  Sheep are neither clean nor quiet.  If Jesus' first bed looked like our popular, rustic, and ultimately romantic images:  well, let's just say that stable hay is a less than sanitary choice of bedding for a newborn. Secondly, the lives of too many people look like the reality of what stables are.  I think of the lives I've met as a Priest of the Sacred Heart:  at risk children, immigrants, victims of abuse, those struggling to find a place in society, workers concerned for their economic future.



Battle Of Shanghai Baby - Retouched

Photo By Bellhalla;  Original by Office Of Emergency Management

   

I can't help but believe that Christ's incarnation was more, well, carnal.  That is the word we use:  incarnation.   We are talking about taking on flesh, of choosing a life that, all too often for far too many, means suffering.  Pain.   

Was the night of Christ's birth a silent night?  Did Mary smile down upon a peacefully sleeping baby?  We wish that for newborns, but that image is not incarnate.  

I ask you:  what is the reaction of babies who find themselves in the last place one would choose for a child?  And, I believe that Fr. Leo Dehon would ask us all:  if this a season of light and redemption, what is our response to a world too often filled with darkness, cries, and screams?