My Christmas Gift from God...

Last year, I felt like You gave me a birthday gift--a gift of cherry blossoms everywhere--and the beauty and elegance and appropriateness of that gift warmed my heart through the cold winter months.

So, as Advent ensued, I wondered if I'd again receive a gift--this time a Christmas gift--from Thee. I told myself things like--a person doesn't give out gifts on His own birthday, but still I felt a thrill of anticipation. I told myself that if the gift I received were the gift of Your Presence, then the most fitting thing to do with it would be to ask that You pass over me and give it instead to someone else who has not experienced such a thing as the wonder of that Presence. I told myself that if You asked how I'd work such a re-gifting moment, I thought first of my husband, who works so hard to make my life a little easier this year. He works both a full time and a part time job that I might take the year off from full-time work, recovering some of the physical strength that has been slowly depleted these last few years, but his own strength is depleted in the process. Always, that price to be paid. I prayed that he might receive some gift of deeper communion with You and rest for his soul, that he might catch a sense of Your nearness without the sacrifice or heartbreak that seem to often accompany such a moment...I pray that for all of us--even though I know to pray for paradise on earth for now reaches beyond the spiritual realm's brand of physics. Still, as long as we're wishing...

I felt like You responded with a glance at Solomon--a reminder that if I should ask for the good of others and not myself, You'd give me that and more--Your Presence for me as well. You gave me a reminder that Your stores are like candle-light. For one candle to share its light means it gives another candle the full measure of its glow without itself being diminished in the least. Such is the limitlessness of the storehouse of Your Presence, and I need not sacrifice that treasure so that another can have his share, to do so cheapens grace--and who can measure the depths of Your real treasures anyway? It is blindness to try. Deafness to barter. Illiteracy to count. I simply rested in silent anticipation as the snows began to fall.

The days until Christmas dwindled, and I told myself it might be a last minute gift You'd give...such is a common principle of gifts given by grace and received by faith--most likely it would appear as something quirky and out of place, or else as something redundantly presenting itself to me again and again...and would I feel Your Presence when it came? It had been long enough since I'd felt that sort of nearness to You that I'd begun to look back over old writings I'd done at those "special times" just to recapture the "feel" of it. And Christmas drew even nearer.

Three times--once per day on the 23rd, 24th, and the 25th--I did find that divine redundancy crept into my celebrations. Three times, almost back-to-back I heard and/or sang O HOLY NIGHT. The first was at a humble little church service during a precious sharing of the Gospel. The second was at a lavish Christmas Eve service where excellence reigned supreme and no expense was spared to celebrate the night of Your birth. The third was Christmas morning on TV--the broadcast of the Disney Christmas Parade. Yanni's Voices performed it. The song was Your gift, but the night before--at the Christmas Eve service--I'd had that moment of Your Presence, and so I thought that was "the gift" and so it was, but hearing the song yet again Christmas morning made me think, "You know, I don't think I've ever had that song present itself to me so often right at Christmastime-proper. Carols yes, but not that one in particular." Such an impression often constitutes my unwrapping of Your gifts like the flowers and the song. (You're such a romantic, aren't You?) But first, the gift of Your Presence begs description.

How do I describe it? Much like light and warmth, sometimes the best description involves measuring the absence as well as the presence of it. Your Presence has at times been an aroma that filled every room of my life, but lately (the last few years) it has been more a thing I just catch a hint of here and there. Oh, I still see Your leading and sense Your humor and interpret Your purposes, but that Presence--it is a gift that comes and goes like the wind, say the prophets, and they're right. I can't contrive it; I can't demand it. At best, I can simply revel in it when it comes, and it came Christmas Eve. What does that Presence bring with it, in human terms? Well-being is a word that comes to mind. Satisfaction and joy outside the brackets of ambition or even of time, these, too, come to mind. A contentment with things as they are no matter how they are because all things of pain will ultimately fall away (to know this deeply and certainly) comes to mind. Yet strangely this contentment is paired with a quintessential advent ache, a joyous grasping for something as yet unseen and nearly unknown, yet called for with a longing that swells the breast and draws the arms up like the arms of a baby who knows she's about to be held by her mother. This is the effect of the Presence, and I had it the whole of Christmas Eve and much of Christmas Day, although laced with a little grief Christmas Day, I know not why.

Christmas Eve at that service I felt a picture form in my mind--as it had been times before when Your Presence visited me, drawing me to the Cross and once to a fountain of glittering ruby waters that were as the blood of Communion for me with Thee--these were past visions granted by Your Presence. Now came another in which I saw myself approach the place of Your birth. I wore the white robe You'd wrapped around me. It slid over my bare feet and ankles, moving as I walked, pulsing with a sheen as it caught the starlight where my feet fluttered the hem of it--time is of no consequence in these visions as You are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, though You were but new-born, the robe You would put around me was mine already in promise and the only fitting thing for me to wear at such a moment.

My thoughts turned to Mary. If she indeed was a 14-year-old--as legend tells--when You came into her life, then she was the age my middle child is now. I imagined what I would do to help one that age deliver a baby when in a strange place and experiencing something so new as the birth of a first child. I felt myself cradle her head in my lap, as Joseph helped her deliver You. I prayed for her peace. I prayed for her to know the joy of such a moment, the blessings hidden beneath the dire circumstances that might try to rob her of her bliss. Then I saw You in a manger, felt the softness of your just-born cheek with the knuckles of my hand--hating to even run my fingers against your face for fear the roughness of my work-worn hands would be painful. I did not wish to be one of the first pains to Your soft cheek, but how else would I caress You? I thought how strange that in this world comfort and pain are flesh of each other's flesh and how the only way to have one purely is to take both.

Then I thought how if Mary were indeed 14 when these events occurred, then she was likewise near my age now when You died. I leapt through time to see her then. I embraced her yet again, but here our roles were almost reversed--she giving the comfort of one experienced with suffering while I was the one looking into the unknown and wondering what my tomorrow holds. The daydream ended, and the church service rose again in prominence in my conscious mind, but I stored it to ponder as all treasures should be pondered.

Since Christmas Day, I've studied on this carol--the gift above and beyond Your Presence--and what it could mean that You would give it to me. Quickly, I discovered that if a song was what You would give me, then this is the perfect carol for You to choose. I've also learned why Yanni was the ideal performer. I hardly need look very far back across these blogs to see the promise You've made for my musical compositions. Specifically, You've promised this will be a next-phase of ministry for me. For a long time, I've hesitated from seeking publication due to my lack of training in composition. To reassure me, You not only gave me a friend with a vision of my gift perfectly formed to feed others (a friend who incidentally figured prominently into that first presentation of the song on the night of the 23rd) but You also gave me Yanni as a performer--a musician who had no formal training and could not read a note, yet who is a Grammy-winning instrumental composer in this day--a reminder of what "can be" whether formal training is involved or not.

And the carol itself has an interesting back story. Not always has it been the carol that all the soloists long to be chosen to sing as their churches gleam in the candle light of Christmas Eve services. No, I learned it endured quite a "shameful" period in its early days. (I learned of this at the website: hymnsandcarolsofChristmas.com.) This was a hymn that during its infancy was loved briefly by the public, but was swiftly "attacked by churchmen in [the lyricist's] native France" with one french bishop denouncing its "lack of musical taste and total absence of the spirit of religion." This flare of offense taken by the church is a mystery to us now, but is easily understood when consideration is given to the other attributing factors, ones that were outside the hymn's doctrinal truth or melodic beauty. The church saw words written by a lyricist who was classified as "a social radical, a freethinker, a socialist and a non-Christian. Indeed he adopted some of the more extreme social and political views of his era, such as opposition to inequality, slavery, injustice and other kinds of oppression." The church also saw a melody written by a musical composer who was more prominently known for composing "light operatic works and ballets." These factors were "deemed incompatible by those churchmen with the composition of a Christian religious song." I can hardly condemn them. Was I not myself just chided for taking measure of the treasure? Christ Himself warned us about mis-classifying the sanctifying agent when comparing the sacrifice to the altar that bears it, but that is a lesser lesson to the one of the song's glory. The glory is that the message of this song rose above politics and reputations, and just over 150 years later, when that generation had turned to dust--when the words and the music could stand on their own merit and when the only reputation involved in its publicity was the reputation of its subject, well that's when the song became a cornerstone carol of the season. Of all carols, this one strikes me as having a history, a life-story that matches the life-story of its subject more fully than any other I've found.

So what did You give me for Christmas? You gave my Yourself, played out again in song and story even as time spun itself into the darkness of the world's winter solstice. And, You gave me the reassurance of the approaching labor and delivery of my own song, one both for and from Thee. As always, Your gift was nothing short of sublime.