It’s the Christmas countdown, and we’re trying, really trying, to focus on the most soul-filling qualities of the season. We need to stay on it, too, because the outer world keeps bombarding us with stuff that is in a whole other category. The more I hear, the more I want to head straight to my piano and play “What Child Is This?” as quietly as possible.
Take the Republican debate the other night, for example. Now that was a really cheerful bit of business. Not one among us minimizes the importance of dealing with terrorism. But somehow it wasn’t comforting to hear them all arguing about how best to close our borders, why we can’t trust the vetting process for refugees, or whether or not we should exterminate the families of suspected terrorists, too.
Ted Cruz kept referring to “the bad guys” and then “the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens” as if we can always, 100% of the time, keep a sharp line between good and bad, make no mistake about it. In my experience, especially in the gleanings from the kind of work my husband does, there are no neat stacks of human beings.
There was that weird question to Ben Carson about how willing he would be, as a mild-mannered retired neurosurgeon, to get behind a bombing campaign that might kill thousands of children in faraway lands. His answer was even weirder—something about how his young patients used to express fear before their operations at first but then, once they learned that he’d be opening up their skulls for good reason, they came around.
And if this extravaganza of hope wasn’t enough, have you been hearing those radio ads for Xfinity? It’s the cable company around here offering all kinds of “bundles” that consist of television and internet packages you can’t find brightly wrapped under the tree. Perhaps there’s an equivalent elsewhere in the country. The message is so so so Christmasy, proclaiming that we should “Tech the Halls.”
Naturally, the first thing we need to be concerned about during this special season is whether or not we have enough Wifi to accommodate all the loved ones who will be coming home to sit ‘round the fire with all their devices – some doing Instagram, some Snapchat, others streaming a no doubt wondrous video, still others just watching plain ol’ television. Amidst this technological picnic, is there apt to be much real conversation about people’s actual lives? Not likely.
I just finished a new book called Private Doubt, Public Dilemma by Keith Thomson; it’s about Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin, the questions that troubled them, and how religion and science really need to figure out a way to work well together. In it, the author points to a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, of all people, in his 1936 essay “The Crack-Up”:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
So maybe, all things considered in this particular culture of ours, we’re all asked to be pretty brilliant, especially at a time of year when we’re expected to function at a high level and stay merry, besides. Fa la la la la, indeed. How did they used to do it in the old days, anyway?
More and more, experiencing the approach of this holiday – with so many competing priorities – feels much more akin to being a passenger in a bumper car at a noisy amusement park than sitting cozily bundled in a peaceful sleigh ride through the snow.
But what is there to do, really, than try to find the magic or at least the goodness wherever we can?
Just this morning, I visited an art gallery right down the hill, a place I’d been meaning to get to for a couple of years, where several horses roam in fields near various large sculptures. The woman there knows the trails around here that are good for riding, and maybe—just maybe—by forming an alliance with her I’ll work my way towards resuming a life with animals I’ve loved since childhood. This might not be magical, exactly, but it sure would be mighty fine.
Almost as fine, really, as imagining that there is someone who travels freely through the skies, all around the globe, encountering no barriers or suspicious looks, keeping to his mission of delivering gifts to children everywhere.
