07020
January 9, 2007

Homecoming

A reflection on love and loss on Christmas Day

by the Rev. Jan DeVries
Synod Executive, Synod of the Southwest

TUCSON, AZ —  I have never lived in Cedar Rapids but it is more like homecoming than I suppose anyplace my parents lived.  I graduated from seminary and they moved — all in 1977 — so it is the place I traveled to most frequently to see them.

     In all my 56 years, I have never missed a Christmas with family.  There are years I can remember complaining that it felt inconvenient, that this should be the year that I broke this tradition, that it was somehow my parents’ tradition and not mine.  Nonetheless, there is not a year I have missed.  But next year I will miss it, and this year will be painfully different.

     The trip began this morning (Dec. 25) in pitch darkness and the stillness of Christmas morning in Tucson.   I left the house well before dawn, dark enough that I used bright lights even on the almost-deserted freeway.  And now, I will arrive in darkness in Cedar Rapids and walk into a dark motel room and realize how artificially home it is to me this year.

     The brightness of this day has been the sky for three flights — soaring over the clouds with the sense that there is brightness everywhere and no cloud cover below.  Sunlight, unending light this day trip.  As the dusk overcomes the night as we fly on to Iowa, I am reminded that it is relationally in this light that my parents both reside — wherever that light leads, whatever it offers to soothe weary, tired bodies and souls ready to meet their Maker.

     During Advent, I happened upon some program which described heaven — a series of interviews with people who were considered authorities on the subject.   Billy Graham and Rick Warren both talked about heaven as a relationship with God, something beyond our comprehension, where we won’t need to take laptops (my addition to the conversation) or do email or have cell phones or too much luggage.  It’ll all be there and relationships will be unlike anything we now know.  What we do know is that God will be at the center of it.

     I like that.  It’s not unlike what my dad used to say about heaven — that it was all about relationship and not about streets paved with gold or being pain free — just about what we’ve spent all our lives trying to get right with God and all of a sudden it’s just there.

     Relationships being the toughest thing to reconcile this year, it seems to me.  Friends dying, friends losing their children, friends not being friends anymore.  Even Billy and Ruth Graham’s children have been arguing about where they will be buried when they die — in Charlotte at a reliquary being built in his honor, or near Montreat where his heart is.   Still having the last word, Graham himself finally “rose up” and said that he and Ruth would decide where they would be buried and they would inform the family.  I read it, laughed and thought it was a good thing that Graham knew he’d better still be the patriarch.  His children will wreck their own havoc after their parents are gone.

     Homecoming.  The sky continues to darken and there are two layers of sky — periwinkle blue on top and white clouds on the bottom.  Layers.  Layers of memories, unearthing themselves inconveniently as I wipe my eyes with the Kleenex tucked inside my sweater sleeve. “I’ll be home for Christmas.  You can count on me …”

Christmas homecoming.  Christmas memories.  Mother’s sheet music still in my Christmas stack.  I can see her at the piano playing “Winter Wonderland” and teasing her way through the vocal part as if she was a coed again.  Creamed onions and standing rib roasts.  Too many sweets dropped off by grateful parishioners.  Mom looking at Dad when he’d had two drinks — her limit for everyone.  Mom working in the kitchen while I played carols and singing “Once in David’s Royal City” — her favorite carol.

     11 p.m. services in Larchmont with candlelight.  Beautiful, quiet, Gothic architecture as if for a moment the world stopped when we all sang “Silent Night.”  Trekking off to the Gasparini’s for their post-midnight celebrations that seemed to give us all a second wind.  Or in Danville, the Advent season where another friend made homemade eggnog with all the fresh ingredients and then loaded it with liquor so she stayed well-lubricated through the entire season.  The years of debating with city hall in various communities about whether or not a nativity scene was appropriate. 

     Witness.  Christmas Eve was always about witness — to the people who had forgotten to come to church for a year, to the people who had been dragged kicking and screaming, to the women showing off their new Christmas sweaters, to the kids exhausted with the pace and the unexpected routine (no Presbyterians go to church for evening worship).  Each year, my dad would preach a sermon intended to hit the mark for everyone — from the elders who never missed a Sunday to the slightly-inebriated strangers who darkened the door with their families just wanting the service to be over before it started.

     The year I learned to make Christmas wreaths out of coat hangers covered with thousands of pieces of tissue paper twisted to look frilly and adorned with small Christmas balls.  They all went to the nursing home, which was always an annual trek with my dad — frequently over my dead body.  I used to think of those trips every time I would go to Cedar Rapids once he moved from independent living — long hallways of people looking for a sign of hope, a new visitor, a Christmas carol to which they could no longer remember the words. 

     Eventually I managed to arrive home after the tree had been put together and decorated.  It was a big deal when my folks bought the first artificial tree and gave up the scotch pines.  I suspect it was my dad who did this, and my sister, Nan, if she was home from Colgate.  Ornaments with sentimental value, but minus the silver tinsel of my childhood. 

     As my dad down-sized, I found a miniature lighted tree with miniature ornaments from some mail order place and had it sent.  Better than the poinsettia plant I sent each year because it didn’t need to be watered and it twinkled.

     These last years, my dad would start saying in November, “Jan, what do you and Nan want for Christmas.”  “Money, dad,” I would say.  “Really???” he’d press as if I would say “Oh, find me another HO train for under the tree.”  By the week of Christmas, he’d say “How much can we afford?” as if I had somehow taken over my mother’s role — the “eternal Jan” who would sign off on every dollar that got spent for anything.  I would give him a figure and Nan and I would get checks and that would be Christmas.  In these last years, it was the enjoyment of watching him.  Everything was wonderful to him because he had us there.  Everything.

     My uncle recalled this week an illustration my dad frequently used in a Christmas Eve sermon.  In a large urban congregation, a staid Christmas Eve service neared midnight.  The paid soloist was singing “O Holy Night” and people who thought they really weren’t religious were beginning to think otherwise.  Individual candles were poised to be lit during the last carol. 

     Into the solemnity and order of well-orchestrated church life stumbled a man from the street — too many drinks to walk a straight line down the center aisle adorned with pew-end candles and hurricanes, with evergreens and red ribbons.  Down the aisle to until it ended at the chancel.  People shifting uncomfortably in the pews, poking each other awake and alert, interrupted by the incongruity of what was emerging. 

     As the soloist continued, the man found his way to the minister who moved to the chancel steps to greet the man.  The stranger seemed to lurch forward and was caught by the hands of the minister and steadied himself.  Without a word, he turned and retraced his staggered steps up the aisle and out the door into the winter night.  The minister said to himself, “Don’t go, don’t go” which was really a way of saying “be born in us tonight.” 

     So, this year, I am saying “don’t go, don’t go.”  This year is too hard.  This homecoming too cold, too overcome by darkness.  There are no Christmas presents in the suitcase, no reason to put on the reindeer headband.  The comfort will come from Christmas carols as I pack box after box.   The memories will preach their own sermons to me again, and I will hear my dad’s voice from last year singing the bass line of Christmas carols. 

     I will remember my mother singing carols when my dad preached — like her life depended on it — proud as she could be that she knew the words without looking at the hymnal.  I will see the lights darkened in the sanctuaries of the churches of my past. I will light my figurative candle, as if at the manger it is the gift I bring this year — the symbol of grief and gladness, the moment of gratitude, the journey to home.