Peace

When I was a girl, perhaps 7 or 8, my mother set up the Christmas tree in early December, but said she’d place no presents under the tree until Christmas Eve.  For this I blamed my brother, who would unwrap presents to peek and then rewrap them, thinking no one would notice. 

Each night my parents turned on the tree lights, and I spent an entire evening staring at them. I laid down on the floor on my back, scooting carefully under the tree like a present.  I looked up through artificial pine boughs at sparkling lights, the trunk of the tree stretching high, pulled like taffy through the roof of our house to the stars.

Quieted by the twinkling—perhaps I was nearly asleep–I hummed songs from Sunday School. “Sleep in heavenly peace,” I crooned, “Sleep in heavenly peace.” 

I remember a deep, abiding calm settling within, as if pressed down by tree branches.  I could rest in that amiable peace.  It felt like summertime at the swimming pool, when I held my breath under water and drifted gently down to the pool floor, suspended and warm and still. 

Under a tree without gifts, I had found the core of Christmas.  I could recognize that grace again—in a sanctuary’s hush before singing carols with the children’s choir, in the gentle department-store mystery of my mother’s nativity set, in the luminescent cloudcover as we drove to our mountain cabin one Christmas Eve, in holly-wrapped iron sconces in a Philadelphia church, in glittering stars of Jerusalem’s night sky on a crisp winter night.  

These moments hinted at the edge of a comprehensive peace, of a magnitude yet to be known, a shalom promising restoration and mercy and justice and joy. 

It took years to realize that connecting with this calm is what I most want for Christmas. If I rush through the season, distracted by details, I leave no room for wonder.  At the core of season is the gift of peace, anchored in the assurance that God has come near—closer than a heartbeat–and made a home with us.       

–Adapted from my article published in Alive Now, 12/2000.             

 

Listen to your life

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”   – Frederick Buechner, Now and Then