Three Christmas Stories

 

Christmas is a time for stories. And tonight, I have three of them.

The first is about Papa Panov, an old and lonely cobbler, who reads from his Bible on Christmas Eve, then falls asleep and dreams that Jesus will come to see him the next day.

He wakes excited that he will welcome the Prince of Peace and sits gazing out the window when an old vagabond knocks on his door. Catching anxious glimpses down the street for Jesus, he nonetheless invites the shivering man into and pours him a puts on a pot of coffee to ward off the chill.

Then, as the impatient Papa Panov keeps looking down the street, a poor woman approaches with her child. He gives the baby some milk and a pair of baby shoes he has been saving as the finest from his hands.

And once they all leave that Christmas morning, he sits there wondering why God did not come to see him, until he falls asleep and hears the voice of Jesus: “I was hungry and you fed me…I was naked and you clothed me. I was cold and you warmed me. I came to you today in everyone of those you helped and welcomed.”

Tolstoy continues: 

Then all was quiet and still. Only the sound of the big clock ticking. A great peace and happiness seemed to fill the room, overflowing Papa Panov's heart until he wanted to burst out singing and laughing and dancing with joy.

And then there’s O’Henry’s story about Della and Jim, and how all she had been able to save was “one dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. And [how] the next day would be Christmas.” 

He tells us how Della sat on the couch and cried because she could not afford to buy a gift for Jim, whom she loved with all her heart, and wanted nothing more from life than to “greatly hug” him.

There was nothing Della and Jim loved more than each other, and no pain deeper than not being able to show that love at Christmas. Surely, Jim had loved his grandfather, who had left him a treasured pocket watch, and Della was more than a little proud of her beautiful long hair, the one thing that made her feel like the Queen of Sheba. 

But they loved each other most of all. So Della went to the wig maker and had him cut off her hair for twenty dollars, which she traded for a beautiful golden chain to hold Jim’s watch.

And as, that Christmas Eve, Jim came home and her saw her newly shorn hair, he was in shock, as he slowly drew a package from his overcoat pocket, which once unwrapped revealed a set of combs which Della had worshipped for a long in a Broadway window, and which Jim had bought with the money he got from selling his watch. 

Thus, O’Henry sagely observes these “two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house” were the wisest of all who gave gifts that Christmas night.

And finally, there’s the best Christmas story of all, for it is true. That on this night, in a backwater town, when the world seemed very dark, a star rose in the east, and led we shepherds and wise men to a young virgin and a little baby, who came from God to tell us we were loved.

That baby grew to be a man and taught us how to love each other, how to forgive and lay down our lives for each other, as he opened his arms on a Cross for our salvation.

As, on that night angels told us to never be afraid again, for today in the city of David a Savior has been born for you, who is Christ the Lord: an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

And so then they sang: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

On the Third Sunday of Advent

 It’s getting awfully cold lately.

Oh, I don’t mean the kind of cold that bites your cheeks when the wind picks up and mixes with bits of snow and ice. I’m talking about a far more fierce kind of cold. The kind that freezes your heart.

And there are lots of frozen hearts out there.

I think of the guy who’s really intent on having more money than anyone else. He works 35 hours a day and sets the alarm for an hour earlier than he should because he wants to be one step ahead of all the others. He’s convinced that once he has enough money, he’ll finally be happy (“has anyone ever gotten to the point where they have enough money?”). The last time he prayed was when his grandmother died, and that was probably out of guilt or habit, and he spent most of the Funeral trying to keep his mother from seeing he was reading a text from his broker. He certainly doesn’t have time for Church, or even for Christmas.

And then there’s the gal who’s been let down so many times and finds all that pious chatter boring. Each relationship, each boss and every institution had been disappointment to her. They’re all fakes, each trying to take advanatage of her. They are like those little pop-ups on the internet, following her around to sell her something, make a buck off her. And despite the nagging of her mother, she knows that Church is just one more fake. She couldn’t care less, even at Christmas.

And then there’s the people who have been hurt, over and over again. So deeply hurt that their hearts are frozen and brittle and trembling. And they don’t want to be hurt again. So the last place they want to be is sitting is on a hard pew surrounded by gullible people singing about comfort and joy.

Yup, it’s very cold out there. Way down deep inside of them, it’s very very cold. 

Perhaps that’s is why Pope Francis recalls Dante’s description of hell as the place where the devil sits on a throne of ice “in frozen, loveless isolation.” Hell is the place, he says, where “we prefer our own desolation rather than the comfort of God’s word and his Sacraments.” And such desolation is characterized by a stone cold refusal to love, to a “cooling of charity, [with] selfishness and spiritual sloth, sterile pessimism, the temptation to self-absorption, constant fighting with other people, and a worldly mentality that makes us concerned only for how stuff looks…”

So maybe in these coldest and darkest days of the year, you can spare a thought or a prayer, or even a kind word for those who dwell in the cold darkness.  Maybe even invite them to come to Church with you at Christmas. They’ll probably say no again, but maybe it will be a little sign to them that you love them.

And perhaps you might teach them the Christmas prayer of Saint Catherine of Siena, who used to ask God to preserve her ‘from every evil thought; warm me, Lord, inflame me with your dear love, that every pain might float away.’

On the First Sunday of Advent

I’m not sure how old I was, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

I’d press my little kid’s nose to the cold window pane in the front of the house and stare up the street as the shadows began to lengthen and I began to hope. I was waiting for my father to come home from work, so I could show him what I had done in school that day. An A with a little superscript of a plus hovering over it’s right side told me and my classmates and my mom and my dad that I had done good. And 

I don’t know if I’ve ever known such joy or such a sense of accomplishment as when I heard the sound of his truck pulling over the graveled driveway and ran out to meet him, with my yellow-lined pride waving above my head.

He swept me up into his arms and cherished me, and carried me into the house as my mother enshrined the sacred text with a bright yellow refrigerator magnet.

That’s what it could be like, as the ancient Collect of today’s Advent liturgy reminds us, when we “run forth to meet the Christ with righteous deeds at his coming...”

Imagine! Our arms so brimming with righteous deeds, that we run forth to meet our judge with joy! Will the fervor with which we celebrated the Sacraments and the devotion with which we ate his Body and drank his Blood have so detached us from the darkness of this world, that we will glow with the bright sanctity of the redeemed? 

Will we run out to meet Christ when he comes, so clothed in the ways of this Mystical Body that they will call us “a man of the Church, a true woman of the Church”? What will Christ do, when we run out to meet him, our arms embracing all the righteous deeds of our lives? 

The ancient Collect give us the answer. He will gather us to his right hand, sweep us up into his arms, recognize us as his obedient children, and carry us into his heavenly kingdom, where we will sit with him and all his children at the Heavenly Banquet in the Kingdom of Heaven.

So, Be watchful! Be alert!