It took me a good solid minute to open my word processor, fingers frozen still with mind dancing a bit faster. “Tect Evit” “Tevt Ecvit” Textr Edot”
“Text Edit.”
There.
It is Christmas Eve here in Dallas. In some places it is Christmas Day – the places across the Atlantic. I can imagine (I haven’t had a TV in years) each network news channel in the majority of living rooms tuned into Santa’s Route, tracing his trajectory from the North Pole to Norway, Holland, to Ireland, England, all across Europe. Into China, India, a long stop on the coasts of Australia, on to the South Pacific, and then for the long flight in a sled to the Americas (another form of ethnocentrism, as if us here are the grand finalé).
The anticipation is growing. The cheeks of children in the culture who trusts in the image of Santa grow warm and red, and mothers are making Snickerdoodles for him to feast just after his descent down the chimney chute.
My 25th Christmas looks quite different from that for obvious reasons, not limited the lack of innocence achieved not only from the realization that the idea of Santa is an idea more about benevolence and giving than it is a literal character who spends the majority of his life in the North Pole.
The lack of innocence is greater. And with the removal of innocence and the illiumination of reality — which ever place on the spectrum we can speak of — comes a great responsibility. Some shock. Some discouragement. But ultimately with it comes responsibility. And a greater regard for those who are not pawns in our own game. With innocence pride is more easily practiced in its forms. With the removal of innocence and the revelation of things greater comes the necessity to practice life (the ethic of Love) in as nuanced a way as reality is becoming.
My Christmas Eve 2009 is markedly different than all before for a number of reasons. With it comes a kind of great loss. The loss of not only the idea of something possible but the loss of a person with whom ideas and those related were shared.
With it comes me sitting in the dining room of an apartment which, in my mind, I have not been a resident for nearly six months. A courageous wind rattles my windows, and the sleet we in Texas tend to call snow out of optimism and hope spackles and pounds the panes, dripping as quickly as it melts into an icy slush on the sills.
With it comes me clumsily searching my computer directories for the program called Text Edit, which would allow me to put to flesh ideas which are circling in my head and not completely formed so that what is necessary to put down in black characters on the white canvas becomes what will allow me to remember the experience, and eventually to rehearse it.
My trips to Colorado with my family near the Christmas climax have become for me not only a time to share thoughts, memories, and our total selves together outside the context of work which usually prevents it, but it has also become for me a gauge on the particular growth I’ve experienced as a person. It is the only tradition left, from what I can tell, that remains solid and necessary for my family, and therefore I attach a giant significance to it.
I was in Colorado only one day ago for this very trip. At 4am yesterday my family and I rose (prematurely, I’ll add) to come home. Not once has Dallas felt like that. When I was overcome suddenly in the early hours of the day to be Home — meaning Dallas — I welcomed what sort of new reality this was for me. For the first time I was not imagining myself in some future that, to have been made possible, was in a different location geographically. Of course there are things to expect and to hope for in Dallas that excited me — living in a house with friends, becoming increasingly connected to and meaningful from within the community, and the possibility to, with what I’ve been given, participate in the redemption of parts (and eventually the whole) of culture.
Even with that, I was surprised by this new experience of actually being drawn to Dallas. To take advantage of my life here in a way that could actually make a difference in the lives of others. To focus less on what my travels would take me from and more on where my committment would lead to me unto.
Make sure you run from something
And not away from
It burned my ears in September when I bought my plane ticket to Queens, NY for December 1. And it is still easily as meaningful.
It is this very thing, and by the power of the relationships I share with people I consider to be some of my closest friends and sharers of contextual experience that has stopped me from moving to New York City after years of planning to do so. It is this very thing which formed a giant hole in me for any of the things I’ve been planning that have fit into that kind of plan.
So with Christmas Eve I know that what has been lost will eventually be revealed in the way other things have been found. This is what Advent is about, is it not? And the hope is, of course, that what comes forth on Christmas Day is the very reality through which redemption comes, is made available to us as humans, and allows us to share and to give, and to redeem ourselves what has been broken. The power is not ours — but may we be agents. And may we plead to be.
I am sure I have little idea of how to fill that role.
These words have never meant as much
As they now mean to me.
