Frederick Buechner - Christmas

Without any prior warning, this past Sunday marked the first Sunday of Advent.  Is anyone ready for the Christmas Season to be thrust upon them again?  There were Christmas decorations in Costco starting before Halloween.  Each year, it seems we are less prepared, less ready, and perhaps even less accepting that Advent, the Season of Hope, is upon us. 

Given this, it seems fitting to share here a Christmas meditation by Frederick Buechner, a pastor and writer.  I have never read anything that comes closer to summing up my emotions, wonder, and sometime distant sadness mixed with hope at this time of year.

Christmas

The lovely old carols played and replayed till their effect is like a dentist's drill or a jackhammer, the bathetic banalities of the pulpit and the chilling commercialism of almost everything else, people spending money they can't afford on presents you neither need nor want, "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer," the plastic tree, the cornball crèche, the Hallmark Virgin. Yet for all our efforts, we've never quite managed to ruin it. That in itself is part of the miracle, a part you can see. Most of the miracle you can't see, or don't.

The young clergyman and his wife do all the things you do on Christmas Eve. They string the lights and hang the ornaments. They supervise the hanging of the stockings. They tuck in the children. They lug the presents down out of hiding and pile them under the tree. Just as they're about to fall exhausted into bed, the husband remembers his neighbor's sheep. The man asked him to feed them for him while he was away, and in the press of other matters that night he forgot all about them. So down the hill he goes through knee-deep snow. He gets two bales of hay from the barn and carries them out to the shed. There's a forty-watt bulb hanging by its cord from the low roof, and he turns it on. The sheep huddle in a corner watching as he snaps the baling twine, shakes the squares of hay apart, and starts scattering it. Then they come bumbling and shoving to get at it with their foolish, mild faces, the puffs of their breath showing in the air. He is reaching to turn off the bulb and leave when suddenly he realizes where he is. The winter darkness. The glimmer of light. The smell of the hay and the sound of the animals eating. Where he is, of course, is the manger.

He only just saw it. He whose business it is above everything else to have an eye for such things is all but blind in that eye. He who on his best days believes that everything that is most precious anywhere comes from that manger might easily have gone home to bed never knowing that he had himself just been in the manger. The world is the manger. It is only by grace that he happens to see this other part of the miracle.

Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed—as a matter of cold, hard fact—all it's cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word become flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not touching. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space/time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God . . . who for us and for our salvation," as the Nicene Creed puts it, "came down from heaven."

Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.

"The Great Remember" - Steve Martin

I may have posted this before.  I can't remember; I'm getting old.  It doesn't matter, the Internet is free, and this song is simply gorgeous.

The highlight film of my life (which would be short and excruciatingly boring) should be scored to this.

Peace to you all.  And, Great Remember.

This is my life...to one extent

Mr. Wright, Physics, And Why We Exist

Jeffery Wright has figured it all out.

And in doing so, Mr. Wright has formed a life that looks to me just like real, genuine, Christ-like love.  This life is acted out daily, both at home, and at work.  I want to be like Mr. Wright when I grow up.

Jeffery Wright is well known around Louisville Male high school in Louisville, Kentucky, for his antics as a physics teacher, which include exploding pumpkins, hallway hovercraft, massive fireballs exploding from his hands, and a scary experiment that involves a bed of nails, a cinder block and a sledgehammer.

But it is a simple annual lecture — one without props or fireballs — that leaves the greatest impression on his students each year. The talk is about Mr. Wright’s son and the meaning of life, love and family.

Each year, Mr. Wright gives a lecture on his experiences as a parent of a child with special needs. His son, Adam, now 12, has a rare disorder called Joubert syndrome, in which the part of the brain related to balance and movement fails to develop properly. Visually impaired and unable to control his movements, Adam breathes rapidly, doesn’t speak, and is wheelchair bound. 

Mr. Wright said he decided to share his son’s story when his physics lessons led students to start asking him “the big questions.”  Those questions we all end up asking about life, meaning, and real purpose.  Mr. Wright, a Catholic, says:  “When you start talking about physics, you start to wonder, ‘What is the purpose of it all?  Kids started coming to me and asking me those ultimate questions. I wanted them to look at their life in a little different way — as opposed to just through the laws of physics — and give themselves more purpose in life.”

Mr. Wright starts his lecture by talking about the hopes and dreams he had for Adam and his daughter, Abbie, now 15. He recalls the day Adam was born, and the sadness he felt when he learned of his condition.  “All those dreams about ever watching my son knock a home run over the fence went away,” he tells the class. “The whole thing about where the universe came from? I didn’t care. … I started asking myself not how, but why, what was the point of it?”

All that changed one day when Mr. Wright saw Abbie, about 4 at the time, playing with dolls on the floor next to Adam. At that moment he realized that his son could see and play — that the little boy had an inner life. He and his wife, Nancy, began teaching Adam simple sign language. One day, his son signed “I love you.”

In the lecture, Mr. Wright signs it for the class: “Daddy, I love you.” “There is nothing more incredible than the day you see this,” he says, and continues:

“There is something a lot greater than energy. There’s something a lot greater than entropy. What’s the greatest thing?”  At first, there is silence in the classroom.  Then....

“Love,” his students whisper.

“That’s what makes the ‘why’ we exist,” Mr. Wright tells the spellbound students. “In this great big universe, we have all those stars. Who cares? Well, somebody cares. Somebody cares about you a lot! As long as we care about each other, that’s where we go from here.”

As the students file out of class, some wipe away tears and hug their teacher.  Mr. Wright says it can be emotionally draining to share his story with his class. But that is part of his role as a physics teacher.

“When you look at physics, it’s all about laws and how the world works,” he told me. “But if you don’t tie those laws into a much bigger purpose, the purpose in your heart, then they are going to sit there and ask the question ‘Who cares?’

“Kids are very spiritual — they want a bigger purpose. I think that’s where this story gives them something to think about.”

For Jeffery Wright to love his students enough to share the most intimate and painful moments of his journey with Adam, and to help illuminate the purpose of life to his students; this is what love looks like.  And to head home each night to the challenges of caring for all the needs of a very special child.  Every night.  That is what love looks like.  Really.

The challenge for us together at Hollywood Pres is to lead lives that consistently, daily, faithfully proclaim the ultimate love that Mr. Wright is conveying to his students.  The love of Christ for a needy world. 

We are in this challenge together, friends.  God is our guide.

Below is an award winning short film on Jeffery Wright, produced by one of his former students.