Christmas Message 2013

It is the Sunday before Christmas. Doctrinal churches call it the last Sunday of Advent. It’s been a while since I’ve been to church, but this does not mean I am without religious feelings and sensibilities. And I would like to share some with you.

We recently had an ice storm, which deposited about three-quarters of an inch of ice on every exposed surface except for the ground. Streets remain clear, but everything else is glazed with a layer of crystal. It is not always symmetrical; a branch may have a half an inch of ice on one side and a quarter on the other.

There is not much that we can do about the ice except, on a Sunday morning, go out and appreciate its beauty: to notice such things as the asymmetry of ice on branches. The ice transforms everything into an object of beauty. Buds, already half-swollen for spring, are encased in it. Spheres of sycamore seeds become bizarre tree-ornaments, hanging from the trees by their loose stalks. Best of all, the ice magnifies and distorts beautiful colors, such as crimson holly berries and blue cedar berries. When the sun briefly emerges from behind thick gray clouds, the world becomes a crystal palace, like the one that Lara and Yuri walked through in Dr. Zhivago. Inevitably, the music of Journey through Snow Country and Dance of the Snowflakes from The Nutcracker filled my mind. I wonder if Tchaikovsky, who was depressed and who particularly despised the Nutcracker music that he himself wrote, could have imagined that someone almost 140 years later would me walking around in Oklahoma (which did not even exist at the time) thinking of his music. I consciously invited the beauty of ice and music to fill my mind.

We could, I suppose, have gone to church to sing about and listen to sermons about doctrines. But I believe we made the better choice, to go walking in the ice with hearts open to the beauty of the thin layer of cosmos that clings to our little path of Earth.

Back at a “Bible church” of which I was a member long ago, a former missionary related a story to me. An African tribal chief had said that he knew there was a God because he could see God’s tracks, just as he knew that certain animals were present, though unseen, because of their tracks. We might say, instead of tracks, God’s phenomena—the appearance (Greek phainen, to manifest) of the unseen in the world of the seen. The missionary meant, by this, that you could recognize the presence of God because of the evidences of creationism. While I consider creation-science to be ridiculous, I have to admit that, if there is some kind of God of love, I saw God’s phenomena this morning.

Whatever beliefs you may have or lack, I wish you a time of looking for, and finding, beauty.