Christmas 2012
By Michael J. Carroll
POSTED: 2012
(Philadelphia Inquirer)
My religious group, former Catholics, is apparently the third largest in the country, coming in just behind practicing Catholics and Baptists. So says a respected Jesuit, and you know about Jesuits. They are expert in matters of faith, and the lack of it. When Jesuits talk, I tend to listen. Not adopt and follow necessarily, but at least listen.
I was interested, maybe even a little gratified, to learn that I no longer lacked a religious identity. That is especially comforting for a former Catholic in the Christmas Season. This is the time when I find myself ruminating about what it means to me, if anything, and what, if anything, I should celebrate.
Christmas can no longer mean toys for me, although I do secretly crave fancy flashlights and other gadgets. I see those little toy helicopters that really fly and wonder if I would look all that silly playing with one. Too bad my kids are in their 20s. They could have once provided useful cover if I claimed I bought it for them. Years ago my father bought a Lionel toy train set, FOR ME, of course, certainly not for him.
Toys aside, it is strange to be a six-decade-old retired Catholic, former altar boy AND former choirboy-----a deadly double threat combination----engaged in late night, middle of the night, and early morning musing on the subject.
I may do my best musing in cold clear Decembers pierced by moonlight. The lighted digits of a clock that would tell me whether dawn is near or far are not as important as darkness and pure frigid air. Magic from this combination gets the memory neurons firing, maybe not firing in a linear, chronological order, but firing nevertheless.
There may be little new to say about Christmas and nothing to say that does not risk boring real Catholics and other Christians. It must be even more tiresome for the many who do not come from any Christian tradition.
Maybe it is not really new insight I am seeking so much as revived old. Perhaps I still wonder whether there is any interest in one more memoir of a first Midnight Mass, whether warm or weepy. That pageant for very young and very old, with its flash of vestments and twinkling blue lights buried in the boughs of recently sacrificed evergreens, cut from life but still offering up beauty of sight and scent. The one night when the usual warnings about the deadly wages of sins of the flesh and the frequent cautions that the world is a vale of tears, were displaced by blasts of organ music and accompanying voices raised in joy.
Maybe I seek Christmas memories of childhood innocence, the fading of it in adolescence, the complete flight in adulthood, and maybe the seeping light touch of its return in old age.
If Christmas is no longer the time of innocence for adults, it can be the time of one more chance, the chance to make that failing relationship work, the chance to stop wounding self and those closest. There can be a heavy pressure, often more than New Years, the popular and traditional start-over holiday to make things right.
Christmas can be a season of joy, not all of it forced or phony, but it can also be a time of depression, made worse by perception or myth that the entire rest of the world is enjoying everything, every minute. It can be a time of enhanced and magnified loss if it is the first Christmas without a parent, child, friend, partner, or spouse. But sad seasons do pass and happier healing ones generally follow eventually.
Clichés of thinking abound and I am as guilty an abuser as anyone, but I would nevertheless say that Christmas can give permission and space for a little less work, a little more calm reflection, and a little more time spent with the people you want to spend it with but have not.
To the Catholics in good standing and those who once might have been, to the Jesuits, the Baptists, and anyone else who cares to pause for a moment and notice: Good Christmas wishes.
Michael J. Carroll lives and writes in Philadelphia.