Blossom Time

This week the flowers decorating the altar are poinsettias. Do you know why? Pepita was a poor Mexican girl who had no gift to present the Christ Child at Christmas Eve services. As she walked to the chapel with her cousin Pedro, her heart was filled with sadness rather than joy. “I am sure, Pepita, that even the most humble gift, if given in love, will be acceptable in His eyes,” said Pedro consolingly. Not knowing what else to do, Pepita knelt by the roadside and gathered a handful of common weeds, forming a small bouquet. Looking at the scraggly bunch, she felt even more saddened and embarrassed. She fought back a tear as she entered the small village chapel. As she approached the altar, though, she remembered Pedro’s words. As she knelt to lay the bouquet at the foot of the nativity scene, the bouquet of weeds suddenly burst into blooms of brilliant red. All who saw them were certain that they had witnessed a miracle. From that day on, the bright red flowers were known as the Flores de Noche Buena, or Flowers of the Holy Night, for they bloomed each year during the Christmas season.

It’s not just poinsettias, of course, that speak to us of Christmas. There’s also the Christmas tree - always an evergreen, a tree that does not lose its leaves to the cold. Although of course scholars remind us that Jesus probably wasn’t born on December 25th anyway, that Christians just appropriated the mid-winter festival as an appropriate time to celebrate the birth of the Christ-child.

Is it ironic that we should celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ during the darkest time of the year? Or perhaps those early Christians knew something we have forgotten. What better time, after all, to recognize that most of us are waiting for something new to happen in our lives, some glimpse of joy or freedom or hope or love? When nature winds down and stops pouring her bounty into our outstretched hands, when we have finished saying thank you for all the material things God has given us, that is the time to see that we need something more. Something beyond things; something, indeed, even beyond our imagining.

How many of you feel kind of flat right now? How many of you feel that you are in a desert time in your life, a dry time, a time when it takes a bit of effort to muster up the Christmas spirit and really get with the mandatory holiday cheer? How many of you feel that it’s positively your religious duty to feel joyful and that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t?

The elephant in the living room that few people dare talk about is the not-so-well-hidden fact that more people die between Halloween and Epiphany than at any other time of the year. Expectations are so high... We’re expected to HAVE FUN and LOVE EVERYBODY and BUY THE PERFECT PRESENT and SERVE THE PERFECT DINNER when underneath it all is grief over the death of a loved one or the breakup of a relationship, unresolved family conflicts exploding into unforgivable words under the pressure of too much togetherness, financial pressures reaching the breaking point as the bills mount up.

And to top it all off we’re supposed to keep our spiritual lives polished up too, and considering how hard it is during the rest of the year to keep any kind of disciplined devotional life, how can we be expected to be even better at it during this supposed to be holy time? And even if you can carve out a little time with Jesus early in the morning or late in the evening, what good does it really do against the barrage of contrary messages our world sends us? Christmas carols are everywhere, but it’s not Jesus who’s coming, but Santa. The only point seems to be to get people to buy more stuff and the faithful are heading to the Mall of America rather than toward Bethlehem. By the time December is half over it’s a wonder you want to sing anything at all. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether exhaustion or guilt is the most prevalent emotion at Christmas. Peace usually arrives, if at all, rather late on Christmas Eve, when if you haven’t gotten it done yet it won’t get done at all, so you might as well relax and get some sleep. Unless you’ve gotten someone a gift that “requires assembly,” in which case you might as well plan on an all-nighter. When people say, “Christmas is for children,” what they really mean is that the grownups are usually too exhausted to enjoy anything except the knowledge that they’ve given their kids some special memories. (The toys won’t last.)