On the Fourth Day of Christmas
 
Monday, December 28^th, 2020
A weekday e-mailer from
Matt Matthews
 
* * *
 
A Memory of Christmas Eve 2020
by Matt Matthews
 
Our live, in-person Christmas Eve service was perfectly pitiful and oddly beautiful in a Charlie Brown Christmas kind of way.
 
Our neighboring Methodist Church graciously invited us to join them across Church Street at West Side Park. They took the lead in the simple service. A rag-tag two-dozen gathered with only one masked family that I could identify from First Pres. Residents at The Edens looked down upon us from their high rise, westerly windows. Temps sunk into the low teens, and a wind churned cold to bitter. I was tasked to read the nativity in Luke and could barely see the page because my mask so steamed-up my glasses. The service was punctuated by single verses of hymns played from the Methodist church’s carillon. Bells, it turns out, are the perfect cold weather instrument.
 
When it was time to do so, we could not light our candles from the Christ candle because of the wind, then the Christ candle blew out. Somebody said the light of God’s love never goes out, which it doesn’t, but our source of light for the service had, decidedly, abandoned us. Others pulled out industrial-sized fire-starters and began passing around flickers of light in a hodgepodge fashion. Some had battery power candles they clicked on. Soon that hooded and huddled people stood shivering in their pods protecting the fragile glow from lit candles. Part of what made it lovely was that wind, foggy glasses, and cold could not ruin this unscripted bloom of light and companionship. The scene would have made for bad television, but it worked well in real life.
 
This is about the time snow showers began, which made it—and I hesitate to use this adjective, but I will—magical. The most enormous St. Bernard dog was part of the congregation, adding the barest hint of surrealism. This docile creature seemed accustomed to Christmas snow, but this southerner had never once even come close to a white Christmas. The dog, the candles, the steely bells crashing above the treetops, and snow approached the sublime.
 
We took up an offering for a family with four children in the Methodist flock who had gotten burned out of their home early that morning. Picturing them bivouacked at a local hotel with their physical possessions and Christmas plans in ashes got my mind off the cold and compelled me to consider the manger from a different, uninvited angle. This was sobering.
 
The crowd dispersed quickly after the benediction. On another night in a time unrestrained by pandemic, we would have shared hot cider and chocolate, and warm, glazed buns. Rachel and I chatted briefly with John Hecker and his wife and son, Methodists all; seeing that family brings me a lot of joy because John laughs at all my jokes, which is my way of saying he’s brilliant. He loves affirming our Christian and neighborly kinship while poking fun at our denominational differences. We would like to have lingered, but dark and cold pried us apart. 
 
Rachel and I trudged heads-down and alone to the church to meet Nancy Martin who drove the two large boxes of candles around the block to the alley for us to carry up to the dark Westminster Hall. I broke Covid protocols and gave Nancy a bear hug—possibly the first non-family hug I’ve given in ten months. Life is hollow without human touch, and I feel nearly hollowed out. Rachel and I waved goodbye, and Nancy’s car made no sound rolling away on the snow-padded alley to State Street and home. We loaded the boxes of candles into the church and made sure all were extinguished. Imagine our inadvertently burning down the church. We trudged through the empty parking lot for our car. 
 
Snow brings uncanny silence and plays tricks with sound. I put my arm absently around my wife and she said she loved me. It was the loneliest of walks I’ve ever made on Christmas Eve, but beautiful in its own way, and I felt glad to be loved both by Rachel and the God we had invoked moments earlier in clumsy, heart-felt worship in the snowy park. 
 
I was missing my sons. John Mark, home from college for a week, had burned with fever for six days that broke only on Christmas Eve morning. Our other sons, Benjamin and Joseph, opted to stay put in the Carolinas to avoid the possibility of catching whatever their youngest brother had. It was a wise move, given we didn’t know how long John Mark would be sick, what he had (it wasn’t Covid), and whether he’d pass it along. So, our boys weren’t all at home together. And I sorely felt their absence.
 
Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay says something universal about how we feel when we recall people we miss. I felt rather like what she described, “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.”
 
In the short walk to the car I was falling, not with terrified screams but falling, nevertheless, like, perhaps, snow. A quiet, floating free-fall. Unstoppably falling. Snow played its trick on sound, muffling the sparse traffic and the whisk of wind. Rough places were being made smooth by its white dusting. I was falling in those slow-motion steps across the parking lot. Snow was making everything seem new. Feeling empty handed, I was letting go of the Christmas plans I had made, the packages that would go unopened, the hugs that wouldn’t happen, the games around the dining table, the movie binges in the basement, the cooking, the eating, the brisk volksmarsches through the neighborhood. In all our years of marriage we had never been without our nuclear family on Christmas Day. In the beginning that number included only each other, then a succession of cats, then children and a dog. Our three sons. 
 
So, it was a lonely, heavy walk across an abandoned parking lot to the car on Christmas Eve. We circled the hole in the world then walked right in, falling into a new adventure I was reluctant but had no choice but to enter. Those with children know the feeling of having taught children to walk, who now reside down a worm-hole through time, on the other side of the world, looking small and faraway, standing so well on their very own. 
 
Much, much love to you all. 
 
Matt Matthews
Cell: 864.386.9138
Matt@FirstPres.Church