Thursday, December 31^st, 2020
A weekday e-mailer from
Matt Matthews
 
Some would say this is New Year’s Eve.
They would be correct. But it is also—
 
The Sixth Day of Christmas . . . 
 
* * *

                  Pause and take stock of what you’ve lost in 2020.
 
                  But don’t allow yourself to get stuck there. 
 
                  The losses may remind you, as they often do me, how deeply I have been blessed. This is an all-too-true story about how one of my blessings came to me through loss. Bittersweet, you may call it. I say sweet. May it guide you in your own reflections as this year passes to the next—on this, the sixth day of the Festival of Christmas.
 
                  We are blessed to be a blessing.
 
M.
 
 
* * *
 
                  Alice Pincus Zischkau died at 7:40 on the morning before Thanksgiving Day. She was born sometime the year before me and was a grade ahead of me in school. I was a Hampton High Crabber. She was a Knight at Peninsula Catholic.
 
                  I met Alice through her brother, Steve, and soon she and I were playing tennis at the courts at Armstrong Elementary. I walked her home down Chesapeake Avenue—the Boulevard as my father called it—and, though we never once dated, those evening strolls could not have been more romantic, moonlight slow-dancing on the dark waves of the Hampton Roads. 
 
                  We played Scrabble. We talked. We laughed a lot. 
 
                  Girls were a mystery to me. They confused me by just walking into the room. Alice brought this complexity to our brief adolescence, but, mainly, she was the girl next door who lived six long blocks away at the bottom of Robinson Park. She was my safe friend. We talked. She listened. I tried. We laughed. A lot.
 
                  When she went to the University of Dallas, we wrote sporadically. She often signed her letters, “Love and Prayers.” She meant that, I knew. What comfort those words brought me, to know that she loved me and occasionally dropped my name in her frequent conversations with the Almighty.
 
                  My wife and I attended her wedding. We were grad students at a protestant seminary studying to 
become the pastors we are now. I hadn’t worshipped in a Roman Catholic Church before, but I never missed a week with my Presbyterian brood. It astonished me to read in their worship bulletin that non-Catholics were not allowed to the altar for the sacrament because we protestants and others were part of the broken church. We were encouraged to refrain from partaking and, instead, pray for the unity of the worldwide body of Christ. I was miffed and confused, too stung to pray, incredulous to be separated from my friend on such a special day by the sacrament we both held as central to our faith and life. Church unity has been important for me ever since, made poignant by this moment at Alice’s wedding. 
 
                  Rachel and I were included in their joyous celebration in every other way, however, and we were so glad to be invited. The wedding crowd was large, as I recall, and an exuberant violinist moved through the crowd playing festive tunes during the sit-down dinner. I remember looking up to see if the moon that evening was blue. Alice had long-held that she only drank once in a blue moon, and every table in that large hall had lots of wine.
 
                  The wedding was in D.C. not Cana, but the miracles that day were no less astonishing. Joy gilded everything, moved through everybody, waltzed across glad faces. A dapper tux and lace wedding gown are not the daily uniform for a thirty-year marriage and for raising a family, but for Alice and Jon it seemed the perfect way to begin.
 
                  If our families shared Christmas cards during those years, I do not remember. Life got busy for us both. We reconnected several years ago when Steve told me about her breast cancer. I started reading and commenting on her Caring Bridge site. We exchanged some handwritten letters in these recent years. We had lived whole lifetimes since those teenaged games of Scrabble. It was good to be back in touch with my old friend. She was still the girl next door, if only half a country away.
 
                  Steve got in touch when the end was near, and texted a few hours later that the inevitable had come. Somehow, it seemed appropriate that she would die on the day before Thanksgiving, putting us all on red-alert that we should give thanks for both the tender mercies we’ve treasured and for those we may have forgotten to count. Alice is one of God’s many blessings that have made my life rich, and whole, and good. 
 
                  On Thanksgiving Eve, my boys and I went for a late-night walk on the wide beach at low tide. Rachel and our grown sons had rented a house on Folly Island for the holiday. Waves nudged in piles of ocean foam, iridescent in the beam of my flashlight. We were warm in sweatshirts and shorts—a far cry from temperatures back in my new hometown in Illinois. The boys laughed, joked, and pushed each other around as we wove a path down the beach around curving lines of waves. The waxing moon pushed three quarters full and wasn’t at all blue, but bright, as were constellations of green stars floating over the ocean. The stuff of memory is like waves or light. We are never apart from those we love, from all creation, no matter the estrangement of space and time and loss. 
 
                  Love and prayers. That’s how Alice might put it. It was her way not only of saying goodbye for now, but of leaning into the future, a credo, her way of affirming that we weave our way together, sometimes as near to each other as the other side of a tennis court and sometimes as seemingly far away as the other side of Jordan, but never alone. She wrote those words in her neat, cursive handwriting. Love and prayers. 
 
                  So many prayers. 
 
                  So much love.
  
P E A C E ,
Matt Matthews
First Presbyterian Church Champaign
A (cool) congregation of the PC(USA)
Church: 217.356.7238; Cell: 864.386.9138
matt@firstpres.church