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CHRISTMAS EVE.
INTRODUCTION:
Several years ago, I was in Paris for a few days. And on one of those
days, I had a golf game scheduled with Oral Roberts for whom I was
working, but I had also promised to take a tour of the Louvre with my
children’s mother, at the same time.
As you can imagine, it was a tough
choice, but I had promised, so I went to the Louvre. And in two hours, I
announced that I had seen the Louvre, and I needed to leave or I would
miss my tee time.
Unfortunately, the other
members of the party made some insensitive and critical remarks about my
choice. Yet despite the shortness of my tour of the Louvre, one motif
still remains of my two hour viewing: I did see the Mona Lisa,
but what really surprised me was an enormous number of other Madonna and
child paintings, some even more gorgeous, from my time-informed
perspective.
To be sure, we could dismiss
it as simply a hang-up of artists, but I think we would be missing
something very basic. It’s this: Peter Berger explains it in his book,
A rumor of angels:
He says that when a mother hears her
baby crying in the night, that by picking that baby up, changing its
diaper and feeding it, she is in one sense addressing very basic needs –
hunger, discomfort, and fear.
But Berger feels there is something more
basic being said. The mother is saying to that little infant, frightened
by its helplessness, that everything is okay, that she or he can depend
upon its cry being heard and its needs being met. She’s saying something
about order and dependability. She’s saying something to the baby about
the kind of world we live in. In a sense, mothers are communicating a
rudimentary faith in the universe and creation, that there is a
dependable order to existence.
It’s one reason we are so harsh as a
society upon child abuse. It violates one of the most fundamental
dimensions of human existence. Mother and child are a profound symbol of
the trust that we have as human beings in the overarching order of
existence.
And when we tell the
Christmas story to our children, we are recounting every child’s wish to
hear that there is love in the world. Stories of shepherds, angels and
wise men, all say, children are important and deserve to be taken care
of. They have a part and a place in the scheme of things.
When my daughter, Laura, was four and my
son, Brett, six months, their mother and I decided that rather than
having a third child, we would try to adopt an unwanted, older, minority
child.
As many of you know, Oklahoma has more
American Indians than any other state, although it has no reservations
to speak of. Back in the 19th century, when Presbyterian
missionaries were working among the Oklahoma Indians, they established
the Goodwell Indian School for abandoned American Indian children, in
Hugo, Oklahoma.
One of the many children they had was
Carol Pishatubbe. Her mother had chosen not to try to rear her and sent
her to live with her grandmother for her first five years, but then when
her grandmother had died, she had to go live with an aunt.
Unfortunately, her aunt’s boy-friend had
a drinking problem, and not only drank up their food money by the middle
of the month, but also became very mean when drunk, which is why Carol
eventually wound up appointed by the court to the Goodwell Indian
School.
At the school, one of the social workers
with whom we were personal friends, thought that because of Carol’s
first five good years in a positive family situation, she had a chance
of fitting positively into another family situation. Through a very
involved procedure, she came to live with us at age 8.
One day something very special happened
with Carol. It started with my telling Laura an amusing incident that
happened to her when she was a little baby. Her little brother Brett was
listening in fascinated. When I finished, he said, “Tell about me! Tell
about me!” So I told something about his babyhood. Then totally
unexpectedly, Carol asked, “What about me?” The look on her face was
both fear and anticipation: anticipation that she would be included and
fear that she might not.
The reality was, I didn’t know about her
baby years, except that her mother chose to give her away rather than
try to raise her along with her other 10 brothers and sisters. But I
knew that wasn’t what Carol wanted or needed to hear. So instead, I went
through the process of telling Carol how her new mother and I so wanted
a little girl like her, and how we first learned of her, and how nervous
we were when we went to the Goodwell Indian Home and met with staff and
workers. I told her about the judge we met with, and the social workers,
and how brave Carol was when she rode back with us all to Oklahoma City.
Then I told her some of the early positive incidents of her becoming a
part of our family. As I talked, a huge grin came over her face, and she
beamed with pride that she too had a story.
Now she’s married and has three children
of her own, and is a nationally recognized American Indian artist, with
work in the Smithsonian Gift Shop and the Department of the Interior.
She came in 3rd competing with 1,100 other Indian artists in
Santa Fe. But beyond that, I’ve never forgotten her need and her want to
be told something of her own story…that she belonged. It was a way of
saying that she too was cared for…that the universe was now a friendly
place for her as well.
That’s a little bit what
Christmas is about tonight. It says, we belong, we care for our
children, and that we are all part of a meaningful whole.
However, the purpose of a service such
as this is really in one sense to ask the question that Carol asked,
“What about me?”
That’s another way of saying, what does
Christmas have to do with us in this time and this place.
But let’s be honest: We all know the
Christmas story, backwards and forwards. In fact, we just heard a
version of it read again by Joyce Ramay. So what possibly could there be
to add to it? What new could possibly be said?
Several years ago, I was
working on my doctorate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It
came time to select a topic for my doctoral project and dissertation.
Special extended workshops were held to help, and faculty members were
accessible as well. Yet I knew that once a topic was approved and
started on, it would be very hard to change it. I remember one of the
questions I had was, “How can I possibly find a topic that someone else
has not already written about that I could add anything new to?”
I remember saying something like that to
one of the faculty members, and his response has stayed with me ever
since. He said, “Wayne, your research is to see what everybody
else has seen, but to think what nobody else has
thought.”
We’re not doing research
here tonight, but there’s a real sense in which that is our task as
well: to see what everyone else has seen, but to think what nobody else
has thought.
Now think for just a moment. We’ve seen
Christmas, but what do we think about it? To help us think, let me
share this simple story with you:
There were six children in my family,
and my youngest sister came very late in my parent’s life. She was also
the cutest, the smartest and the most talented, and unlike any of the
rest of us, she had blond hair and fair skin.
We all loved Gracie. She had a wonderful
and loving disposition. I used to love to tease her though and tell her
she was too pretty to be a Robinson and that we had gotten her mixed up
at the hospital. But we decided to keep her anyway because she was so
pretty.
She would run to Mother and tell on me,
and Mother would hug her and assure her that yes she was pretty, but we
hadn’t gotten her mixed up at the hospital. Gracie would come rushing
back to me and with a proud look on her face say, “I belong to.”
There are some who want to make of
Christmas some kind of doctrinal statement, and I don’t want to be
unduly critical of that. There are others who are not Christian and
recall Christmastime as being a very unhappy time of year in America for
them as non-Christians. Certainly, we want to be sensitive about that.
But there is also another sense in which
the birth of Jesus is emblematic of the birth of all children
everywhere. It’s a symbol of the vestigial hope we all have as parents
that we will be able to provide love and care for our children. It’s
also a symbol we have as a society that says we care about our children.
And for our children, it’s a way of saying they belong…they are a part
of the whole…the mystery of the Universe.
CONCLUSION
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl writes in his
book, Man’s Search for Meaning, about spirituality in the
concentration camps. He says:
In spite of all the enforced physical
and mental primitiveness of life in a concentration camp, it was
possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to
a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain, but the damage to
their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their
terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.
Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some
prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive life better
than did those of a robust physical nature.
And that’s the final meaning of
Christmas: a spiritual one…that life is more than things…more than the
external things of life. It’s also love and hope. It’s shepherds and
angels and wise men, but it’s also children: little children, young
children, big children, and children at heart. Merry Christmas.
Shalom, Salaam Aleikum. Amen. Blessed
be.
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