Christmas Anyway...

Christmas Anyway...

Sitting here this morning thinking about Christmas. How it was the mid-year lifeline for me when I was a kid. My year was neatly broken into two pieces, like a saltine cracker.

Summer and my little league family... and Christmas. In between was school, which was wonderful (I was very blessed with great teachers at every stop along the way) but at home it was suffocating. I always say "I didn't have a home...I had an address."

But for whatever reason, Christmas was a two week break from the overwhelming nature of the house I grew up in. It was like someone called a truce in a war. I think it was because we had people coming to visit over the holidays and my mother and her husband wanted to put on a game face and look like they were actually happy 52 weeks a year.

Whatever... it have me a break from the real them for a couple weeks and I'd take it any way I could.

Plus...I really really love the holidays. I love every holiday that hits from Halloween to Orthodox Christmas (Epiphany)

Thanksgiving is really just the opening act.

I loved neighbors and friends visiting. I loved singing in the school Christmas concert (when you could still call it that) I loved learning about Hanukkah in school and celebrating with my Jewish friends. I loved watching every single Christmas special on TV. The cartoon ones and clay-mation ones for kids and the adult ones, like Bing Crosby, or Bob Hope during the war. Most of the time they bored me but I watched dutifully because it was Christmas and that's what you did. (It's amazing how much of those old classics I absorbed and how much I love them now)

I loved being a paper boy at Christmas and my customers giving me a card and a tip. Sure, I appreciated the money but what I really loved was the recognition..."Thanks for doing such a good job." I didn't hear that at my address.

I loved giving gifts to my teachers. I loved flipping through the Sears wish book and circling the things I dreamed of.

I loved singing carols and hearing Christmas music on the radio. I loved the way a tree smelled. I loved thinking that maybe this would be the year that this two week reprieve would somehow extend itself 50 more weeks and things could be better at the address. I soaked it up and threw myself into it as much as I could. Like I was charging a battery that had to get me through the next four months.

Christmas got me through to spring. Spring got me out of the house more. That's how I endured.

I think I took a little piece of each Christmas and stored it in my heart when I was a kid. A few memories each year that I filed away to use as a template for the Christmases I would one day have as an adult.

As a dad.

Even before I got married and before I had Daisy, when I was single and had my first apartment the first thing I did was have a Christmas party.

I'm sure it's why I always decorated so much. And got so into the season... especially after Daisy was born. It was to make sure that she had happy memories of Christmas. And it was to remind myself, I suppose, that Christmas was still as special as it always has been.

I have a photographic memory. I'm very visual. Of all those "photos" I hold onto in my heart, so many of them have twinkling lights and tinsel and smell like pine. And I wanted my daughter to have the same snapshots.

But you get older... and within those photos in your memory are a few that you created. The ones you'd always hoped would develop and take shape. The ones that were more plans for the future than memories of the past.

You wait for them but the picture never develops. Or it's blurry and out of focus.

Or you missed the moment and the picture just isn't there.

When you put your heart and soul into Christmas every year, these pictures are hard to take. "It wasn't supposed to look like this. It wasn't supposed to be like this..."

Even that is a lesson from Christmas past. Sometimes you didn't get the thing you most wanted. So you lived with it and opened the things you did get, and it was Christmas anyway.

I have to admit that this year its been harder to get into the season as I usually do. I wrestled with just putting up the tree this year. I didn't want to watch Christmas shows or listen to my Christmas playlist.

It took a few extra days but I did it. A few movies and a handful of songs and Christmas showed up, as usual.

Christmas doesn't look like I dreamed it would when I was a kid and thinking about "someday." But it's Christmas. It's probably the only legacy I actually have from my childhood that's worth hanging on to... and making better.

So...I did it anyway. So far Christmas is 60-0 against the Grinch and old Ebenezer. It still doesn't look like the one I hold in my heart... maybe it never will.

But it's Christmas anyway.

And that's enough.

Merry Christmas y'all 

I Miss Church

 I Miss Church     

5:30 on Monday morning. Sitting here in my living room before heading off to my morning walk.

Thinking about church, and how long it's been since I've attended and how much I miss it, and how much I am getting used to not going.

     All of these things are not good. I shouldn't ever "miss" church. I shouldn't have gotten to the point where I gave up years ago on ever finding a church I can become a part of ever again. I shouldn't have gotten to the point where I think about going this week, and the sad feeling of disappointment falls over me instantly. The feeling of "Why bother?" The feeling that the same old thing will happen...I will go, I will be excited and wistful and hopeful. And then the same horrible, formulaic service will unfold before me. 

     The same worthless music...intended to do nothing more than illicit emotions from the listeners. The "Big Show." The lights will be dimmed. The smoke will be blowing across the stage. The "Worship Band" will do every nauseating star-turn that you'd see at a pop concert. The "Worship Pastor" will come out, trying his best to be Bono from U2, only with a voice that at best sounds like a woman. Or a man trying to sound like a woman while trying to sing and not wake a baby. 
     The lights will be low...like a concert, not a church. There will be video walls and rotating colored lights and in some churches "praise dancers." It's a heck of a production!

     The songs will be the same vapid, pointless songs they have been for about 20 years now. How God is an ocean, or a hurricane, or a blue sky. or some other analogy that doesn't even come CLOSE to representing who He really is or what He is actually like. The songs about Jesus will be nothing more than songs about some high schooler's dreamy boyfriend. They'll breathily tell me how they love the way He loves them. If Jesus is ever actually mentioned by name, it will be only in passing. He is typically reduced to the great ethereal "whatever, bro!" The hip dude from the Big Lebowski who simply abides. 

     Any mention of difficulty or burden is done in code. "Stormy waters" or "The Desert" or "Darkness."  Nobody will ever talk about any real, tangible pain or trouble. They can't. They aren't allowed. It's against the code of "worship" music. 

     Then, of course, the worship pastor...skinny jeans and beard and goofy glasses (I swear Warby Parker must have an actual frame they call "Worship Pastor" because they all have them) will tell me how he can't hear me. He'll ask me how I'm doing, he'll tell me they are about to "usher us into the presence of God." And he'll quote selected portions of verses making it sound like the only way to spiritual victory is through singing these horrible songs louder. It's not about him! (He reminds us) It's about showing God how much we love Him! I guess singing louder fools Him into believing something our hearts betray most of the time.

     I will endure this for forty-five minutes. The entire time my soul will be thrashing inside me, wanting to scream out "This is NOT who God is!" But I can't, so I sit there. Or I got to the lobby and try to distract myself until the music...the performance, stops. 

     And that's what it is, really. A performance. A show. How do I know? Ask someone about their church. Listen closely to the order of importance of the things they love about it. The music will be right there at the top. Not the sermons. Not the impact on their lives. Not the changes wrought under the conviction of the Holy Spirit. The music. The atmosphere. "I feel so loved there..." Loved by who? 
The people? Is that why you go there...because the people love you? Or do you sense the presence of GOD there and HIS love? There is a difference. 
     Nobody ever tells you how the church CHANGED them. Words like "conviction" or "sin" aren't even used. In fact..they're banished in a lot of these churches. "Oh you can't talk about sin...people will stop coming!' Or they'll CHANGE! Have you considered that? Have you considered that your effort to make church a "Hospital for sinners" (which I agree with whole heartedly) requires SURGERY sometimes? Or Chemo? Or rehabilitation? Have you considered that a Hospital often causes pain during the healing process? No? Then you aren't really a "Hospital for sinners." You're a methadone clinic. "Here...take this drug to help you get off that other drug."

     All of which has left me entirely uninterested in going back. It's not church anymore. Not really. It's something else. Something less. At least for me. It's wimpy men who have no idea what to do with that Y chromosome except apologize for it. It's pastors so consumed with being liked and being perceived as "loving people as they are" that they never bring them to a place where they consider they shouldn't be as they are anymore.
     It's forty-five minutes of torture to start things off. So much so that by the time the pastor starts his sermon, I am already gone. I tuned out. The concert sucked and I stopped listening. This God you sing these songs about...I can't find Him anywhere in scripture and apparently all He does is love me, so things like "circumspect living" and "wrestling in prayer" and "enduring faith" have no value to Him. 
     If I'm okay as I am...why do I need to be here? That's the question I can no longer answer. 
So I miss church. I miss it badly. I miss belonging. I miss being seen and known by people who aren't strangers to me. But I fear that church is gone.  Reduced to a chapter in a "History of Christianity" text book that my grandchildren will read in college one day, and make the comment to the professor; "My grandad told me about this era of The Church."  I hope I'm wrong, But I'm not.

   I want to go back. Make no mistake...I love God deeply. I have not "wandered off" or become "backslidden" or cold hearted. My faith is battle tested and worn on the edges and too ingrained in my life to ever betray. But I hate being treated like a child. 

     I want to offer what I have. I want to teach a Sunday school class, and serve a role in the church. I'm not looking to just go and be entertained. But I can't find any place that wants to do any more than entertain me. So I stay home. 

And nobody notices.

NOTE: There are good churches out there. I know of some. But they are few and far between. So no...I am not dismissing "The Church" just the church industry.