The Day After Christmas Is When The Celebration Begins In Full and Earnest

If Christmas is just an exchange of gifts, then Christmas has come and gone. But driving my son(g) to the airport this morning, it was a kind of relief to feel the aching love and heavy heart that is always what time has come to as of late. In this way, as several songs of this season say, it is Christmas every day. The dying that I know of in greater numbers than ever before remind me that Time must have a stop, but it won't as long as we habitually dwell in these bodies where the most lingering and capable thoughts of who we are are as fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.

The family is, of course, larger. The Giver/Giving makes it to every home in every thought of giving. It is, as Christmas reminds, the All of us, so to speak, whose safety and well-being we crave. And it is into this encompassing sense of enclosure as family with Father and Mother to pray to for its welfare that I return this morning, ready to spend what I will earn as daily bread on comfort and renewal. The weight of the name-words Jesse and Amy is autonomic sum of the weight of worlds that I have had a hand in shaping and handing to my children.

Christmas, my faith tells me, is supposed to be the best world this can be, white not with snow but clarity, radiance, and the deservedness of our membership in it. A world worth thanking for. Gratitude reifies God.

My friend Jonathan Granoff stopped me short the other day when he said that Justice is a quality of God just as important as love and compassion but which is now barred from invocation of The Master Presence in our lives. We must yearn for the dispensation of Justice as much as the Rahmat-virtues of Mercy and Compassion. We must yearn to be its conduits, for Justice is the Virtue that flies farthest and most concretely from us in its sharing.

So I declared this grey, misty Tuesday morning a New Year of sorts, and searched for a Robert Creeley poem to mark the resumption of time and the resolutions it may bring. Since Creeley is never less than watchful, it didn't take long to find a poem of 'his' that spoke for me. It's from a calm, contented Spring day 40 years ago at least. Call it the Feast of the Assumption--the assumption of continuance, and the responsibility it brings.

If by my end of days, I can do no better than the sense of two, the duality of me and all those whom I love, the world as subject and object, this poem would say I lived well and practised the core mindfulness asked of every disciple. (For to celebrate any holy day is the be reminded of discipleship.) On such a day as then or this, "Who am I?" is, as it is here, a refrain and everything seen participates as particulars of that singing. Note how sweetly elemental things are in this world: water contained as lake, air verging into aether as hgh-rising smoke, then fire of sun sent as morning light on leaves and, finally, combusted into bird song and canticle of praise in the reverberant space. This is a poem about the first and final stillness in which we are contained--no matter which, or all, of the three worlds that we occupy: the before, during or after. Creeley is saying, It is all one time and place; it is all a holy day. Allhamdullilah!< /DIV>

With my best wishes,

David

INTERVALS

Who
am I--
identity
singing.

Place
a lake
on ground, water
finds a form.

Smoke
on the air
goes higher
to fade.

Sun bright,
trees dark green,
a little movement
in the leaves.

Birds singing
measure distance,
intervals between
echo silence.

--Robert Creeley, Words, Scribners, New York, 1967, p. 129