My Lenten reflection includes a poem (no great surprise there – it is the comic relief) and a wish.
First, the wish: I wish all of us peace. Peace is such a big word. It invokes, among other large things, the end of war. It is for me, at least, a kind utter calm I imagine for myself and the world, some kind of tranquility that seems always on the horizon, but is somehow unattainable. Even sleep sometimes won’t give me peace. I wake in the middle of the night thinking about a problem and can’t find a way to get back to sleep. I guess we all want to rest in peace – especially when we’re still alive.
I suppose that the Christ child is our emblem for peace. For those of us who are parents, we’ve all had that moment, usually born of the exhaustion in the weeks after a birth, when we cradle a sleeping infant against our chest and rock back and forth in the middle of the night. I can remember specific moments with each of our children when all was calm, all was bright.
It is too bad that in this season of peace, it seems more unattainable than at any other time. We always have too much to do, too much to prepare for, too many things we didn’t get done. I’m making this wish for myself as well as you—that each of us can, at least for a moment, find that calm, that slowly rocking back and forth, that intimacy of parent and child, that peace. And please let it spread into other moments and bring a stillness, a center, a God into our lives.
Eating Santa’s Cookies
They’re usually cold and hard, the milk
warm by the time I get there, careful
to leave the crumbs, a few swallows
of milk. I write a note, if the exhaustion
from wrapping hasn’t kicked in entirely.
Thanks, and the reindeer loved the carrots,
writes Santa, gnawing on the carrot,
then sipping his Christmas scotch.
Sometimes I want to weep at how
lousy we are at doing this – not
that we don’t get the presents
under the tree – the lists
checked, the naughty and nice
cared for within reason. But
we’re always here in the last
minute. It’s always three AM
or four and we’re too tired to argue
over how much we spent or how
we didn’t get one of the kids this
or that. Sometimes one of us
just gives up and the other trudges
on with the tape and scissors,
and that ridiculous roll of ribbons
in red, green, and white that always
gets fouled up. One year I stood
in the cold of the Clark gas station
down the block seeing my own
shallow breath as I inflated a hippity-hop
with the quarter-operated compressor,
the gray snow around me, the stars
blinking in wonder at a man reduced
to this: an act of love or madness
connected through custom and culture
and history to the story
of a birth and wise men chasing
some dream of a king.
Peace,
Joe
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