January 30, 2008

The Lanyard by Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

December 6, 2007

Written by Loretta Ross-Gotta (An American Presbyterian author, dramatist, and chaplain) from the book "Watch for the Light:Readings for Advent and Christmas)

God asks us to give away everything of ourselves.  The gift of greatest efficacy and power that we can offer God and creation is not our skills, gifts, abilities, and possessions.  The wise men had their gold, frankincense, and myrrh, Paul and Peter had their preaching.  Mary offered only space, love, belief.  What is it that delivers Christ into the world - preaching, art, writing, scholarship, social justice?  Those are all gifts well worth sharing.  But preachers lose their charisma, scholarship grows pedantic, social justice alone cannot save us.  In the end, when all other human gifts have met their inevitable limitation, it is the recollected one, the bold virgin with a heart in love with God who makes a sanctuary of her life,  who delivers Christ who then delivers us.

Try it.  Leave behind your briefcase and notes and proof texts.  Leave behind your honed skills and knowledge.  Leave the Christmas decorations up in the attic.  Go to someone in need and say, "Here, all I have is Christ."  And find out that that is enough.

Imagine a Christmas service where the worshipers come in their holiday finery to find a sanctuary empty of all the glittering decorations, silent of holiday carols.  What if this year you canceled the church decoration committee and the worship committee and called off the extra choir rehearsals and the church school pageant?

What if on Christmas Eve people came and sat in the dim pews, and someone stood up and said, "Something happened here while we were all out at the malls, while we were baking cookies and fretting about whether we bought our brother-in-law the right gift: Christ was born.  God is here"?  We wouldn't need the glorious choruses and the harp and the bell choir and the organ.  We wouldn't need the tree strung with lights.  We wouldn't have to deny that painful dissonance between the promise and hope of Christmas and a world wracked with sin and evil.  There wouldn't be that embarrassing conflict over the historical truth of the birth stories and whether or not Mary was really a virgin.  And no one would have to preach sermons to work up our belief.

All of that would seem gaudy and shallow in comparison to the sanctity of that still sanctuary.  And we, hushed and awed by something greater and wiser and kinder than we, would kneel of one accord in the stillness.  A peace would settle over the planet like a velvet coverlet drawn over a sleeping child.  The world would recollect itself and discover itself held in the womb of the Mother of God.  We would be filled with all the fullness of God, even as we filled the emptiness of the Savior's heart with ours.

The intensity and strain that many of us bring to Christmas must suggest to some onlookers that, on the whole, Christians do not seem to have gotten the point of it.  Probably few of us have the faith or the nerve to tamper with the hallowed Christmas traditions on a large scale, or with our other holiday celebrations.  But a small experiment might prove interesting.  What if, instead if doing something, we were to be something special?  Be a womb.  Be a dwelling for God.  Be suprised.

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Last modified: December 05, 2007