Finding God Where We Least Expect Him

     

   

     The Christmas story, in spite of all of our contemporary church pageantry complete with camels, elephants, full-scale choirs and televised broadcasts, is a story of silent desperation.  A young couple on a cold winter night, with nowhere else to turn.   The Christmas story, if you read it carefully, raises questions, that perhaps we don’t have the answers for.  

     It is a story of preposterous implications that asks us to believe in that which we can not understand. It demands that we remove our shoes of rationalism at the doorway of the miraculous and walk barefoot in recognition that we are standing on Holy Ground.  For who’s to say which is a greater miracle:  angels singing in a field to shepherds, or the power of a life that has been transformed by the presence of God? 

     In today's politically toxic culture, where even the church is divided left from right, I find myself wishing I could be transported back to that night. I wish I could be sitting in that field, trying to keep warm by a lone fire as sheep slept nearby. I wish I could feel the goosebumps on my neck as suddenly the stars are outshone by heavenly beings singing a melody never heard before. 

      I love that the angels sang to shepherds.  Shepherds!  God didn't send this angelic choir into the middle of the synagogue.  He didn't send them into the center of the Roman courts.  God doesn't usually show up where we think He should, the way we think He should.  Neither politics, nor organized religion held the hope for humanity that night. The entire Christmas story is an incredible tale of the divine coming into the middle of the dust, dirt and desperation of our lives.  

     When I think back on my own experiences of a sense of God's presence that is so overpoweringly real, they have become milemarkers for me in the journey of my life - more often than not, those experiences were not in a church.  That's not to say that God's presence is not found in organized worship however, the personal, intimate sense of God wanting to communicate something to me, oftentimes caught me when I wasn't looking for it - like the shepherds, when I was simply doing what I had to do:  in a cafeteria, watching three girls dance to worship music from a $79 boombox, in a kayak in the middle of a remote lake in the hills of Vermont.

   So, perhaps the best way to celebrate Christmas is simply to stop from our politically biased rhetoric and arguments over who has it right. Perhaps it is simply to be silent long enough to listen for God's voice in the most unlikely of places.  We just might be surprised...we just might hear the rustling of angel's wings in a cold, dark field...we just may hear a newborn's cry of life, of hope, in a place deep within our own souls where we had denied him room.

Just A Country Girl

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." TS Eliot

I grew up in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, in a tiny little working class town tucked into the center of the Pioneer Valley.  It was a thirty minute drive to the closest grocery store. There wasn't a single movie theater or mall within 45 minutes. My teachers in school had taught both my parents, who were high school sweethearts and married at 18 and 19.  My dad, like my grandfather, worked his entire career in the paper mill situated by the river in the neighboring town.

I was always mystified when families would move into town from the city and my new neighbors would look at me incredulously and say with great sarcasm, "what do you do out here?" I remember thinking what a ridiculous question that was.  Spring brought the annual canoe races where my cousins, aunts and uncles would sit on the bank behind my grandparents house watching to see who would capsize as the canoes and kayaks navigated the Spring time white water of the Westfield River. Summers were spent riding my bike to the small town library and racing home to curl up under an apple tree and get lost in a great adventure.  Summer evenings there were adventures of our own catching fireflies and running from the boys chasing us with empty mayonnaise jars filled with nightcrawlers. Winters were full of snowmobiling followed by snow eating parties with delicious hot maple syrup poured over a sheet of snow.  On the off weekend that I didn't have dance classes, I'd grab my ice skates and head to an ice covered alcove in a neighbors field, where I would ice skate until it was almost dark and my cheeks were rosy from the cold winter breeze.

It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized that growing up in the country was something to be ashamed of.  Getting elected to the state student council meant monthly trips into Boston where I would meet with students from other cities across the state who all seemed so much more sophisticated than I was.  So I learned to keep my country roots a secret.  By the time I graduated from high school, I couldn't wait to escape from the smallness of my small town and get out into the real world where there were cities waiting for me to discover and a sophisticated, glamorous life waiting for me to live.

I learned to look with disdain at my small town, which seemed to get smaller the more I traveled and discovered the world.  People who knew me post- small town upbringing were always shocked when they discovered I had grown up in the country.  They would laugh and exclaim, "there is no way you grew up in the country!"  I had done a great job of disguising my small town beginnings.

Today, I was returning to the small town my father had grown up in.  It was the church my parents were married in.  Today it was the church my uncle would be memorialized in. As I stepped inside the sanctuary I struggled to reconcile the simplicity and the smallness of the sanctuary with my girlhood memories of this same space, which had seemed so intimidating and cavernous to my six year old eyes.   Today it was neither of those.  Today, it was a small country church, in the center of a small New England town, looking almost exactly the same as it had over 45 years ago.    It remained as it had always been.

  These were country folk. This was a country church.  Hand carved rafters of wood that had been polished to deep umber tones, simple stained glass windows that softened the sunlight, and a pipe organ in the very front and center of the small sanctuary, held a place of honor in the wood encased choir loft.

I crowded into the same wooden pews that I remembered from long ago and sat next to my parents as the memorial service began.  It was a beautiful service. Simple yet sincere stories told by tearful children and grandchildren about a man who had lived and died in this small country town.  They spoke of him as their hero. They cried as they told about the amazing love story he shared with their mother - for 66 years. The tiny sanctuary echoed with the sounds of family and friends struggling to hold back tears for a man who had lived a life of quiet integrity and devotion to family in a very small town. 

The pastor had opened the service by reassuring all of us that he was not going to preach a sermon.  Yet there was a sermon preached that morning that will perhaps be one of the most profound I have ever heard.  It was the message of a life lived by a man who had the wisdom to know and the courage to hold onto that which was truly important.  Faith, family, honesty, integrity.  It was a very large message lived out simply and quietly in a very small town.

As I sat in the carved wooden pew, wiping away tears, I finally embraced the legacy that I had been struggling with most of my life.  Perhaps for the first time, I recognized the profound gift that I had been given.   I quietly slipped my feet out of my designer heels and wiggled my toes.  I prayed a silent prayer.  I was thanking God I was a country girl.