Christmas in a time of war

 Last week I received an email notifying me that a friend of mine had commented on another friend’s Facebook post. I usually ignore these notices; I receive so many of them they irritate me. But in this case, because they were both good friends, I decided to get in on their conversation and I opened Facebook.

My friend from Virginia had posted a cartoon, as she frequently does. It showed a group of people in a subway train, heads down in personal concentration, but instead of their cell-phones, they were all reading books. The subtitle read, “On a different planet.” Very funny.

Then I went to the comment of our mutual friend from Scotland. Her response jolted me. She didn’t think the cartoon was funny at all. It wasn’t the content, but rather the fact of telling jokes in this particular season. She rebuked her American friends (like me) who were sending her “Merry Christmas” messages. “This in NOT a merry Christmas!” she ranted, referring to the war in Gaza and the extreme suffering of so many.

This touched a cord in me and I wrote back immediately thanking her for her concerns. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Here in the retirement community, Christmas cheer vibrates off the walls. The staff has outdone itself with a large glowing Christmas tree in the lobby and other trees in every public place. Snowmen, Santas, elves, and nativity scenes inhabit every empty space. Lights sparkle in the greens adorning the walls. Here on the 5^th floor we residents have taken charge and our lobby is festive and each apartment door festooned with family heirlooms. It’s Ho Ho Ho everywhere you look.

I don’t want to sound critical. All this really does make me happy. Hal is part of a musical trio—two ukuleles and one harmonica (his). They preform in the different neighborhoods of the community. I went with them when they played their music in the memory-care unit, the place where residents with dementia live. I watched the faces while the trio played. During songs like “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” everyone was smiling and swaying, some even tapping their feet. I would certainly not begrudge these people their childhood memories. They also smiled at “Joy to the World.”

The last two nights the beautiful Christmas concerts placed the emphasis of the season where it belongs, on the Christ child. I thrilled to the music.

But back to my friend’s concern. My concern as well. How to carry together the two diverse realities this Christmas season—the very merry celebrations all around us and the extreme violence and suffering on the other side of the globe.

Some of my friends have told me they no longer watch the evening news. Too negative, it affects their spirit. I can’t adopt that perspective. Hal and I regularly watch our news program, talk about it, and pray together. We need to know what’s happening because it matters.

Prayer seems like such a simple answer, but I know that a small person’s (me) prayer has power with God. At least I think I know that. But I can’t help but wonder—what difference does it make? I pray that God “make wars cease to the ends of the earth” (Psalm 46:9) and the next day find out that the bombing has intensified.

The people of Palestine, and the people of Israel too, don’t celebrate Christmas. It’s not part of their faith traditions. But this is the place of the first Christmas. That first Christmas season was not merry, although it was joyful to a few chosen witnesses. Joyful and mysterious. While it was not actively a time of war, the Romans were oppressing the Jews and suffering abounded. War was on the way.

The original Christmas story gives clues that help integrate these two realities. Years previously the Spirit had revealed to the prophet Isaiah that the babe would be born and that one of his strange names would be Prince of Peace. 

Prince of Peace
Isaiah 9:6

Silent night, we sing.
Sleep in heavenly peace.
A story book song
for a star-studded dream.
That night wasn't silent
pax romana not withstanding.
Bethlehem teamed with people,
impatient, demanding,
wanting to be in their own homes.
Inns throbbed with activity,
wine flowed, and in one dim corner
a woman moaned in childbirth.
That night wasn't silent,
and neither are ours.
The world convulses
in a chaos of crises.
The newscaster's voice is grim,
and people fear the dark.
Here at my house
my grandson cries out in nightmare,
and insomnia stalks these rooms.

Prince of Peace,
you came to Bethlehem
in the clash and crash of life
as it is.
Show us your face.
Teach us the strength of your tranquility,
the power of your humility
         that bent to babyhood
         and still bends to us.

Prince Jesus,
baby and Lord,
we kneel.
Speak Shalom to our world.
Here.
Now.

Lord Jesus, have mercy on the people you love in Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, and Russia. Let wars cease. Let lives be rebuilt.

Amen.

Merry Christmas.

Flickers of joy

 I will try hard not to complain, but these last three weeks have been a comedy of the absurd. We never laughed in the midst of it all, not even once.

It’s all about getting older and the inevitable rebellion of body parts.

And it’s about my husband who has given permission for me to write about it.

Three weekends ago he came down with stomach/intestinal pain that seemed different from what he’s experienced before. So we did what we usually do in these circumstances. He took it easy, ate bland food, and we decided to wait it out. Most things get better in time without medical intervention. But after two days Hal told me to take him in to emergency. Enough was enough. I did and it turned out to be diverticulitis. Again. We were in time. The good doctor put him on a ten-day regimen of antibiotics with grim sounding names. We’ve met these fellows before and have not developed a friendship, I’m sorry to say.

Next, while still on medication, he felt a hernia begin bulging out of his intestines. A lump on his abdomen. Gross, no? So we got an appointment with our primary care doctor who miraculously agreed to see us right away. She wrote out a reference to an intestinal surgeon. We got an appointment a week away, and, in the meantime, a friend loaned us a belt that put pressure on the hernia, helping it stay in place. Great relief.

The relief didn’t last long. Hal began feeling pain in his neck and shoulders, something unusual for him. His back problems are located in the lower back. This was new. The pain grew with each day but we decided again to wait it out.

Our appointment with the intestinal surgeon was Friday morning. We got ready early and walked out to the car with enough time to make it to the doctor’s office. As I approached the car, I pressed the unlock button on the remote and wondered why the light didn’t blink. Too much sun, I figured. Hard to see. But we discovered it wasn’t the sun at all. The car was “dead.” Totally unresponsive. We called around and found a driver, but by then we knew we’d arrive late. I call the doctor’s office to tell them we were running a little late, and the receptionist told us the doctor was on a tight schedule and we’d have to reschedule, bulging hernia and all. Our appointment was now some ten days off. “God knows all this,” we told ourselves. “We’re in his hands.”

Hal called our auto repairman and he came over. Turns out it wasn’t just a recharge but a new battery we needed. The shop took care of it that day. (Some things run smoothly, thank God.)

At 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning, Hal woke me up, told me he couldn’t stand the neck pain any longer. We needed to go to the ER again. Turns out it was good we did. The doctor (a different one this time around) put him on a scary combination of morphine and cortical steroids and we went home, hoping this would be our last trip.

It was (so far) and Hal has been able to limit his intake of morphine. The pain is lessening, leaving us free to attend to the hernia. Our rescheduled appointment is still a week off. The story hasn’t ended.

We’re realizing that at our time of life, this show will likely keep going on and on, hopefully with some long intermissions.

Now for the good part. Saturday evening our son, daughter (both now in their fifties!), and two grandchildren came over to pray for Grandpa. We all gathered around him on the bed and laid hands (carefully) on him. We thanked God for his power and love, asked for physical and emotional healing, encouraged, and even gave some prophetic words about future ministry. Then the kids prayed for me and my chronic dizziness. The prayer meeting lasted over an hour. We were especially moved by our 18-year-old granddaughter’s insightful and impassioned prayers. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be ministered to by your kids and grandkids. It’s good. We all felt that something real had been accomplished.

Hal woke up the next morning feeling good, although the pain returned by the evening, to a lesser degree. We know that, while some healings are instantaneous, God often heals in a gradual way. At least for us that seems to be the case. We feel that God is healing through the combination of prayer and medication. And possibly surgery.

Sunday afternoon we went to church online. One of our favorite places is Woodland Hills Church in Minneapolis. Greg Boyd has long been a favorite author, and his preaching is always rich, scholarly, but down-to-earth and anointed. He had just been through a grizzly three weeks, worse than ours, that involved five trips to the ER, including one for his wife who fell and broke her ankle in the middle of her husband’s trials. He preached from his home as he is not able to go out yet. But he was as articulate, funny, and profound as usual.

He told about his misadventures in detail, but focused on the lesson God was teaching him in all of this. It centered on the strange New Testament coming together of suffering and joy. Take the Apostle James’ strange counter-intuitive command to “consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds” (James 1:2). The various verses on “participating in the sufferings of Christ” came to his mind. At one point he had a vision (through his imagination) of Christ’s excruciating, but voluntary, suffering on the cross, and what a privilege it is to count our troubles as sharing in those sufferings.

Boyd told us that, while he didn’t exactly break out in laughter, he began feeling flickers of joy, laying there on the emergency room table. Joy in suffering is not natural or easy, but the experience of pain and trauma is the classroom for learning joy, he told us.

That sermon came at the right time for us and we, too, are sensing flickers of joy.

As I wrote above, this particular story is not yet over, but we’re heading into it with lighter hearts—thanks mainly to our family’s prayers, helped along by sound teaching from our brother, Greg Boyd.

It makes me think that joy is an excellent tool to carry with us into the challenges and potential traumas of growing older. I love it when old people laugh. I think I’ll join their ranks.