December 18, 2013
The Third Week in Advent

Today syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson repeated her annual Christmas challenge to put “A Book on Every Bed.”    This project was inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, who recalled that every Christmas morning during his childhood, he and his siblings awoke to the gift of a wrapped book on their beds, delivered in the night by Santa.   Ms. Dickinson believes that a book is one of the most precious and enduring gifts that any child can receive.    So do I.

I remember the earliest books of my childhood, like Dr. Seuss's classic  The King's Stilts.   I read all of the Hardy Boys mysteries I could get my hands on.   And my adolescent mind was transformed by a dog-eared library copy of the Science Fiction Omnibus.    I remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 because there were books on my shelf that I hadn't read yet, and the threat of nuclear war might mean I would never get to read them.    So I stayed up half the night with a flashlight reading!       The words on the printed page still have the ability to challenge and inspire me, to transport me to other cultures and universes, to stretch me to deeper understanding, even to bring me to tears.    I want this gift for my granddaughters, for all the children of the world.

Novelist Sarah Smith once said, “I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy...it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dispensation for it, angels to guard its making and its preservation.”     Perhaps so.  No wonder that John the evangelist, grasping for a way to explain the birth of Jesus, asks us to imagine a book, or a story, or a song, or a poem.   "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,"  he muses.     It is a reminder of how worlds are made by every author, including the Divine One, a story to be written on our hearts--and how, when that happens, it comes to life.

Words

"In those days
a decree went out
from Caesar Augustus"
the story begins.
And the words
give birth
to this story I know,
that I have told over and over
so that it is now written
in the most secret place in me
where worlds dwell.
It is by heart
that I tell this story,
and in words they live again:
a Galileean carpenter and his betrothed,
a babe in swaddling clothes,
those poor shepherds face-down
on the earth, sore afraid
of wild-winged angels overhead.
Lord, you are the Word I hear,
the Word that burns in me,
the Word I must repeat.
But of all the words
that you may speak, sing, be,
I hear these:
Yes.
I love you.
Amen.

--Timothy Haut, December 18, 2013