Advent Visions

December 12:  Memories

This season is a time for memories.   It is often a time when we reminisce about the magic we once experienced as children, a magic that gets harder and harder to experience anew. 
This picture is the front of a Christmas card my parents sent out decades ago featuring me, little Timmy in my PJs, blowing out a candle.    I recall one particular Christmas when I was that little.  I was sick with a very bad cold, hardly able to breathe.   I was miserable, sleeping most of the time.   For several days I didn't even get out of my pajamas.   The saving grace was that my mother dosed me with chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, lathered me with Vicks Vapo-Rub, and propped me up on the living room sofa as we paged through the Sears Roebuck catalog and read Christmas stories to pass the time.     It was an awful time, really, but somehow I remember it with joy--one of the special Christmases of my life.   I know it was because I felt such love and security, the best Christmas gift of all.     It's why the smell of  Vicks Vapo-Rub still means Christmas to me.

Years ago a man showed up at our church after all the services were over.   He sat slumped over in the back row, and I asked him if I could help him in any way.  He was rough and unshaven, and he showed me the scars all over his tattooed body.  He pulled a beer out of his pocket and told me the story of a desolate life, which involved drug abuse, gang fights, and prison.    He had a mean-looking knife strapped to his leg, which he called his best friend.  He said he had just been released from jail and was trying to figure out how to re-start his life.   He had come to the church on an impulse.   In those months in jail he remembered the one short happy episode of his childhood, when he was placed in the care of an older set of foster parents.   They had brought him to this church then, he remembered, and it was that one Christmas when he had felt safe, happy.   He hoped that maybe he could find that again.

Of course the truth is that we can't go back.   And memories fool us into believing that once everything was beautiful.   We glamorize our past, often dismissing or minimizing the sadness and pain.   Even a child's sickness can seem wonderful, because love was there.    Rather than wallow in nostalgia, this is what we can do to hallow our memories:   we can help make a world where love is.

Memories

Once we were better,
and the world was, too.
Magic was in the snow,
silver as tinsel,
and Santa was as real
as love.
We carry it all,
that world of goodness,
and our memories 
are the bright wrapped packages
that we open 
in our scarred and somber years
to give us joy,
and to help us find our way
to the unseen treasures
that may yet be ours.