Baby Jesus on a Bar of Soap
Tuesday, 15 December 2020
We put up our Christmas tree the weekend before we celebrated Thanksgiving, an unusual move for us. We typically keep Christmas efforts for after American Thanksgiving. This year, it felt right to let Christmas creep across that imaginary line in part because we had been waiting to do so for much longer than normal.
When we packed up our home in Northern Virginia in summer 2016, before moving to Berlin, some of our household goods went into long-term storage and a carefully weighed amount of household goods was shipped to Germany. Our family's Christmas gear was supposed to go to Berlin, and we were devastated to learn that it had all accidentally gone to storage. We would have paid a hefty overweight charge to retrieve it, and then the window closed for us to get it again.
So, for our first Christmas in Berlin, we had to improvise with some hastily acquired IKEA ornaments and a lot of printer paper snow flakes taped to the windows. It was fine and good, actually. The stripping away of the things helped me to see both how precious they were and how much more precious other things were, but we still ached for the little treasures and traditions of our home.
When we moved to Brussels, we put in a request to get some boxes out of storage, and decided it was worth paying that overweight charge. We looked over our old moving list, trying to figure out which of the many boxes the Christmas stuff might be in. When we located the box holding our old artificial Christmas tree, the one we bought at a Carrefour grocery store in Doha, Qatar, for our first holiday abroad, we hoped that the boxes adjacent to it on the list -- ones labeled "MISC." or "BASEMENT STUFF" in someone else's handwriting -- might hold some decorations too. Then we prayed and hoped that it would arrive in time for Christmas 2019.
Two weeks into 2020, the boxes arrived, so too late for Christmas, but it still felt like a profound shift in making things right, a real leap in the direction of hope. Checking the box contents -- the ornaments, books, household decorations, and some other random stuff that had been packed with them -- we put it all away in the basement. We've been waiting all year to dig through the boxes and reminisce with the kids, journey through old ornaments, stories, and treasures. Since Adam was a baby the last time he saw some of it, many of the cherished old items are new to him.
It was especially precious to find all the old preschool ornaments the girls had made -- the one-eyed clothespin angels, their glittery paper wings still holding on with Elmer's glue, and the dozens of homemade counted cross-stitch ornaments from my childhood and theirs that my mother or sister have made over the years for us. Some of them I made for our kids. It was intoxicating to see them again after four long years, like visiting with an old friend.
One of the other precious items we pulled out was a red cloth bag, duct-taped at the bottom from heavy use, full of a plush nativity set, complete with Mary, Joseph, a camel, wise men, a shepherd and an angel. Our dear friends, Cathy and Jim, gave these to us during our first tour in Qatar, after adopting us with love there during those somewhat bewildering and critically shaping years. They too knew the bite of being far from family, especially with very little ones. Their gift meant so much to me then, and its meaning has grown over the years.
The most hilarious and precious aspect of the set is, of course, baby Jesus. It's not easy to fashion a plush and playable manger-laid baby Jesus, and the makers of this particular set did their righteous best. I doubt that Cathy and Jim will take any offense to knowing that we have long called this plush character "Baby Jesus on a Bar of Soap," because that's exactly what he looks like. I never fail to get a real chuckle out of him. In another rare violation of my normal practices, here's a picture of him posed with Joseph. It is good to be reunited with these memories and these objects that assist us in remembering.
I am looking back upon our year, so full of sorrow and heartache, and also the gracious manna through it all. One thing that has been absolutely sustaining has been regularly drinking in and chewing on Scripture. This year, I copied the Psalms by hand, day by day, which was a vital and nourishing discipline to take up in the late spring. As a birthday gift to myself, having finished the hand copying of the Psalms, I began to read through the Bible again, bit by bit, using this bubble-in sheet to help me keep track. A strict schedule overwhelms me if I miss a day or two, and that sense of overwhelm leaves me vulnerable to quitting, thus making the perfect the enemy of the good. So I just read and bubble in what I read, without worrying too much about deadlines. I've been practicing trying to be more regular about all kinds of things this year, including building in flexibility into my regularity. I've found that filling in a little bubble after I've read a chapter is enough of a "reward" to keep me moving forward, inch by inch, and flexible enough to keep my life-extinguishing perfectionism at bay.
This year would have been crushing without God's Word, shining like a pillar of fire, hovering like a daytime cloud, in what has often felt like a wilderness of worry and woe. There is so much goodness to savor in this life, and learning to be ruthlessly regular in savoring it is a discipline that I know I'll have to keep practicing, forever.
PS. This is the new delivery format. I hope it feels comfortable for you. I'll tell you, I'm not minding it at all, and I'm glad you now have that "unsubscribe" feature below!
PPS. I was so happy to learn that Englewood Review of Books named KEYS TO BONHOEFFER'S HAUS their "Best Biography/Memoir of 2020" in their Advent Calendar of books. Chris Smith, the founding editor, included his brief review of it, which I found quite kind and insightful into my own attempts at making sense of things and times.