Everything Is Alright

I think there will always be a sense in which Christmas for me will mean blue lights and red ornaments. Now, that may not sound like a terribly profound sort of Christmas meditation, but bear with me.

I don't remember when it all started. I must have been in junior high, perhaps even younger. About all I can remember for sure is that for some reason, by the time Christmas vacation rolled around, I was ready for a break. Perhaps the classes were going badly, perhaps I was just played out, on the verge of a cold or something of that sort. More than likely it was a combination of any number of those small, persistent irritations, challenges, problems that seem to be so much a part of growing up.

At any rate, I can remember the evening of the first day of Christmas vacation. It was well after supper, and the rest of the family were off doing something or other, scattered around the house. I was sitting alone in the living room, staring at the newly decorated tree, asking myself, for what must have been the hundredth time, why it was that life had to always be so terribly complicated.

Now, I wish that I could say that in the midst of that reverie, my mind suddenly cleared, and in a vision of practically angelic clarity I saw the answer to all of life's mysteries. I didn't.

I wish that I could say that I had shifted my glance away from the tree, saw the manger scene next to it, was moved by a newer and stronger insight into the nature of the Incarnation, and was spurred by that grace to carry on in greater faith. I wasn't.

I even wish that I could say that I had nobly said to myself something like, "Enough of this moping, John. Stop wallowing in self pity! and get hold of yourself." I didn't.

In fact, all that happened was that the blue lights on the tree reflected off the red ornaments.

Not very meaty stuff, I admit, but it was enough. It caught my eye. It was pretty. I started to look a little more closely at the rest of the decorations on that tree. I thought about the beat up old cardboard box that they had been stored in for Lord knows how many years. I don't think that box had ever been used for anything else since the day it was brought home from the grocery store. It always sat all year long in the same place in the attic. It was the sort of thing that always gave you a Christmasy feeling whenever you walked by it, even if you did so in the middle of July.

I thought about a few more of the things we would do that week. Things we had done so many times before, and would do so many times again. The visits we would make, the gifts that would be bought, and hidden, always in the same places, the efforts we would make at trying to get a sneak preview of those gifts by waiting till the folks were out, and then burrowing around in every corner of the house, except the one where we knew the gifts were hidden. And there was something about the warm familiarity of those thoughts that made me feel a good bit better. Things were going about as they should, after all. Whatever sort of complications I had carried with me up till the just didn't matter very much any more.

Oh, I knew that nothing much had changed, and whatever was bothering me before would more than likely do so again once vacation was over, but somehow, right then, sitting in a darkened room watching blue lights reflect off of red ornaments seemed ever so much more important, ever so much more real. I can almost hear myself saying the words... I must have said them, "Even if it doesn't seem that way sometimes, John, everything's alright."

Everything's alright. It really is, you know. What can we say about Christmas that comes any closer to the greeting of the angel, "Peace on earth, good will to all?" The world, after all, is so much more than what it seems to be. The world has become, once and for all, the birthplace of God Himself. The Creator has moved in the company of His creatures. Everything that we do, every thought, every feeling, every hope, every disappointment, every pleasure, every pain, even death itself, has been touched by God-made-man. We move now in an infinitely sacred world, because Christ has moved in it. And once that has happened, can anything ever really go wrong?

Which is the truer picture of the world, which reflects the deeper reality? Great cities full of rumbling machines, princely halls of government filled with schemers playing games of power, armies massed against armies. . . or a small child, waiting with an age-old patience to call a few, at first a very few, and tell them "Follow Me." Surely it was just such a question that moved the author of the second Psalm to write, "Why do the nations rage, and the people speak so foolishly? . . . But the Lord said 'You are My Son', this day I have begotten You."

Oh, I know, all of those other things are true, the cities, the halls, the schemers, and so on. But they just don't matter very much. Not any more. The world is God's own. He walked on it, touched it, claimed it. And because He did, no matter what else may seem to be true, everything really is alright.

From 1980 through 1982, Father Sandell served as Chaplain to the Bishop O'Reilly Council No. 3918,Grafton, North Dakota Chapter of the Knights of Columbus. "Scattered Thoughts" is a collection of essays based on columns originally written for the Chaplain's Corner, section of the Council's monthly newsletter.