Once again, the star, the shepherds
The Column: 12.26.23
Old Man Christmas (moi) has been out shopping and found a shop that sells hiking shoes so, being married to a hiker, I went in and saw beautiful alligator boots, also a pair of sharkskin, and wouldn’t this be perfect for my beloved venturing into ungenteel neighborhoods, boots made from man-eating creatures, better than pepper spray or a Smith & Wesson, but the pricetag was staggering –– I’m the son of a postal clerk –– so I moved on. I went to Macy’s on 34th Street just to ride the wooden escalator and hear it clunking and I roamed past perfume counters but was distracted by the stunning beauties behind the counters, women who’d come to the city to become fashion models but were only 5”11” and were overweight at 117 lbs. and so were relegated to retail sales and now at 22 they’re over the hill.
It made me sad, the abandoned dreams –– you see it everywhere –– and I left the store and went to the public library on 42nd and sat in the Rose Reading Room and came back to my senses. My beloved and I have merged two. Domiciles into one and we are still in a deaccessionizing process and don’t need a pile of gifts under a tree. I’ll put some cash in envelopes for our building’s doormen and super and send some to little kids I know and a $100 bill to a few friends so they can buy a good bottle of champagne, not a chintzy one.
I did a show in New York a couple weeks ago and at the end I had the audience sing “Silent Night,” the verse about calmness and brightness and also the shepherds and heavenly hosts and then we hummed a verse which, a capella, was so tender and haunting and beautiful, I saw people dabbing at their eyes, but at the same time I knew I was out on a limb, it being New York, there being so many unbelievers in the crowd and –– Hello? It's New York? The handclapping to “Chanukah O Chanukah” an hour before told you that the Bernsteins and Brusteins and Blooms were in the house, and had they paid $109.50, to attend a Lutheran service? I don’t think so but I’m not going to speak for them.
They all knew the words: this came through clearly. Maybe they were Orthodox Chasidim from Crown Heights but they knew “Silent Night” and you can call it colonial acculturation but it sounded authentic to me and my purpose was only to give them the pleasure of joining a 1500-voice choir, a rare privilege in our fragmented society, wary people edging away from each other, and shouldn’t each of us at least once a year consider the possibility that the Creator of the Universe of galaxies known and unknown billions of light years away should come to this tiny insignificant planet in the form of an infant in order to better understand us mortal beings? It’s beyond our understanding but then so is the Universe.
In return, I will consider that maybe the Chasidim are right and I have wasted a great deal of time listening to sermons on the Pauline epistles.
I do believe in the Christmas story, that God put his omnipotence on a shelf and became an infant child –– it’s in keeping with Christ telling his disciples, “What you do for the least of these, ye do for me.” I believe, except for the three wise guys. How they snuck in is a mystery. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh are not suitable gifts for a newborn. Three wise women would’ve brought something useful and arrived in time to help deliver the infant, make supper, and clean the stable.
The Christian faith has given us plenty of Jerks and they’ve been running rampant recently, bands of Visigoths lying about our democratic institutions, trying to pillage, and I consider the quiet communal “Silent Night” some compensation for the trouble they’ve caused. My daughter was born a few days after Christmas 26 years ago and I’ll always remember the calmness and brightness of that December. I have been a quaking shepherd ever since. All I can tell you is “Hark.” If you’ve neglected harking, it’s never too late to resume. Look around. Listen. There are no flashing amber lights at shepherd crossings and the FAA tracks aviation, not angelic beings. Forget the snowman and the reindeer. Santa is preposterous. The Cratchits are sort of creepy. But there are radiant beams if you look for them.
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Greetings Garrison: Macy's wooden escalators, Silent Night and the Christmas story are all very real in our lives. Silent Night is in my opinion the most wonderful song ever. I play it on one of our 5 acoustic pianos in all 12 keys. We sang it load on Christmas Eve during communion at St. Patrick Catholic Church here in Fremont, Nebraska and felt our eyes water some. Thanks. RRoeder
Being a King myself, and in name only, I have spent much time wondering about those three gifts my namesicks brought to the Holy Family. Symboylic they had to be. No poor Jewish couple had likely experienced both frankincense and myrrh, costly as they are. As for gold, everyone knows what it is, but likely never sees. How much was given the Holy Family during that visit, but surely not enough to stop Joseph from his carpentering, or his son, for that matter. The 3 King's gold must have been symbolics, as all of it its. Nobody says it better and more painfully than poet T.S. Eliots's rendition of the 3 Magi's visit:
The Journey Of The Magi
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death."
More one can hardly ask than what those 3 visitors told the family of 3.