Walking to church on a cold day
The Column: 12.02.25
We had a couple of summery days in November in New York but now, thank goodness, summer is over and we can get back to business. Thanksgiving is done and we spent it with talkative friends and since I was brought up to believe it’s impolite to interrupt, I sat through a two-hour dinner saying nothing but “Uh-huh” and “Oh, really.” And on Sunday I stepped out into a bitter cold wind and walked to church. It felt good.
Summer is too perfect, the dreaminess of it, like an all-Debussy festival, you long for some interesting weather, possibly a tornado. It makes me question the idea of heaven as eternal bliss, which comes from desert tribes who didn’t know about ice and snow.
All my vacations in Florida I was glad to see come to an end, especially the ones on the Gulf Coast where your motel room is likely to look out on a strip mall and a six-lane freeway. The Jews go to the east coast of Florida, the ocean side, and a person should follow the Jews: do not vacation in Egypt, you’re not going to like it.
I assume that we Episcopalians will go to heaven — we are very very nice people and not the sort you can imagine God hurling into the lake of fire — but what little we know about heaven from Scripture, the praising and rejoicing, doesn’t sound like something I care to do endlessly. For years, okay, but after half a million years it’d be heavenly to have a day of complaint and lamentation. My Unitarian friends will refuse to go to heaven because it discriminates against atheists. And heaven is authoritarian and Unitarians would demand to have seats on the planning committee. I’ll miss them.
Walking to church on December 1st, against a cold wind, made me very grateful to get there, walk into the warm sanctuary, have a cup of coffee, shake hands with people. And up front hung the Advent wreath waiting for the first candle to be lit.
Christmas changed for me 27 years ago. It got small. My mother loved the holiday and we had the tree and stockings and piles of gifts and the big dinner, and I did my best to keep up the tradition after I left home. For a few years I spent Christmases in Copenhagen where Christmas is a monthlong festival with obligatory traditions galore. My Danish friends didn’t necessarily believe in sanctification by faith but they believed in singing all the carols around an enormous tree elaborately decorated and then opening piles of gifts properly wrapped and not merely with adhesive tape but also with ribbon tied into bows, followed by a dinner of roast goose, red cabbage and rice pudding, followed by serious drinking.
But in 1997, as Christmas approached, my wife was nine months pregnant and we sat in our New York apartment with no need of tree or gifts or goose. The anticipation was everything. We lit a candle and waited day after day and on the 29th the holy child arrived and the obstetrical nurse handed her to me, her arms waving, her legs dancing, and the crappy songs vanished, the stores full of junk, the Christmas tree lots, the glittery lights, and it’s been a beautiful simple holiday ever since.
I don’t come to church Sunday morning as a saint, I come to contemplate my messy life and the time I’ve wasted and friends I’ve abandoned, but on this Sunday morning the deacon read from Luke’s Gospel loud and clear, “Be on guard that your hearts are not weighted down with the worries of this life” — Astonishing! A command to lightheartedness! — the opposite of what unbelievers believe church is all about.
On the way out, I stop to congratulate the deacon for reading Luke in a big bold voice, and she says, “I love the Word.” And now I do too.
Be on guard. Enjoy the simple pleasures, prayer, the benediction, the rousing Bach postlude, the handshakes, and the luxury of the warm taxi ride home, the embrace of my love who meets me at the door, the fresh coffee, and a sugary doughnut. We live in troubled times but perhaps there needs to be a time-out from trouble and maybe I’ll make it Sunday. Put the worries of this life aside.
We light the wreath of Advent, A season whose coming is meant To lighten the spirit Of those who come near it And make us reasonably content.
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Well, that's what Sunday is for. To be different from the rest of the week. A day of rest. Whatta concept! It could even be a commandment.
I stopped believing in heaven and hell when I was taking Advanced Physics as a senior in high school because I realized that it was not physically possible for them to exist and that they were just ideas that evolved with the human brain over the millenia as a survival benefit.
My French-Canadian grandfather died of colon cancer at age 63 about a month into the school year and his body was shipped back to Massachusetts from Pennsylvania, where he had lived most of his adult life. I only saw him about half a dozen times, so I really didn't know him and noticed that nobody cried at his funeral.
My mother told me that he had abandoned the family when she was about 13 and that she had to get a summer job working as a gluer in a paper box factory to help her mother with expenses. Her older brother dropped out of high school and married his pregnant girlfriend later in the year.
During my childhood my mother talked about her father rather affectionately, but said that she was devastated when he gave her only coal in her Christmas stocking when she was 8. I noticed that she seemed a lot less upset when her father died than she had been when my father's father died a few years earlier and realized that he had been more of a father to her than her biological father had been. Many years later her brother told me that their father had run a brothel in the boarding house he owned with his 2nd wife in PA.
So, after he died I realized that "going to hell" actually just means that most of the people who knew you, or knew of you, think and say bad things about you after you die and maybe even are glad that you are dead. Conversely, "going to heaven" means that most people are sad when you die, say mostly good things about you and your life, and wish you were still alive. I think that I was about 2.5 when my mother took this holiday picture of my father, her father, her brother, and (unintetionally) of me.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=9231241716920386&set=pb.100001039495643.-2207520000&type=3