If you pay any attention at all, you can tell it's
coming long before it arrives.
But at the same time, you can expect to be surprised
when the signs of it begin to appear, earlier and earlier every year.
Just like it is with athletic seasons: When you and I were kids basketball
season had the decency to stay out of sight until the World Series had
ended, and the Series, winding up baseball season, would do so before
the first snowstorms threatened to delay the playing of the playoff
games. Football was an autumn sport in those days, and they didn't play
hockey in months when the thermometers were registering 99 degrees.
But we're drifting off the subject. The task at
hand is to talk about The Season, and we'd better get started on that
exploration which will be upon us before we know what's happening.
The Season, of course, is the busiest, jolliest,
brightest, merriest, cheeriest of the year. It's Christmas.
You can discern that The Season is right around
the corner because the thoughtful merchants endlessly tell us so. Around
which corner we are not exactly sure, but if you look you are certain
to find it at the far side of some corner, somewhere, waiting to help
you mightily in the work of redistributing your wealth.
Rather than wait for The Season to be right around
the corner, though, you can watch for the advance signs. The Season
is what comes just after the Thanksgiving sales items in your local
Wal-Mart or K-Mart or whatever have replaced the scary Halloween costumes
and that have replaced the Labor Day picnic preparations and back-to-school
sales that have pushed the Fourth of July flags and fireworks off the
shelves.
There are other seasons in which to buy and be
busy for, but let us not get into that just now.
By the time The Season is well underway you will
have been exhorted to remember the true meaning of Christmas. This is
a good thing to be reminded of and chances are you will be reminded
of it in a multitude of places and ways. Reminded of the concept of
the true meaning, that is, even though what the true meaning is may
vary from person to person and town to town and family to family and
certainly from nation to nation and faith to faith. If nothing else,
the true meaning just might get some friends and neighbors and relatives
-- whether related by way of blood or sect or theological leaning --
to put aside their cudgels for a time and try as hard as they can to
do some really deep-down soul-searching, thank-God contemplating, on
what this thing I have flippantly been calling The Season is all about.
So I hope you'll allow me to offer just one idea
that might redeem the drivel that has gone before in this rambling.
A notion that is not new, but may be worth thinking about again. It
is this:
Interesting, isn't it, that so many of the details
that make up the story of our Savior's birth take place in the nighttime.
In the dark.
The angels seem always to appear in or from a star-studded
sky. The magi seem always to be riding across a darkened desert. Joseph
and Mary seem to be seeking admission to -- and being turned away from
-- the inn, in the late hours of the night. And the star, of course,
would be much less dramatic, and noticed, in a daytime sky.
Could it be there's something symbolic here? That
is is no accident that Love's Light is born in such a setting? That
the concept of light overcoming darkness is so frequently and richly
presented? Even that such as you and I can be, will be, inevitably must
be, heirs of such a Light?
I'm going to spend more time thinking about that,
this year.
