Preparing the Soul - Week 2

In week one of our Advent reflection, we began to listen through the noise of holiday demands to hear the heartbeat of our most meaningful Christmas experiences.  I ended with an invitation to consider the stories (bitter and sweet), desires, and hopes that you carry into this memory-rich time of year. If you haven’t read “week one” and reflected on those concluding questions, go back, and read it (or listen) before coming to this second week.

Since I ended with an invitation to explore your personal history, it’s only fair to offer a part of my story. I offer this memory as an example of how noticing the emotions that return to us, and how naming them with granularity, can help us discover what they are trying to teach us. There are things left unattended to, or unfinished, in our own lives that we can address through making new stories.

Before you read on, begin by slowing down. Take some deep breaths and come to a moment of calm so you can be fully present to this reading, this moment, and the invitation to whatever your experience is. Then proceed on. If you are seeking to engage this reading as a means of getting “5 points for a great Christmas” then maybe come back when you have more margin. There is another goal in mind for this reading. When you are open to engage with a personal experience, come back. Even if this is my reflection, allow it to be a doorway into a deeper consideration of similar experiences from your own life.

With that said, here is brief memory from my story:

There’s a moment every fall when the light changes. One morning, almost unexpectedly, the heat of summer gives way to a softer sun. There’s a free-spirited side of Southern California and she’s a bit of a nonconformist even with the weather. The pronounced seasonal changes enjoyed in other places, with their vibrant bloom of new color, are subtler here.  In Orange County, you mark the seasons by the fashionable jackets more than the weather, but I remember the light. Something stirs in me when the warmth reaches our windows from a new point above the neighbor’s house. Later in the year, the days come without the promise of heat, but it is always the light that captures me.

That sensation pulls me back to the emotions and images of my elementary school playground. The long tree limbs stretching tall and shedding their leafy canopies too late in the year to call it “fall,” but it was our fall. We gathered up leaves like they were playground artillery awaiting our huge imaginations and our tiny fingers to make something never imagined before. Maybe it was the lack of snow, or the promise of Christmas steadily coming, but it was fresh fallen and certainly something that brought new delight. 

With Christmas then just around the corner, I would daydream through December. I knew that with all the good tidings came fun traditions, family celebration, presents, lights, tinseled trees, incense, and the other holiday garnishes—all of this soundtracked by the time-capsuled musical monument that is the Alabama Christmas album. We can agree to disagree on that album today (my wife, Jenni, and I certainly do), but there is no time machine like the music from childhood. I can return to those memories in an instant and relish in the carefree joy that only a child at Christmas can savor. These gifts are small windows into many wondrous childhood moments that marked my early years—and the unquestioned sense of place in the world that those memories anchor. I pray that my children can return to their own memories with the same gratitude that I do now.

But I didn’t always have those vivid memories. I had vague recollection of the events, but they played in black and white, emptied of the palette that I can paint them with now. For years, these memories were cold, distant, and almost secondhand in memory. They were shaded by the pain of a family falling apart. My memories were veiled by the sadder moments—as if I imported pain into the memories which initially had none. After my parents’ divorce, and the years of disorientation that followed, I somehow forgot the joy of my childhood.

How those sweet memories returned to fullness is a story I’ll save for another time. But by God’s grace and healing, they did return to me. Now I recall the later pain and the sweetness of those earlier years. Seasons like Christmas are emotionally charged and move beneath the surface. Each year, I long for the innocence, ease, and goodness of childhood, while also being present to the occasional grief that those times have passed. Some of the people have passed away, some of those relationships are distant, and some relationships have deepened and matured.

Early in my marriage, I tried to recreate the perfect recipe with the best moments from my childhood and replay them, but it never worked. The ingredients are different. I am different. My family is different. Nostalgia is not a path forward, it turns out. Remembrance, on the other hand, is a way of honoring the past while keeping a foot firmly in the present. Nostalgia seeks to create a present by rehearsing old memories with new actors. We set the backdrop with movies, music, and delicacies, but the cast is new. It might even feel like a performance if we’re simply reading an old script. In nostalgia, our eyes (and hearts) are fixed on the past, not the present. It’s why, with all the best intentions, we might attempt to cultivate holiday memories and end up lazily filing them away in our minds before the tree is stripped bare and set aside for trash day. Memory is a fickle thing because what we attend to is what we’ll remember.

One of the most important resources that you possess is your attention. Like time, it’s not something we can hoard, but it is something we can steward. We have spent the past week in some reflection, attending to our own stories. This is a useful practice that can provide deep healing; however, it should be done to bring us more fully into this moment, not to escape it. Each of us carries our histories into the present. When we are ignorant of them, they steer us from below the surface of our conscious minds. When we make too much of them, they will equally impose their demanding wills and we see them as fate. In modern life we are prone to live in between times, between past and future, regret and anxiety, nostalgia and fear, all of which leaves us unknowingly blind to the present. So, we must be constantly reminded that our futures are made with the resources of the present.

As we enter this next week of advent, which relationships will get the fullness of your attention? Are they the most important ones in your life? Your spouse, lingering a bit longer at the dinner table bidding for your busy attention? Your son or daughter, hoping to craft that gingerbread house without your phone glued to your hand? These are the moments that become the very scenes that make our future memories. Which stories will you one-day hope to retell with all the colorful warmth possible and not just the grayed palette set by partial attention.