As we rushed out the door for the Christmas Vigil Mass at Queens we darned near tripped over our late-delivered Christmas Eve mail and a package. The package was a Southern Care package from our dear friends Michael and Virginia.
He’s a former food industry product marketing bigwig now the proprietor of a coffee shop that has received rave reviews; she’s a best-selling writer of romance novels. They’ve been my friends for more than 30 years. I think I’ve known each of them longer than they’ve known each other; he was my best man; my wife and I are godparents to one of their children. Damn, I miss them. Every Christmas they send us a Southern Care package: country ham, White Lily flour, yellow corn meal, white corn meal. These ingredients have become an intrinsic and beloved part of our holiday breakfasts.
This year’s Care package included a Christmas card and letter. We’ve all received these holiday letters—a recounting of notable family milestones of the previous year that all too frequently become brag letters. This was the best damned Christmas letter I’ve ever read. Here’s the last paragraph:
Madeline L’Engle writes of anamnesis, “truly remembering.” When we gather on Christmas Eve, we truly remember every Christmas Eve that has gone before. Not as a past event, but in the here and now. We leave our sense of time behind and get a glimpse of kairos, God’s time where the past, present and future all collide. In God’s time, the birth of the Christ Child is not historical. It is real. Now. When the kids put on their Santa stockings they are three, five and seven. It doesn’t make sense, but
This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild,
Had Mary been filled with reason
There’d have been no room for the child.
Life hasn’t turned out as I’d imagined it. And the worst is too many good friends too far away.
