Tag: brotherhood

Posted on

Invitation to the Dance

Written Dec. 14, 2019

Missy seemed to be made out of rubber. Up and down, up and down she bounced in her seat, too excited to stay still as the ballerinas danced her favorite – “The Nutcracker.”

“Da’y, look!” she told me as the music swelled. Her head swiveled, now watching the action, now smiling at me, now looking around at the audience to make sure they were appreciating it before returning to the dancers again.

For those who know Missy, this isn’t unusual. On her own, she can watch the world go by silently for hours on end. But in an audience, in front of a show she likes, the Quietest Extrovert In the Universe finds her power. She becomes restless, eager, involved, full of energy. It’s not the usual “seat etiquette,” though we’ve mostly had understanding neighbors over the years.

But today, there was no worry. Today, every neighbor was in the same position.

Some called out in appreciation – or just called out. One or two stood up briefly to dance themselves, carried away by the music. It wasn’t rock-concert wild, but it wasn’t concert-hall silent either. And it was wonderful.

It tends to be, at the “Gentle Nutcracker.”

If you’re not familiar with the annual show, the Gentle Nutcracker is designed to be “sensory friendly”  for those whose disabilities might otherwise get overwhelmed by the lights, sounds, and intensity of a full production. The house lights remain on at a low level.  The show is shortened. A number of seats remain unsold so that there’s room to move around if needed, and there’s a quiet room for moments when even the reduced stimulus becomes too much for someone.

Most of all, more than anything perhaps, there’s understanding.  From the performers. From the staff. From the other audience members. For anyone who’s ever had to worry about being “that family” at a show, that’s huge.

In fact, it’s one of the best examples of holiday peace that I can think of.

“Peace” may sound like a strange word to describe a concert where there may be involuntary words or movements at any moment. And it is a strange word if by peace, you mean everyone knowing their place and staying quietly in it, like figures in a Christmas pageant.

But there’s more to peace than that.

An author friend of mine, Stant Litore, likes to point out how the meaning of the word changes as it goes from language to language. In Latin, peace implies simply the absence of violence or disturbance. In Greek, it implies a weaving together of a community, individual strands forming a greater tapestry . In Hebrew, it implies a restoration, with everything made whole and brought back to where it was meant to be.

Moments like this create a peace in that larger sense. There may be a little bit of ruckus. It may not be silent rows in perfect order. But it’s a community reaching out to each other, seeing the needs that are there, and helping everyone to be a part. Helping a family to live as any family would, even if they don’t do as every family does. Sharing gifts so that all can be part of the whole.

That is peace.

There’s a song that captures it well. “Let There Be Peace on Earth” gets a lot of circulation this time of year. The opening lines conjure not meditative silence, but a reaching out: “Let me walk with my brother, in perfect harmony.”

That’s a gift. One of the greatest there is.

May peace be with you all this season. Whatever that may look like. For us, we’ll be limbering up a little.

The ballet may be over. But our dance has a lot of music left.  And Missy’s just bouncing to get the next round underway.

Posted on

Lighting Hope

I’d gotten halfway across town when Santa Claus mugged me.

OK, not literally. There’s no need to call the fine folks of the Longmont Police Department and report a jolly old man with a fur hat and a blackjack, making a getaway in a reindeer-powered sleigh with one (red) headlight. The year’s been strange, but not that strange – yet.

No, this time Santa was part of a yard display that seemed to pop out of nowhere, complete with lights and color and holiday cheer. Normal enough for the holiday season. But a bit striking when it’s several days before Thanksgiving.

Missy, of course, was delighted. Our disabled ward eagerly plays Christmas carols in the middle of July. If Longmont were to break out in colored lights immediately after Labor Day, she’d probably break out in cheers that could be heard as far as Lyons – right before insisting on seeing every display, every night.

Not everyone is in her camp, of course. As stores increasingly deck the halls with holiday merchandise right after Halloween, I’ve seen the more-than-occasional post on social media, all of it set to a common theme: “What happened to Thanksgiving?”

I understand it, believe me. When I worked in the now-vanished City Newsstand bookstore, Christmas music and decorations were strictly forbidden until Black Friday. The dire penalties were never explicitly spelled out, but presumably included a lengthy spell on the Naughty list and a stocking full of coal.

But these days, I’m not really bothered by a chorus of “Oh, Early Light.” For a couple of reasons.

First, I figure Thanksgiving can take care of itself. Where other holidays cry out, Thanksgiving is about drawing in. It doesn’t require fireworks or dazzling displays, just a table to share and a spirit of gratitude. Its one garish parade, the Macy’s march, is really more of a start-of-Christmas celebration, with cartoon balloons and forgettable pop ballads mixed in. Thanksgiving doesn’t need to shout. It just needs a space to be.

Secondly, in this year of all years, I’m not about to refuse light and cheer from any source.

It’s been a hard one, with a lot of fear, anger and uncertainty that isn’t over yet. One (out-of-state) friend has had family threatened.  Another found a friend’s car had been covered with hateful graffiti. In so many places, online and off, battle lines have been drawn.

Mind you, election years are often divisive. But this one has taken it to a power of 10, not least because it’s left so many unsure of their future or fearful that they don’t have one. It’s a time when we need to be standing by each other and saying “You will not be forgotten” – as a promise, not a threat.

But threats are in the air.

I’ll say it again – we need each other. Every time we isolate, every time we declare someone unworthy of a place at the table, we weaken the whole family. Every time we turn aside from someone who needs our comfort, our support, our help, we break one more bond and undermine one more foundation of our common life.

If a few lights can remind us that joy drives out hate, I’ll welcome them.

If an early carol or two can send out the call for peace and understanding, I’ll join the chorus.

This isn’t about burying discord under a carpet of tinsel and plastic snowmen. It’s about recognizing the pain and reaching out to heal. It’s about seeing the darkness and driving it back so that we can find each other … and ourselves, as well.

There’s a Christmas carol I’ve quoted in this space before, taken from the despair and hope of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Its final verses are worth evoking one more time.

 

And in despair, I bowed my head,

‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said,

‘For hate is strong and mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men.’

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep,

‘God is not dead, nor doth he sleep,

The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.’

 

May we give that peace to one another and a true Thanksgiving with it.

May that be our proudest decoration.

Posted on

Love in a Cold Time

The first serious snowfall of winter always energizes me.

Maybe part of me never stopped being nine years old. That’s how old I was when the Christmas Blizzard of 1982 hit, transforming the world around me with sudden rapidity. A six-block drive to pick up Grandma became an epic journey in my Dad’s crawling Subaru. A bicycle left on the back porch disappeared beneath a carpet of white, except for one tip of one handle. The entire back yard became a frozen world to explore, one that my sisters and I – proper “Star Wars” fans, all – immediately declared to be Hoth from “The Empire Strikes Back.”

In the years since then, I’ve learned about the joys of freeing high-centered cars, salting frozen sidewalks at 6 a.m., and wrenching your spine while shoveling snow. (Snow shovels make a very inadequate cane, by the way.) None of it has deterred me very long from my basic thesis. If anything, it’s deepened the complexity, setting off two overlapping voices in my head:

“It’s wintertime. What a white, beautiful and lovely place the world is.”

“It’s wintertime. What a cold, chill and deadly place the world is.”

The latter cannot be denied. This is a time of year that can freeze people outside or drain them inside, as the dark nights lengthen. It’s a time when we become all too aware of the people who should still be here celebrating with us, when the empty chair takes on a presence of its own and summons more ghosts than a dozen “Christmas Carols.”

Which is why I maintain that this is still the perfect time for a celebration of universal love.

I admit, this may take some explaining.

Almost every belief and tradition turns on the lights this time of year to hold back the cold and the darkness. Whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, Yule, or something else, there’s this deep-set need to push back against the encroaching night and create beauty. The light kindled stands all the more bright and lovely by contrast, even without five marching Snoopys, four Santa Nativities, three melting lights, two inflatable turtledoves, and a partridge in a floodlit pear tree – all of them on the same yard.

But anyone can plug lights in a socket and “ooh” at the result. It doesn’t necessarily follow that we also turn our thoughts to tidings of comfort and joy, especially in times when the thermometer would have to be heated to reach two digits.

But it’s all the more fitting that we do. Because this is the time of year when love takes guts.

Love comes easy when the sun is shining and the world is green. The barriers are down. It’s when we relax, when we court, when we find it easiest to visit on the spur of the moment. Why not?

But when it takes an act of will and a thick pair of boots just to make it from the front door to the mailbox … that’s when even the smallest gesture takes on new meaning. The natural instinct is to stay huddled inside in the warmth – and we have to ignore that instinct if we want to be able to help a friend, a neighbor, a stranger freezing on the street.

We expose ourselves every time we do that. But we also spread the warmth to places where it otherwise could not go.

Anyone who lives in Colorado, I think, knows that it’s during the times of extremes that you find out what your neighbors are made of. Flood or drought, wildfire or blowing snow, this is when you see the open-armed charity and almost selfless courage begin to emerge. It’s when a community is tested, to see whether you truly have a community at all or just a bunch of people living together.

This particular test is more predictable than a rising river, more enduring than a blaze in the woods. So what better time to celebrate brotherhood and goodwill? Sure, church scholars talk about how Christ was probably born in the spring or the early fall (to draw from my own faith for a moment), but the story of love coming to a hostile world would still belong in the winter, even if no other tradition had demarcated the territory and lit the darkness.

This is where risky, selfless, muscular love belongs.

And if that love comes with strong vertebrae and a snow shovel – so much the better.

See you in Hoth, everyone. May the season be with you.

Posted on

The Moment of Pain

Sometimes news is hell.

I don’t use the word lightly. Yes, at the best of times, the daily news can seem to hold enough misery, anger and grief for anyone. Major wars. Minor cruelties. Kardashian news. We know it, we brace for it, we sigh as it goes by.

But some weeks are worse. This one, for instance.

If you’re among my Longmont readers, you know what I mean. The murder-suicide, with a man suspected of killing one parent with a knife, nearly killing the other and then taking his own life. The stabbing attack on a seven-months pregnant woman, where the child-to-be was physically removed. Each hard on the heels of the other, gruesome and horrific.

If there’s anyone who simply turned their computer off on Wednesday and refused to read any more Internet news, I can’t say I blame them.

Some scenes hit you in the heart and rip your soul open to scream. They’re the calls that every cop and paramedic hates to get, that every reporter hates to write, that every reader hates to bear witness to. They’re the ones that your brain refuses to let go of, asking the heavens “How is something like this allowed to exist?”

It doesn’t matter if the audience is the world or the folks inside city limits. The audience is you. And it’s too much to hold.

I don’t have a magic word to make it go away. I’m not sure I could be trusted with one if I did. To feel another’s pain is to be human; if I banish that pain, am I sending my humanity away with it?

But oh, the temptation.

So what do we do?

If there’s any answer at all, I think it has to be “What we can.”

Grief like this doesn’t just shock, it isolates. It makes you feel alone and helpless in an overwhelming world. Other hurts seem minor compared to that big boulder that refuses to move.

That is when we most need each other.

This community has a powerful heart. It showed in full force during and after the 2013 flood, when no sort of help was off limits. People cleaned their neighbors’ homes, housed their neighbors’ families, sometimes saved their neighbors’ lives.

It’s harder with something like this. I know. There’s a less visible enemy to fight, a less obvious way to help. But the gist remains the same.

Be there.

Be there when someone in pain needs a kind heart and a listening ear.

Be there when they don’t dare talk but just need someone nearby.

Be there when you see a friend or a neighbor or a stranger who seems to need a hand.

Not as a snoop. Not as a looky-lou or an intrusive pest. But as the brother or sister we all need to be to each other.

Most of us may never know any of the people who were at the heart of this. (Those who do, bless and keep you all.) But we all know someone. It can start with something as simple as a word of kindness to a police officer or EMT, a reminder that they’re remembered and appreciated. It can grow as big as you want it to.

If we all care for one of us, we all care for all of us.

Good news happens, too. But it’s rarely as easy as looking. We have to find it, to make it, to create it ourselves. We have to be it. And that can be a frightening prospect.

But not half as frightening as having to stand alone.

News can be hell. Undeniable. True.

But together, maybe we can be heaven.