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a not-so-silent night

4 Comments

The cattle are lowing; the poor baby wakes.

But little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.

It wasn’t my cheeriest Christmas thought. But pacing the back of church with my baby screaming in my arms, wailing and wrenching whether I put him down or picked him up, reeling back and smashing his head against my own, all I could do was roll my eyes while the congregation sang “Silent Night.”

Give me a break, I grumbled. A silent newborn Jesus?

Perfection is annoying in the face of a tired toddler, anything but tender and mild.

. . .

Childhood is full of tears. Rare – if not impossible – is the hour that goes by without a cry. So every single day since my first was born, I have heard wails and dried tears. Tears for falls and fights, tears for tantrums and tiredness. Crying defines childhood more than any emotion. When else in life do we wail in public with reckless abandon?

So perhaps it’s because my second throws more tantrums than my first: crying in the car seat, wailing in the high chair, screaming on the changing table. Or perhaps it’s because this December has been dark with sorrow, plastered with pictures of public grief. But this Christmas I find myself frustrated with the image of a Christ child who didn’t cry.

Crying is our first form of communication. It is how we learn to be human. We raise our voice and let feeling burst forth in the hopes that someone will respond.

It must have been the same for Christ.

. . .

Jesus wept. It’s the shortest sentence in the Bible. But it carries a depth of emotion: the love and compassion Christ had for his friend. Jesus’ tears at the death of Lazarus were not a moment of weakness, a wimpy stumble or a private sniffle. They were an outpouring of grief, wet and wailing proof of his deepest humanity.

Crying comes from a desire for things to be differently than they are. As a child, we cry out of our desire to have a snack or a toy or to go to sleep when we are too tired. As an adult, we cry out of our desire for a situation or relationship to be changed. Christ’s crying for Lazarus meets us there, in that most awful human moment of losing someone we love. And since we know how to be as an adult because of how we were as children, Jesus must have wailed as a baby, to be able to cry as he grew.

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Crying makes us human. The bursting forth of emotion when facing the most basic needs of existence, when dealing with the rawest of our desires. We cry not just for food and drink, shelter and warmth, but in the hopes that if we cry out, someone will respond. Crying teaches us comfort, dependence, compassion and humility.

And even though Emmanuel means that Christ was fully divine from the start, the mystery’s flip side insists that he was always human, too. That he could not have been immune from the tears at the heart of the human condition. That like us he cried for warmth and food and sleep and love. That his first night in human flesh was not free from tears.

. . .

Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child. Holy infant so tender and mild.

Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.

Despite being Christmas, yesterday was full of tears like every other day. I don’t remember which cry I confronted, whether the tears over the stolen toy or the forbidden cookie or the forced trip to the potty. I don’t remember which child I comforted, whether it was the oldest who wails “I feel sad!” when tears spring to his eyes or the youngest whose frustrated frown quivers wordlessly before he dissolves.

But yesterday I remember holding a child close to my chest, his tears darkening my shirt as he sobbed. And as he struggled to breathe through his heaving, I felt Christmas songs of quiet nights and silent babes slip away into a darker, wetter image: a sweat-soaked girl in a filthy stable filled with the piercing shrieks of a newborn.

And I realized that what matters most about Christmas is not that Jesus didn’t cry, but that he did.

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Comments

  1. Rachel says

    26 December 2012 at 2:22 pm

    I totally agree!! Thank you! Jesus must have cried, and he must have thrown tantrums. I sometimes wonder if, knowing Jesus’ divinity, Mary was always perfectly patient. I too wrote a post about how mothering a toddler has deepened by understanding of Christmas: http://fyionrachandry.blogspot.com/2012/12/child-of-grace.html

    Reply
  2. Tressa says

    26 December 2012 at 4:15 pm

    I love the imagery of the line, “a sweat-soaked girl in a filthy stable filled with the piercing shrieks of a newborn.” You write in such a vivid, stripped down fashion. It is very truth revealing for me.

    Reply
  3. Kathleen says

    2 January 2013 at 10:15 am

    Absolutely! This year, more than ever before, I’ve been realizing how much we’ve sanitized the Christmas story and thus robbed it of its real meaning. All the focus on babies distracts us from the whole point, which is Incarnation. The baby is just one teeny tiny little part of Incarnation. Incarnation is about *us* being joined with God, and about God showing us how to use our imperfect bodies to become more perfect. When people write sentimental sappy words focusing on angels and stars and babies sleeping, it misses the whole point. I think maybe that’s why Joy to the World is the best Christmas song of all, even though it wasn’t written for Christmas at all, but for Christ the King.

    (Soapbox alert…..)

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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I have a habit of walking the ATL tunnels, but nev I have a habit of walking the ATL tunnels, but never made it to terminal T until yesterday. What I found stopped me in my tracks and spun my day around.

May we let ourselves be interrupted by joy and remember the beauty of being human.

Even in the least likely places.
If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
The Moment After Suffering By Jessica Powers (Sis The Moment After Suffering

By Jessica Powers (Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit)

Time’s cupped hand holds
no place so lenient, so calm as this, 
the moment after suffering. It is like
a sunlit clearing after densest wood,
bright by antithesis.
One sits upon a stump to get one’s bearing
and to admire such evidence of day.
Thicket and tangle fade; the furtive creatures
of darkness take their leave and slink away.
One feeds upon a succulent rich wisdom
that, to the mind’s surprise, has naught to do 
with late abjection; it is revelation,
God-fathered, heaven-new.

Oh, there are woods, of course, long forest stretches
of wide inhabited darkness to be crossed,
with pain and hunger, fear of unnamed creatures,
an imminent certainty of being lost.
But even these elude this meditation,
or if intrusive bring yet more release.
One muses as to what it will be like
to step at last from final forest into 
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the harsh, obtrusive sun that walks our sky,
light that the soul assimilates until
not witness but participant it stands,
taking of Godhead its amazing fill.
A morning meditation after a week of hard conversa A morning meditation after a week of hard conversations.
I bristle whenever I hear (well-meaning wise ones I bristle whenever I hear
(well-meaning wise ones say)

“Little kids, little problems.
Big kids, big problems.”

I know what they mean, of course. Parenting gets more complicated as young people grow.

But when my children were tiny, I was faced with trying to keep them alive despite life-threatening complications. That wasn’t little.

I know parents with grade-schoolers on suicide watch or tweens in intense therapy. That’s not little.

Life can be complicated and challenging from its very beginning.

The deeper wisdom I find is that smaller children do bring solvable circumstances in ways that older children do not.

Wet? Change to dry.
Hungry? Feed to full.
Sad? Comfort to calm.

In the midst of potty training my fifth child, I’ve realized something that my younger self would scoff to hear:

I will miss the cloth diaper laundry.

For thirteen years the bright colors have churned in our washer, tumbled in our dryer, hung on the line. Contrary to what you might think, they’re the easiest laundry of the household. Simple to sort, quick to fold, satisfying to stack.

But we’re leaving behind this stage for bigger clothes, washed independently by bigger kids. They’ll have to figure out more messes on their own.

May I stay grateful for whatever solvable circumstances their lives bring them.

May I learn to love them through whatever can’t be easily cleaned or smoothed or sorted.
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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