Right around January 3rd, I start to breath a bit easier, a great weight begins to lift off my chest. That same weight that settles there around mid-November and grows heavier as the weeks of advent wear on. I am such a creature of seasons, a creature of sun and moon. My body and my heart tells me that I should be feeling something, why so empty my soul? This is your fourth Christmas without him, you must be accustomed to his absence. No, my soul answers, no, I am empty of anticipation. The anticipation of him coming home, it started in November with Thanksgiving, even if he is unable to come in from South Dakota, he will call with a story to tell. Your heart still keeps time with the college schedule, he will be home by my birthday at the latest. No, he won’t. But certainly for Christmas, even from South Dakota, you found your way home. No longer.
Anticipation gives birth to energy, to ideas, it releases all sorts of feel good stuff in our system. Our brain can rapidly calculate how much food to prepare, remember everyone favorites, we can quickly lay our hands on the recipes, the ones where you wrote notes for me about what we did different each time. Precious scraps of your handwriting. It is hard now to field questions about our plans, and who will we see for Christmas. Even harder to hear others complaining about how much they have to do. Don’t they understand what a gift it is to have someone to love, and to have that someone still alive? What a privilege that preparation is, the joy that exists in the noisy chaos of living children, living parents, the promise of life…anticipation.
We hunkered down for the week of Christmas and New Year’s, indulged ourselves in BBC productions of various works of Charles Dickens, had a “Christmas Carol” marathon comparing productions and actors. We did slip out for Midnight Mass. Grateful for the presence of my brother and sister-in-law, they sat behind us, so I literally knew they had my back. They carry no tales if they see my shoulders shaking at the entrance hymn, tears flow, and not from joy, sorrow comes in great waves, memories of small heads nestled in my shoulder at Midnight Mass. Memories of my own small head in my father’s arms at Midnight Mass and Fr. Snyder asking my parents if I enjoyed his homily again, I was known for sleeping though homilies even at four years old.
Perhaps these are the years of our fields lying fallow. We have been harrowed, our field broken up, the land flat, uprooted, unseeded. A field can lie fallow for a long time, seemingly forgotten, is it a time of rest after the sharp blade? How long before any visible green of hope growing, a glimmer of anticipation of life ? Why the repeated harrowing, the blade that severs each new bud?
And so we learn to expect nothing, and in that way be at peace with everything. The peace of letting go of all expectations, and being surprised by even the smallest movements of grace and charity. To be present to the moment at hand, not one in the future that may never happen, to not allow anticipation to build expectations that are easily dashed because they were never based on the reality in which we exist. We begin to embrace our reality, such an unanticipated, unexpected land. I would not say we have happiness in our field, but there is peace. There is sorrow in the absence of anticipation, but perhaps that is wisdom and maturity sneaking into our field, its growth not lavish, hardly perceptible. Small blue flowers that have fought their way to fruition, small blue flowers that only grow in broken soil.
Hugs, Marydon