The Second Day of Christmas: Making Room
The Second Day of Christmas: Making Room
On creating and re-creating ritual. Breathing new life in old forms.
This post is part of this year’s 12 Days of Christmas Contemplations, a journey into the heart of Christmas for dancing monks and weary pilgrims given freely from our heart to your’s… If you wish to give a gift in return, do consider becoming a paid subscriber, inviting some one in, or gifting this gift as a gift :-).
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Dear fellow traveler,
This entire week up to Christmas eve, our little child was waiting eagerly to open the “Weihnachtsengel” (Christmas Angel), that I bought some years ago in a local thrift store. This inspired bit of carved and constructed art has become a central aspect of our Christmas story since then. We open the doors in the robes of the angel every Christmas eve.
Hannah has been brimming with excitement for this time, and when Chuck walked it down from her storage place upstairs, Hannah was jumping up and down, clapping, and cheering with anticipation. Our tradition in the past has been to open the door, place a candle in front of the manger, and gaze at it in wonder. But this day, Hannah would have none of this. From her perch on Papa’s knee, she opened the doors and looked and clapped, and then shut them again. Then she wanted to open them again. And again. And again.
We were perplexed, but after a few rounds, I saw her wisdom. She was practicing the opening! Like a pilgrim kneeling repeatedly to pray, she was opening and closing, in a repetitive, meditative motion, the door to the vision of Christmas.
Rituals are indeed about repetition. Which is their bliss and their downfall. Even the most inspired repetition can become stale and lifeless. We are here on this journey together because many Christmas rituals ring hollow to us. In fact, the whole purpose of our 12 Days is to ask: Is there more to the traditional Christmas spiel?
When rituals become stale and rigid they imprison us. Instead of making space they make it hard to breathe. This is when we either need to breathe new life into the old forms or to leave some old forms behind.
The problem is, that we cannot live without creating rituals. This season I felt more than before in need of ritual. And I have suffered our lack thereof compared to the rich Christmas rituals of my childhood.
The crux with freeing ourselves from rituals is that we then, necessarily, run into the need to create “our own” new rituals. And then we might realize that doing rituals well is an art that needs time and practice (and often centuries) to mature. We do need ritual to grow. As do our children. The practice of rituals needs grace and patience. Grace because each ritual is also just that, a ritual, a metaphor of some deeper thing. And patience, because creating new, and inhabiting old, ritual needs time, focus, and attention.
When I started writing about my need for rituals this season I looked back and saw that we have written at least twice about it — on the second day of Christmas!
Thus it seems the 2nd day is giving a sign here. It wants to be the ritual day. So below Chuck invites you to do exactly this: create a ritual for this journey. As he will return to our Christmas angel :-)
With love, Almut
PS: Tomorrow I will share a deeper reading of the nativity scene as the great Hildegard of Bingen has it. I only came across it yesterday and it blew my mind open!
“Bring the heart if you come to Us”
—Chuck Huff
☆ Many years ago, my wife Almut made a surprise find of a carved Christmas angel in a local art store. Since then we have developed a tradition: sometime in the days before Christmas, Almut and I have a small procession in our house from where ever our Christmas angel is stored to where ever we have decided to display it that year. The doors to the nativity scene in the angel’s robes will be closed with a ribbon, and we won’t open them until late on Christmas Eve. Now that Hannah has joined us, we get to tell her the Christmas story by showing her the figures in the Christmas Angel nativity scene. Standing in front of this rustic carving and telling the Christmas story to my daughter is one of the most deeply moving experiences I have had. It has become a ritual with great meaning.
We have an ambivalent relationship with ritual. We both have seen a time in our lives when we tired of ritual, when it seemed confining rather than focusing, dry and dusty rather than verdant. Though living in different worlds, we both felt the pull away from tradition toward more lively expressions of our faith. This sweeping away is a good impulse. As Almut says, paraphrasing Kierkegaard,
“Sometimes you have to lose your ritual in order to find it again.”
Now that we are experiencing late parenthood, we are discovering a third approach to ritual; simple joyful presence to the repetition and to the experience. Hannah, our four-pushing-five year old, loves ritual. She loves doing rituals with us. She insists we pray before meals and that we light candles at meals, “Papa, you forgot the candles, again!”
Hannah also loves the evening ritual of snuggling in my lap, as I read her to sleep. She rests her head on my leg, pulls the covers up, and complains about too little light to see the book. I hold the book a bit higher to see the letters in the dim go-to-sleep light, and she asks me to hold the book down where she can see it. Bible stores, animal stories, some Bible stories with animals, and the occasional story about construction and trucks. Hannah and I do our evening ritual several nights a week, more often when Almut needs to work in the evening (like during the 12 days retreat!). It is usually successful in getting her to sleep. Except when it isn’t, and Almut has to pitch in to cradle her to sleep. And some nights I find the grace to see even this as enfolded in the Divine embrace.
I cherish these small rituals and do not want to give them up. They surely connect us to each other, but they are also holy because, in Martin Buber’s words, they create a space where there is a third presence.
Rituals connect us to each other in part because they include us all in the Divine embrace.
Hannah seems to be changing from week to week, new skills, new perspectives, a deeper grasp of herself and the world. And I will soon be retiring from my long sojourn in the foreign land of academia. Almut is launching new ventures and still seeking her home. So much is changing and the future now actually seems to me as uncertain as it has in fact always been, but for my inattention.
Our awareness of the precarity of our future opens a space that we can fill with rituals that give structure to our fears and our longing. They provide a form, a frame, and an architecture in time that support the slow and painful birth of the fully human divine within us.
And because they invite a holy third presence into our shared lives these rituals bind us together in love. Having abandoned rituals once, we can now re-inhabit them in that love.
Practice: Find your own ritual for this journey
As we walk through these 12 Days of Christmas, we invite you to construct a ritual, a container, to hold your devotion. Some accommodation in physical space is helpful, though not necessary. It might be a single candle in the living room, or a simple altar, or tea in your favorite cup, or a familiar walk or posture.
What is essential is the wisdom and grace to keep your focus in times of inspiration and of irritation. So do find a regular time, however short it might be and even if it is a moveable feast. Hannah’s candle lighting rituals last no more than a few minutes, or the saying of a short poem. And remember, give yourself grace when somehow you cannot manage to be faithful.
May God grant us, and you, the perseverance, wisdom, and grace these days to do so.
A Blessing
May you bring your heart to ritual this Christmas
When you cannot find space, may you stumble upon it
When your space is in disrepair, may God come to you even in a stable
When you cannot find time, may Grace embrace you by surprise
And when you cannot find your heart,
Receive the grace that is offered and bring your lack and your longing to God
May you know, in fleeting glimpses,
that what you seek is also seeking you.
CH
And may Christmas find you where you are, Chuck with Almut & little one
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