Second Sunday Of Advent

We’ve looked everywhere in this region and still can’t find old-fashioned icicles for our Christmas tree. Is there some connection between the CO-vid and thin strips of shiny mylar? If we manage to find any icicles, we’re going to buy many, many packs of them. Our tree always has icicles. It’s just the way things are done. We drape them, toss them, hang them, throw them…we need them.

When I stepped outside this morning, I could smell the coffee in the pot, and I wanted a gallon of it, but duty and companionship called, so I walked with care on the deck boards and felt the grit of Jack’s sugar beneath my soles, and Jinx and I crunched our way to the gate and out into the slap-in-the-face of a December morning in these mountains.

Mrs. Orr ran some needful errands in the early afternoon, and I busied myself with things that I’ve been putting off. While I worked, I thought my thoughts and sighed my sighs, and at a particular moment, I said softly but aloud, “Christ, don’t leave me.” Almost immediately afterwards, a thought came to me with the force of epiphany, of revelation, of direct communication. It left me weakened and blinking in the harsh winter sunlight.

Much on my mind lately….a very dear friend from whom I am estranged. This friend was once as close to me as I might be able to describe. I introduced him to the Reformed faith. And when I left that particular club, he was hurt and disappointed, and he aimed his hurt and disappointment at me like arrows, always seeking a way to wound me and plant his foot in my chest. It has been a difficult span of years.

So after my four-word prayer today, the face and voice of this friend flooded into my mind, and I realized something. I realized that the reason he reacted with such antagonism when I left the Reformed faith, and the reason he reacted with such overt and relentless hostility when I told him of my affection for the traditional Roman Catholic faith was because he was afraid of my ability to influence him. He knows that I have weighed the doctrines of Calvin and have found them wanting. And he is terrified that he will do the same.

He is terrified that, given the chance, he will come to see the agate gates of Presbyterianism as…wrong. And if he does this, he will lose all that he has built upon the scaffolding that he has erected since our decades-ago debates, debates in which I convinced him of the truths of the Reformed faith.

This was my great epiphany. My friend is terrified that he will see the same things that led me to walk away from that particular worldview. If it could happen to SK, then it could happen to me. And now I can understand his hostility, his defensiveness, his palpable fear. 

Comfort, a sense of belonging, and the approval of his self-selected authority figures is more important to him than the real, real truth.

Ah, now I understand. And this understanding dampens down my reciprocal anger at my friend, and it prods me to...pity him. I pity his prison bars. He stands to lose much if he ever takes a half-dozen steps down the path I’ve taken. The cost is high, and I doubt he will ever be willing to pay it.

Outside tonight, under the gauzy moon, with the frozen needles of grass beneath my boots, while I watched my dog cavort and leap under the –what, indifferent? — stare of the moon, I felt within me the gratitude of winter. The cold kills things, drives them to slumber, slows them to imperceptible movement.

I love the cold. It tortures my joints, embeds its ground-glass gratings and grindings in my body, freezes my feet, turns my blood to molasses…but I love it. I love the cold. I was born in its bosom, “In Dixieland where I was born, early on one frosty morn…” and I can never not love it. The summer is hateful to me, with all its noise and glare and damp chafings. But the cold…ah, it is mine, It is here. It is now.

~ S.K. Orr