My Christmas Without Jesus

     “Once each year the Christmas season strikes both the sacred spheres of life with sledgehammer force: Suddenly Jesus Christ is everywhere.

     For approximately one month His presence is inescapable. You may accept Him or reject Him, affirm Him or deny Him, but you cannot ignore Him. Of course, he is proclaimed in speech, song and symbol in all Christian churches. But He rides every red-nosed reindeer, lurks behind every new doll. Resonates in the most desacralized “season’s greetings.” Remotely or proximately, He is toasted in every cup of Christmas cheer. Each sprig of holly is a hint of His holiness, each cluster of mistletoe a sign of His love.”

Brennan Manning

“Lion and Lamb: The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus”

I remember reading this paragraph many years ago when I first discovered Brennan Manning. I remember a light going off in my heart as these words confirmed what I had always felt: that regardless of how “commercial” Christmas had become, it was still about Jesus and everyone knew this. That’s why I never got riled up about Santa Claus the way my Fundamentalist Baptist friends did. I believed in the old fellow until I was 12, and still do in some ways. (Those Christmas-romantics among us know what I mean here)

This year, however, something is very different for me. I’ve been re-reading Manning over the past few months and I find myself untouched at heart by words that once moved me to tears. The truths of love and grace he was so gifted at expressing, are meaningless to me.

I have gone numb.

I never thought I’d say that. I never thought I’d have a bad Christmas. But here I am, Christmas 2019, having the most non-celebratory, non-Christmassy Christmas in my fifty-six years. This has been one of the hardest years of my life and it shows no sign of letting up.

Christmas has always been a haven for me. The house I grew up in was rife with discord, pettiness, arguing, resentment, and deceit. It’s not that there was a shortage of love…it’s that there was a love vacuum. Showing love in that house would get you hurt. But somehow, Christmas provided a two-week respite from this drudgery. For whatever reason, my mother and her husband seemed to catch the Christmas spirit and for about two weeks there was joy and a veneer of happiness. This was probably owed in large part to the friends and family who came to visit, and the diversion they provided. I lived in a house where outsiders were treasured and valued far more than the “family” who lived there year-round.

Being a Christmas lover, this was okay by me. I didn’t care about the “how and why” of it, I just knew that for about two weeks, the fighting would stop, the bitterness and resentment that pervaded our days would be tucked away, and we actually looked -for that brief period—like a family that loved each other.

I loved this season. I circled the dates on the calendar when each of the essential Christmas specials would air. Charlie Brown Christmas. Rudolph. The Grinch. And my favorite…Scrooge. I watched Bing Crosby’s annual Christmas specials, not because I was necessarily a Crosby fan at my young age, but because it was Christmas. And at Christmas, you participated in every possible tradition you could, because…it was Christmas.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Christmas, for me, was the center point of my year. Not because of the presents -though, as a child, that is certainly among the highest motivation—but because of the pervasive shroud of peace that Christmas brought. Maybe, I was seeing that quote from Manning in real-time in my otherwise very unhappy home. Maybe it was the baby in the manger, underneath it all, that caused a two-week truce, and gave me enough oxygen to survive the other fifty weeks of the year.

When I got older, I swore I would create the kind of home I wanted back then. A place where love would abound and my children would feel like, no matter what the world was throwing at them, once they set foot inside their home, the attack ended. A place where mom and dad where their champions. Where love was a year-round thing. Where Christmas joy wasn’t a facade to impress the visitors…it was an outward expression of a year-round emotion.

That never did happen. I was divorced before my daughter could have her second Christmas. I worked hard each year to create the kind of Christmas I’d always wanted, even within the bounds of a broken family. I did it well, for all those early years. When my daughter was three and was aware enough about Christmas to really start getting into it, I went to Hobby Lobby and bought the items to fashion a set of sleigh bells. I kept these hidden from her, and on Christmas Eve -on the years she spent with me—I would climb up on my roof, as she was just drifting off to sleep, and stomp around, and shake the sleigh bells, and “Ho Ho Ho” and call out to invisible reindeer. She never even remotely suspected that it was me. I would sneak back into the house silently and go into her bedroom and find her squeezing her eyes shut as tightly as she could, just to make sure Santa didn’t think she was still awake.

We kept an Advent calendar each year. We baked Christmas cookies together. We lit up our yard with enough lights and decorations to land a plane in a fog bank. Christmas was, for her, a refuge, as it had been for me. It broke my heart to see her not have Christmas with both her parents together. I would give her anything, and yet I couldn’t even give her this.

She is twenty-one now, almost twenty-two. She still loves Christmas as much as I do…or did.  As the years went by, we engaged in the traditions I knew growing up. She’s even made two trips to the legendary Wanamaker’s light display in my hometown of Philadelphia, and she’s eaten “Seven Fishes” with my cousins on Christmas Eve.

Somehow, amidst all the disappointment and sadness of our family dynamic, and the difficulties we’ve endured through the years, we “kept Christmas…and kept it well.” To quote Dickens.

But this year is different.

This year, no matter how I’ve tried, I can’t get into Christmas. I’ve played my favorite Christmas playlist. I’ve watched “Charlie Brown Christmas” over and over…I’ve even cried when Linus gives his remarkable “Meaning of Christmas” speech. But something is missing this year. Something has died.

Yesterday it occurred to me; You simply can’t have Christmas, without God. Not really anyway. If He is really behind every celebration and decoration -as Manning wrote—than to attempt an authentic Christmas celebration without Him is antithetical. It’s a fool’s errand. I should know better.

Yet here I am.

This has been a very hard year for me. Very hard. I finally positioned myself to buy a home, twelve years after losing my last home in the crash of “07. Two weeks after closing, my position at LU was eliminated, and I was out of work. Two weeks.

I found another job right away, but it’s a straight-commission job and building a pipeline is difficult and it has all but ruined me.

During this past year, I watched one of my dearest friends lose his battle with cancer. I saw my cousin’s son lose his battle as well. And somehow this year, I came face to face with my own orphanage, and with the long-term effects of growing up that way and how it has shaped me into a man I no longer recognize. 

So has my life.

I became a Christian at the tender age of nine. I am fifty-six. For the first time in forty-seven years, I am doubting God. Not questioning Him…I’ve done that before. I questioned Him about my divorce. I questioned Him about my abbreviated fatherhood, my job loss, the abandonment by my father and mother. I questioned Him -oh how often I questioned Him—when I was homeless. I questioned Him over the past year as my friend Rick battled a brain tumor, and God wouldn’t even let him keep his wonderful gift of creating music, as the battle drew to a close. I questioned Him as my cousin lost her son before he even turned thirty. But I never doubted Him.

Until lately.

I don't doubt He exists. I am certain of that. I doubt that what I thought He was like is true. 

Lately, I’ve wondered if He even cares. Not in a “I care about you” sort of way, but in a “That doesn’t really concern me” way.

Lately I have realized that I see Him exactly as I see -and relate to—my own father. “You’re here because of me. I owe you nothing. Make what you can out of it. See you when you get here.” I have stopped praying, except to pray for others. I have stopped reading the Bible daily, something I have been in the habit of doing for these forty-seven years. I don’t go to church anymore and don’t even want to. Church is full of people who will give me clichés because the questions I ask are too uncomfortable and I am viewed as some sort of reprobate for asking them.

I doubt Him now. I don’t doubt that He can “do anything.” I just doubt that He will.

More and more I am convinced that I’m down here on my own. That the promise to “never leave you or forsake you” is more a mechanical outcropping of the salvation experience -once you’re in the family you never leave—than it is a spiritual, almost-physical presence by my side. My family (my daughter and I) are struggling. Things are hard. My dreams are forgotten now and all I think about is bailing enough water to keep the boat from going down with one arm, while I row the boat to shore  with the other. One-armed rowing only moves you in circles. One-armed bailing isn’t efficient enough to make headway against the inrushing seas.

I can’t remember a time in these forty-seven years where I wasn’t concerned, almost obsessed with whether my life was pleasing to God. Even when I was “far from Him” and not living exactly as I ought…I was aware of Him and always made my way back in short time. I kept short accounts with God and never liked the feeling of distance or silence between us.

But now…it’s mechanical now. I can never retreat into a life of sin and debauchery…my faith roots run too deep. But the longing in my heart, the desire for something mystical, the feeling of a “personal” relationship has faded. God has retreated to His throne room and I am out here in the world, battling on my own. I guess what’s so scary to me about this is that I don’t even feel bad about it. I’m not even mad at Him for this. I was. I was angry that He would abandon me when life has taken such a toll. But I even got over that.

It’s sad to me that my relationship with God now has simply become one of accepted distance. I can’t imagine Him stepping in and helping me. I can’t pray to Him with even the slightest shred of confidence that He is going to intervene. I feel like He’s just watching, uninvolved, unaffected, unimpassioned. Just watching. Untouched by my struggles, offering only the encouragement “to just keep trying to figure it out.” Telling me -in a somewhat subtle manner-- that I’m on my own.

Just like my father.

That this would all happen at Christmas is heartbreaking. I love this time of year and for the very first time in fifty-six years I am entirely untouched by Christmas. The tree in my living room is just a thing. The Nativity scenes I see on display everywhere I look, are just figurines, barely visible through this fog, and no longer holding the sacred magic they once held.

The arrival of Jesus once moved me so deeply that I wrote an entire Advent book about it. A book I can’t even read this year. The movies I loved, the songs I sang, the lights and ornaments and traditions…have all faded. I have lost connection to the child this holiday celebrates and in doing so…the entire holiday has gone as flat as a failed souffle.

My Christmas without Jesus is drudgery. It’s painful. It’s sad and sorrowful and…pointless.

But I can’t change that right now. I have only recently, maybe in the last three days or so, begun to even have brief conversations with God. I guess that’s praying, but it isn’t very sacred. In fact, it’s been rather profane at times. I’m not mad at Him. I don’t hate God. I’ve simply accepted that, while He was infinitely concerned with my eternal salvation, my physical life and the trials I face and these hard things I’ve had to endure, simply aren’t something He involves Himself with. I don’t know if I should be worried about the fact that I feel this way, or that it doesn’t even bother me anymore.

Maybe it’s because I know what I’m missing, but I feel badly for people trying to have something of a Christmas spirit without a recognition of Christ. From my battered, jaundiced perspective, distant as I feel, I still recognize that without that essential element, this holiday is the most disappointing of all.

I’m a believer who no longer believes as much as I did. I’m a follower who no longer feels like he’s being led. My deep relationship with God has cooled. I’m a Christian at Christmas, who has lost his connection with Christ.

This has drained all the meaning from these days and left me drained as well.

    

Epiphany (of sorts): A Hopeless Romantic looks back at a difficult Christmas

It’s Wednesday December 27, 2017. Two days after Christmas. For the first time in, perhaps, my entire life, I’m glad Christmas is over.

I went home (to the Philly suburbs) as I always do at Christmas. I love my hometown and I love the sights and sounds of my childhood, but this time, for many reasons, it didn’t provide me with the usual respite from my wandering. This time, it made me feel like I’m still homeless. Homeless in the worst kind of way.

Homeless with a home.

I have a home. I have a 750-square foot townhouse that I share with my nineteen-year-old daughter. I have a good job at my alma mater. I sleep indoors and I’m rebuilding my life and I’m even starting work on my Master’s degree. But I feel like a vagabond. At Christmas, I feel like a Nomad. Like a man making yet another trip on the trade routes, through the deserts and mountains that make up this wilderness in my heart.

Christmas always gets me. I am a hopeless romantic and Christmas is the most romantic time of the entire year. This particular Christmas didn’t disappoint on that front either.

I am considerably older than my coworkers. Most of them are young married guys, with young families. There are three women on our staff of nine, one is a widow, and the other two are in their early twenties, and both got engaged this Christmas.

I am thrilled for them both. I know both of their fiancés, and they are great guys. But looking at their posts on Facebook over the last few days, made me feel a twinge of sadness.

I remember when I was those young men. I remember when I asked my (now-ex) wife to marry me. I remember when I realized that I’d only ever loved one woman enough to want to marry her and here she was…and I asked. I remember how great it felt to have a fiancé, and then how great it felt to have a wife. I married the love of my life. Sadly –as I was to find out a mere three years later—my wife did not.

She’s already divorced the second love of her life and has multiple lines in the water looking for number three. Meanwhile, I’ve licked these wounds for nineteen years and wondered if anyone, anywhere would ever make me feel as giddy, romantic, and excited as I did that day.

It’s not about her anymore…I’m as over her as a man can be and still be civil. In fact, given my despise of divorce and how much I really do love marriage, I often feel a little guilty that I am this glad to not be married to her now. Trust me…it’s not about her.

It’s about marriage.

It’s about the whole “For better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness and health” thing that I swore to her, and meant every word. I remember saying “I do” a little too soon in the exchanging of the vows, and the pastor getting a big chuckle out of it. (In my defense, he paused and I thought he was done) I couldn’t wait to say “I do.” I just wanted her to be my wife.

I remember going out in public with a wife. I remember the way it took me a few months to get used to the feeling of a wedding ring. (I’m not a jewelry wearer) I remember how much I really liked having someone at home that I had to check in with if I was going to be late, or to call and see if she needed anything on my way home from work.

I thought by now there’d be a few kids, and a few thousand memories, and friendships we’d forged over the years with other married folks. I thought maybe we’d teach a Sunday School class or host an exchange student, or buy a beach house. I thought we’d be having guests come to our house for Christmas once in a while. Instead, I am a one-man caravan up I-95 each Holiday season. All the while wondering what it would be like to have those Christmas dreams come true, doubting now that they ever will or even that they could. I admit to a touch of jealousy when I see families who have what I’d always hoped I’d have.

I stayed single all these years for several reasons, some good, some not. Devotion to my daughter was number one and I am glad I did that for her. But fear and doubt and disillusionment were all tied equally for second on that list. I suppose I thought I’d get over it. I guess I thought I’d take the chance one day. I suppose I thought that I’d meet someone else who truly took my breath away, for whom my heart beat, and without whom I simply would never feel complete again. Someone who made me a little nervous. One amazing woman who would cause my heart to skip a beat, and my hands to tremble as I pulled a black box from my pocket, slowly dropped to one knee, and asked the once-in-a-lifetime question, for the second time in my life.

But I blinked and nineteen years went by. And now I fear I’ll never find her. Maybe I was never going to find her anyway. Maybe this is just my lot in life.

But if it is, it’s a shame. Because somewhere under all this hardened, brick-wall I’ve surrounded my heart with, lives the soul of a romantic. The spark is flickering and dying, but it’s still alight just enough to remind me of how I used to be. And who. There are songs I would sing her, poems I would write her, family I would proudly introduce her to. There are places from my childhood I’d share and photo albums and names carved in trees, or written in the long-hardened cement of a sidewalk somewhere outside of Philly.

There is a light display, and a crowded table on Christmas Eve, occupied by smiling, loving faces, all of whom share my last name, or my ancestry, or both.

There is a pile of exactly the perfect Christmas presents I would have bought you if I’d have met you. There is a friendship with my daughter you could have forged, and maybe been an influence and a help to her when she was so devastated by her mom’s recent husband.

There are secrets I hold in my heart that I would have told you, had you ever shown up. Dreams and plans and hopes and successes. Whoever you are, I’ve pretty much given up on you ever finding me, or me finding you. I think we missed each other, and our concentric circles are now growing in the wrong direction…taking us a little further from each other with each moment. But if you are –or were—out there, you must have been someone special. You must have been astounding and magnificent and you were probably the most wonderfully lovely woman I was ever going to meet. You probably would have saved my life. Oh, I’m not dying, and I have no plans on doing so anytime soon. But inside, perhaps, I am…just a little each day.

Brennan Manning once said, “There are three ways to commit suicide: Take your own life, let yourself die…or live without hope.” I would never consider the first two. I fear I am already in the grips of the third.

Whoever you are…you would have saved this life of mine. You would have painted fresh color on the canvas of my heart where only grey exists now. You would have thrown open the dusty shutters and let the light in. You would have made me smile when I pulled into the driveway at night.

Maybe you’d come with kids of your own, and my longing for a full house would have been satiated. Maybe you’d become a fan of my writing, or my cooking, or my harsh attempts at singing. Maybe we’d flip some houses together and share our creativity.

Maybe you’d slip your hand inside mine when I knelt to pray for our family, and I’d feel your breath on my cheek as you leaned in to offer your input as well.

Maybe one Christmas, I’d glance across my coffee cup and see you at the other side of the table…the kids would still be asleep and the house silent for a little while. We’d both feel the warmth of our dreams coming true in a simple thing like the stillness of a Christmas morning and we’d know, without speaking, that both of us were as in love as we could ever possibly be, right then, in that moment.

But not this Christmas. Because I haven’t found you yet. And I am beginning to doubt that I ever will.

Worse still… I’m accepting that I never will.

The Ghost of Christmas that Should Have Been

On Ebenezer Scrooge’s fateful Christmas Eve, he was visited by three spirits, and they changed his life forever. The Spirits are familiar to all of us who’ve read Dickens’ book, or watched the many iterations of “Scrooge.” (My personal favorite is the 1951 version with Alastair Sim, considered by most, to be the best ever done)

They are the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghosts of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Future.

Each Christmas I find myself caught up under the spell of these three “spirits” in the form of memories, current plans, and hopes for what might one day be. But there is another Ghost I have come to recognize at Christmas. He’s a sad Ghost and He doesn’t appear to everybody, saving his hauntings only for those with regret, sorrow, or sadness at Christmas. He is the “Ghost of Christmas That Should Have Been.” He might be the most frightening of all Christmas Spirits.

He started haunting me 18 years ago, when I first got divorced. Instead of showing me shadows of what was, or what is now, or what might one day be, he taunts me with what was supposed to have been. He shows me flashes and glimpses of the Christmases I longed to spend, with the family I dreamed of having, in the home I wanted to build.

His hauntings were muffled and muted for many years, by the magic in my daughter’s eyes. When she was little, and Christmas was still very much a wonder and a spectacle and when it held its childhood excited mystery for her…this ghost was forced into the shadows. I was busy being happy with her, and because of her, and her happiness, and childish innocence banished him to the fringes.

Once in a while, he would step out of the shadows and whisper in my ear: “This isn’t how it was supposed to be” and I would feel the pain shoot through my heart. But my daughter would be smiling and I would quickly cast him aside with “But how it is right now is very good…” and he would go back into hiding. I thought maybe I’d banished him but apparently, he was just biding his time. He knew the day would come when I’d be vulnerable to his attacks and so he waited.

In recent years, he’s been more visible, more vocal, more daring in his attacks. This year…he’s been downright confrontational, right in my face, too close for me to look away. He reminds me of what my Christmas dreams were, and how far from those dreams I find myself.

He shows me visions of the wife I was supposed to have. A wife who would remain and not give up. A wife with whom I had, by this time, built a lifetime of memories with, and who knew me as I knew her. We shared knowing smiles and funny Christmas stories and we hosted parties with those we loved. She was supposed to be my best friend. She was supposed to know me better than anyone ever knew me. She was supposed to have made me better, and softened my toughness, and smoothed out my rough edges. She cheered each victory and comforted each loss, and I returned the favor in kind.

But she never showed up. Not in the 18 years that have come and gone since my divorce. She was never there to wake up to at Christmas, with impatient children knocking at our bedroom door, begging us to get up and get Christmas underway. She was never there to sneak away with and do our secret Santa buying. She never found me and all the romantic, wonderful, thoughtful gifts I would have picked out for her if only somehow, she’d appeared.

But she didn’t. She never became my best friend and knew me well enough to buy the exact, perfect present for me. I never got to unwrap a gift and be overwhelmed by just how much thought must have gone into it, and how perfect it was for me, and how she really had to know me to have seen this perfect thing in a storefront window and thought, “Craig would just love this”

She never laid in bed next to me, wishing it were Christmas morning so she could take this perfect present from its hiding spot and watch me unwrap it. She never showed up and so I have not had the experience of ever having had a perfect gift from a wife who loved me.

This ghost shows me the family I was supposed to have had. The other children. The in laws and out laws and cousins and friends who would come and go throughout the holidays, never wanting to miss time at our house. Relationships would develop and remain. Life would seem impossible without certain of these faces at our table, in our home, and in our hearts. The sort of friendships and relationships that only come from family. The kind that can never include a single man.

There was supposed to be Christmas mornings where my daughter woke to find both her parents there…not one or the other. Short of this, should have been a woman who loved her dad, and loved her as well, so that she’d have the feeling of family at Christmas, even if it was a blend.

There was supposed to be love, and memories, and excitement, and family.

But none of this ever happened and I wonder now, at this point in life, whether it ever will. I wonder if I will ever feel enough excitement about another person to want to share  my life with them. I wonder if I will ever be so loved by another that she’ll go out in search of that perfect gift, and not rest until she finds it, and be excited when she does.

I wonder if my daughter will ever see her dad in love, and see how he does this, and see a woman love him deeply. (She was only 18 months old when her mom and I divorced, so she has no knowledge of what this would look like.)

I wonder if Christmas will ever be what I dream of it being, and what I hoped it would be, now that the wonderful distraction of my daughter as a child has passed.

As a boy, I dreamed of being a parent one day and what kind of Christmas I would have for my family. Perhaps it was there that this particular Ghost of Christmas was born. Perhaps, in reality, he is a monster of my own making. I have always loved Christmas and held a high standard and a romantic notion that could have only been accomplished by a true couple…not by a single man, doing his best to raise a daughter alone.

And so, in that fertile ground, he grew, and on that fertile ground he plants his seeds of regret, disappointment, doubt, and longing. He has never ruined Christmas for me…for I am too much of a hopeless romantic and sentimentalist at Christmas for him to ever take it from me completely. But he has damaged its glow and dimmed its star. This Christmas in particular, has been hard on me in ways I’ve never experienced before.

I need to exorcise this ghost or surrender to his haunting. But I don’t know how to do either. And so, I do nothing. Nothing but enjoy Christmas as I can, and –in my quiet moments—look at his taunting and teasing with honest regret.

Of all the Ghosts of Christmas, he is the most sinister, and the one I am most powerless against.

Christmas is six days away. I have to find a way to silence this ghost before then.