Midlife Meditation

A first for this family. Somehow it came. To Scrooge, to the Grinch, and even to curmudgeonly me: Christmas came, and not a moment too soon. It's been a season, a year, a decade of growing ugliness, of good will becoming as endangered as summer ice in the Arctic. I could write of the ironic rightness of the way Americans have come to celebrate the birth of a poor child in a small Middle Eastern village, occupied by a global superpower, by spending billions of dollars on gewgaws and tchotchkes, screaming at each other over parking places at shopping malls, fighting tooth, nail, and bullet over perceived bargains and limited-availability toys, and how this so-very-American holiday has hegemonized so much of the rest of the world, drowning out far more appropriate traditions of generosity and piety--but I've done that. In fact, I've been doing that for most of my adult life. And I don't want to, because in some inexplicable, mysterious way, Christmas has gotten ...

And what happened, then? Well, in Whoville they say - that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day. And then - the true meaning of Christmas came through, and the Grinch found the strength of *ten* Grinches, plus two! I've been such a Grinch. The original purpose of this blog was to provide me with a platform for venting. Since leaving the ministry in January 2000, I'd been without a pulpit. After more than a decade of being able to say my piece in front of a captive audience at least weekly, I was now reduced to guest preaching, no more than monthly at first, eventually tapering off to not at all. I wrote occasional essays, submitted some for publication, and even made it onto the Oregonian 's op ed page twice (though the second one was only in their online edition). Even when I was guest preaching, I was doing my best to behave, tempering everything I had to say to keep it from shocking my listeners. So when, after thirteen years of bottling it ...