pull up a chair

not so very long ago, within the reach of my old brain folders, this was the morn i had my boys set out shoes (sometimes admittedly smelly sneakers), which i filled with clementines and tinfoil-wrapped chocolates. the feast of st. nick, the jolly soul who in long-ago times filled the shoes of girls and boys with trinkets from his pouch. the original arbiter of good v. not-so-good; a lump of coal you did not want to find tucked in the toe of your wooden clog.

december, it seems, is a month punctuated with tradition. we embroider advent’s waiting, the dim day-by-day darkening with the kindled flickering of myth and lore and wonder gathered round the globe. every land, it seems, is looking for a bit of light amid the darkness.

i learned only this week of december fourth’s “barbara branch,” when the german tradition is to give the branch of a flowering tree to a barbara and await its blossoming by christmas. the story goes that barbara, who would become a saint and then later (at my tender and impressionable age of 9 or 10) be stripped of her sainthood (for reasons i never quite grasped but the good ol’ Church did it anyway), dear barbara back in medieval times was such a beauty that her wretched father locked her in a tower whenever he went away. and when she refused to marry some princely fellow, because she preferred to marry Jesus Christ (plenty of saints chose that path) he sent her off to prison, awaiting beheading. on the way to prison, so the story goes, a cherry branch snagged against her skirt, so wise and wily barbara clutched the branch and carried it along to her cell, whereupon every few days she watered it with drops from her scantly-filled drinking glass. and don’t you know that on the day she was burned at the stake and then beheaded, the branch blossomed. and so we barbaras carry on the blossoming, with branches awaiting bloom. my mother is a barbara, and she now has a dear friend where she lives who also happens to be a barbara. so this barbara brought those barbaras branches awaiting bloom. 

and so december goes. 

but really what i find myself thinking here this morning is how the sages i have come to know and love find themselves in conversation across space and time. how their wisdoms interlace and amplify, and to my mind underscore the eternal in their simple truths. 

the two i’ve drawn from my shelf this week are brian doyle, the beyond-brilliant late great essayist and longtime editor of portland magazine, who died of a brain tumor not too many years ago. his wisdoms cannily or not line up with those of dorothy day, the radical pacifist and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, devoted to the poor, the hungry, the broken, and now on the road to sainthood, though she famously protested that labelling when she once snapped: “don’t call me a saint. i don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” (a sassy saint she’ll be, patron saint of sassiness among her zillion virtues.)

i found myself pulling dear brian off my sages shelf this week, and zeroed in on this passage in particular from his magnificent one long river of song: notes on wonder (a book whose praises i once sang in the pages of the chicago tribune, back when i wrote a column called “books for the soul”): 

This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love.

he echoes the essence of dorothy’s wisdom, an epiphany of hers long etched on my heart. this simple, simple code: “by little and by little.” 

her biographer, robert ellsberg in dorothy day: selected writings, elucidates: “simply, it consisted of performing, in the presence and love of God, all the little things that make up our everyday life and contact with others. from therese [of lisieux, yet another saint, the one who inspired dorothy], dorothy learned that any act of love might contribute to the balance of love in the world, any suffering endured in love might ease the burden of others. . . we could only make use of the little things we possessed—the little faith, the little strength, the little courage. these were the loaves and fishes. we could only offer what we had, and pray that God would make the increase. it was all a matter of faith.”

what i’ve come to know, through the alchemies of age and maybe cancer, is that my one holy task here is to live by love, little by little, day by day, for as many days as i have. if i can be a little flame, if i can choose love, choose joy, choose kindness at each and every turn and each and every choice, then my swift life here will have left some mark and measure. if each one of us might tip the balance, bend the arc toward justice, then our existence holds holy purpose. the choice becomes so clear, so finely-grained focused: i aim to walk closer and closer to the holiness i was––we were all––meant to be. and to find unending bliss within.

so help me God. 

one more brian doyle: in a brilliant, brilliant essay (found in One Long River, p. 12) about two strangers holding hands as they leapt from the south tower on sept. 11, doyle wrote: “their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer i can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. it is everything we are capable of against horror and loss and death. it is what makes me believe we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.”

i don’t know why i even try to say what has been so magnificently, unforgettably uttered already. brian doyle’s truth i feel unfolding in me every blessed day. i feel those seeds breaking open in the roaring furnace that is a cancer in your lungs.

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because, why not, two Advent poems from emily d. or at least two poems worth contemplating in this season of anticipation, of heightened awaiting, of soul on the lookout for wonder coming….(Advent reflection on the poems, from my friends at the Salt Project, down below, but first, emily, the belle of amherst:)

“The Infinite a sudden Guest” (1309)

The Infinite a sudden Guest
Has been assumed to be —
But how can that stupendous come
Which never went away?

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant — “ (1263)

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

+ Emily Dickinson

and here’s what my friends at Salt Project say about both…

These two Dickinson poems are perfect meditations for Advent:

The first as a provocative play on one of the season’s mysteries (How can we “wait” for someone who is also present to us, and in us, even as we wait?); and the second as a window into the many ways the Advent and Christmas stories testify to a God who comes in ways that are somewhat softened, accessible, “slant,” camouflaged, even hidden.

An ordinary baby in an ordinary backwater town, signaled by a star so faint that only Magi can spot it (Herod’s assassins can’t!), and announced not to the powerful in Jerusalem but to nameless shepherds on a forgotten hillside, watching their flocks by night.

It’s as the old carol has it: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail th’ incarnate Deity!” (that’s from “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”). Veiled, hidden, not so God disappears but precisely so God may appear — or rather, so we may see. The Truth must dazzle gradually…

what simple sages’ truths have you found echoing of late?

blessings to teresa p for teaching me all about BBs, barbara branches!