April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
REFLECTION
Advent memories: Joel, Leo and me
On the last day of college classes before our exams began, a small group of friends and I would gather at a corner table in the cafeteria with coffee, tea or hot chocolate, and we would wait for our classmate Joel to arrive and settle himself.
We would grow quiet as Joel gathered himself, and, with his eyes aglow and fervor in his voice, he would begin: "One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was 12 or whether it snowed for 12 days and 12 nights when I was six."
Joel lifted us, on the wings of his memory, back into Dylan Thomas's magical poem, "A Child's Christmas in Wales."
Joel told the story as if it were his own, the timbre of his voice perfectly pitched, his inflections shifting from the narrator to the voices of the different children, children charged with the excitement of snow that was "shaken from white wash buckets down the sky" and settled on all, including "the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards." Joel transported us with his voice, his eyes and his expressions.
We were all one with the speaker now, and Joel's voice seemed so pure and lyrical as he said the closing words of the poem: "Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."
*
The anticipation in my college years of hearing Joel's rendition of "A Child's Christmas in Wales" I felt with as much intensity but on a different level when my brother John and I as kids would wait for my brother Leo, who was a priest, to arrive home on Christmas day.
We were his family, so he would shower us with wonderful gifts: as little kids, trucks, trains and puzzles; as older kids, musical instruments and sports equipment. Leo was like Santa Claus; he was the principal reason for our "child's Christmas in Raymertown."
I began to see Leo differently when he would, on his day off, drive us to and from our piano lessons - and later, when he suggested to me as a senior in high school that I might want to think about college rather than the military.
His presence in my life began to take on a deeper meaning when he would arrive at least once a month at my college to take me out to dinner or a show - and then drive the three hours home at midnight. During my first year of teaching, when I became very depressed that I was not going to succeed, he came to visit me and told me about his first year as a priest and how he had gotten so discouraged, but had persevered and weathered the storm.
He said I could do it, too - and I did. Leo was a brother in the best sense, and I had come to see that his caring and love for me had helped me to clarify my direction and values. He was Christ coming into my life.
*
Leo gave me a more profound sense of what the Spirit coming into one's life can mean, but there is a moment in my distant childhood that I can link to my own concept of the season of Advent - that most beautiful and profound time of the Christian year.
As a child, I did not see each day of the Advent season as one step closer to the birth of the Christ child, but I did have one moment when words helped me realize in my soul what Advent meant.
In those days, when I was very young, we went to midnight Mass. My father would warm the car up - and even with that, we would have blankets wrapped around us - to drive to our little country church of St. George. I remember sitting in the pew between my brother and my mother, cold and a little bit sleepy, listening to the Latin incantations.
Then came a moment right after communion when the church grew quiet and Frank Meron, leader of our small choir, began to sing a hymn. As he sang, I felt my spirit lift, and whatever spiritual sense can consume a five-year-old, I felt that night.
"O holy night/the stars are brightly shining/It is the night of the dear Savior's birth./Long lay the world/in sin and error pining/Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth./A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices/ For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!/Fall on your knees/Oh, hear the angel voices/O night divine./O night when Christ was born./O night divine/O night divine."
On the ride home, wrapped in blankets, I felt the close and holy darkness.[[In-content Ad]]
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