by Christie Purifoy | Dec 20, 2011 | Advent, Family, God's Love
In our family, we always celebrate Christmas with a birthday cake. Sometimes, birthday pie.
No, it isn’t in honor of Jesus. We don’t sing “happy birthday to Jesus,” appropriate as that may be. We sing to our own birthday boy. My husband. Born on Christmas Day … well, not too many years ago.
Three days after Christmas and birthday we celebrate fifteen years of marriage.
Once upon a time, we raided a Christmas tree lot the day after Christmas, collecting free decorations for our reception space. Once upon a time, we filled clear glass Christmas ornaments with birdseed. Once upon a time we ordered a few simple arrangements from the florist, grateful the church was already full of poinsettias. A Christmas wedding.
Fifteen years later, I know that marriage is no fairy tale. I know that it’s harder than we imagined it could be. I know that the children we count as blessings also make it very difficult for us to talk to each other at our own dinner table. Last night, with the kids distracted by a movie in the upstairs playroom, we actually sat down to eat without bothering to let them know that food was on the table. They figured it out eventually, but, in the meantime, oh joy! ten minutes of quiet conversation. Ten minutes to remember who we once were and who we will be again someday.
Perhaps, marriage is no fairy tale. Perhaps, there is no happily ever after. And yet … I don’t speak this truth out of disappointment but out of gratitude. Fifteen years ago it was romance. Today, it’s love.
It’s a husband who says he’s sorry. It’s a wife who cooks dinner even when she has a chest cold (though not, necessarily, with a good attitude). It’s a husband who wakes up every single night to soothe a baby who has long outgrown babyhood but still can’t quite manage a full night’s sleep.
It is love in the gritty details. Love that still puts twinkly lights on a Christmas tree and is grateful to accept a free poinsettia after the holiday concert. Love that dreams dreams about the future at a table sticky with maple-syrup fingerprints.
Love in the flesh.
God with us.
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 19, 2011 | Advent, Jesus, Poetry
Who else but Hopkins to wake us up, to dazzle our eyes and ears, and to fill us with expectation? A poem for you on this final Monday of Advent:
from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
Now burn, new born to the world,
Doubled-natured name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered He in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 18, 2011 | Advent, prayer
A prayer for the fourth Sunday of Advent.
Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
from The Book of Common Prayer
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 17, 2011 | Advent, Art, Jesus, Music
O come, Thou Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, O come, Thou Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai’s height,
In ancient times did’st give the Law,
In cloud, and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 16, 2011 | Advent, book of quotations, Waiting
“Waiting is open-ended. Open-ended waiting is hard for us because we tend to wait for something very concrete, for something that we wish to have. Much of our waiting is filled with wishes: ‘I wish that I would have a job. I wish that the weather would be better. I wish that the pain would go.’ We are full of wishes, and our waiting easily gets entangled in those wishes. For this reason, a lot of our waiting is not open-ended. Instead, our waiting is a way of controlling the future. We want the future to go in a very specific direction, and if this does not happen we are disappointed and can even slip into despair. That is why we have such a hard time waiting: we want to do the things that will make the desired events take place. Here we can see how wishes tend to be connected with fears.
But Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary were not filled with wishes. They were filled with hope. Hope is something very different. Hope is trusting that something will be fulfilled, but fulfilled according to the promises and not just according to our wishes. Therefore, hope is always open-ended.”
– Henri Nouwen, “A Spirituality of Waiting”
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 15, 2011 | Advent, Chicago, Waiting
When my life is in waiting mode, I sometimes wish I could go to bed and just sleep for a few months. Oblivion seems so much more appealing than the hard, day-to-day of waiting.
Waiting is painful, and it often feels pointless too. So much so, that I fantasize about hitting some kind of cosmic fast-forward button.
The firstborn feels it too. For weeks now she’s been murmuring the same refrain: “I wish that today was Christmas Eve!” From my grown-up perspective, I can clearly see that she, in her impatience, is wishing for the lesser. The not quite-as-good.
I always tell her, “No! You don’t want that. It would mean that Christmas is almost over.”
What I’m trying to say, but can never quite convince her of, is that Christmas will certainly come, so why wish away all of the good that happens in the meantime? The daily Advent calendar, the classroom parties, the cookie baking. It may not be what we’re waiting for, but it is good nonetheless. And Christmas will come. Speeding it up doesn’t make it any more of a sure thing.
Other times, waiting is less enjoyable. That’s when I fantasize about becoming a modern-day Rip Van Winkle. God, just wake me up when it’s all over. Wake me up when it gets good.
This is when age comes in handy. It’s good to no longer be eight years old. Because I can remember.
I can remember the painful waiting of our first few married years. All we wanted was to leave Texas and live in a big city. We had exciting dreams but felt painfully cramped by our current circumstances. An uninspiring white box of an apartment. The heat and humidity of a Texas river valley. The fact that we couldn’t go anywhere unless we started up the car.
Moving to Chicago was a dream fulfilled, and the magic of it never really wore off. I could still feel it even ten years later. There was our corner apartment in a converted jazz-age luxury hotel. Our windows were at tree-top height, and the views included the lake and the museum’s grand front lawn. There were the honey locust trees that gave every neighborhood street a golden canopy each October. There was a downtown skyline that glittered, and a lake that sometimes looked like a wind-swept arctic wilderness. And there was snow! But best of all, we could walk everywhere.
I could hardly step outside my door without being grateful that God had brought us to this place. I would often marvel to myself that this – this! – is what he’d had in mind all those years of our waiting. The friends. The church. The old, ivy-covered buildings. The bookstores like underground caves stuffed full of treasure. It was good, but it was made even better because we had longed for it before we ever even knew exactly where it could be found.
I remember these things and know that it is precisely the discomfort of waiting that urges us forward into the plans God has prepared for us. The people. The places. We long for them before we even know their names. But this is good and necessary. Because when the things of God are finally revealed in our lives … we recognize them. We know them. And we know exactly who to thank.
“Many, O Lord my God, are the wonders you have done. The things you planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell of them, they would be too many to declare.”
Psalm 40:5
