don’t panic

Grace:

• elegance and beauty of movement or expression
• seemliness: a sense of propriety and consideration for others
• (Christian theology) the free and unmerited favor or beneficence of God

For most of my life I have had a fascination with grace. Like chapters of a book, it has manifested itself to me in different ways at different times in my life. When I was still in middle school I learned to juggle. I’m not sure what got it started, but I would sit in my room and practice for hours while I listened to music. There was just something magic about the way the balls would complete each complex pattern, dancing seemingly on their own. My hands performed the motions that were too fast and subtle to think about without flubbing a catch. They were able to create a thing of beauty that always surprised me in it’s intricacy and simple impossibility. Objects just never did those things in nature. It was grace; grace of motion and mind that allowed that relaxing rhythm. It was the letting go of conscious control so that the unconscious could create and perform the dance that made me laugh aloud for the sheer joy in celebrating gravity.

As a young adult, I was presented the Christian faith, and shown the spiritual aspects of grace. Unmerited favor. All of God’s work can be summed up in those two words, the power and implications of which can not be fully explored in a hundred lifetimes.

In college, I learned yet another state of grace from readings in philosophy, logic, astronomy, and my own reading for personal enjoyment. I learned about culture, and what it meant to be civilized. For perhaps the first time in my life I really started to look at the world from a much larger perspective. I studied biology and saw the grace of all living things and the complex dance of the various ecosystems that sustain our world. I realized that civilization did not simply apply to humans.

Today, I find that it is that first state of grace that intrigues me the most.  I have accepted my favor with God in faith, and although I am still mystified and continuously surprised by the complexity of our world, I have had to let go of some of my youthful ideals for the reality of mature life. But in everything I do, every motion, there is still that rhythmic dance against gravity. I see it in the way I balance when having to pull myself up off the floor after playing with my daughter, and I feel it in the flip of a pancake on the griddle.

Although I have never spoken of it with my family, I constantly try to find that love of motion in everyday life. There is a flow like water when I rise from the toys on the floor, and an unconscious release as I toss a plastic cup spinning through the air to be caught impossibly just before I fill it with milk for my daughter. Balance and counter balance. Awareness of position and place. The weight and hardness of the world around me.

Recently, my wife has taken to doing studies in mindfulness as a part of her therapy. She is learning to be aware of herself and what she feels… and why she feels it. It’s all very zen, but maybe that’s the point. Grace gives us something that is beyond ourselves. It lends to us a connection to the world that we otherwise have neither the skill nor the merit to acquire. It lets us dance with God, with nature, gravity, and each other. It gifts to us the impossible.

When I was a kid, Christmas was the time when the family got together and shared gifts.  Yeah, yeah… it also had something to do with the birth of Christ, but let’s get real here. When you were five, did you really wake up Christmas morning thinking of our Savior’s birth? No, you hustled out to the pagan bush to check that year’s haul. You were giddy about the ~toys~, wide eyed with excitement and happiness that you would have new things to play with.

As we got older, my sister and I cared a little bit less about the plastic goodies, and started enjoying the time with family more. Christmas had become a time when we did a great big breakfast and sat around and actually talked to friends and relatives we might not have seen in a while. Instead of a lot of little toys, there were usually a few larger ones, and because our interests had changed (carefully shaped and molded by modern-day marketing) the presents were more expensive.

As an adult, Christmas has a completely different meaning and feeling for me. This is obviously to be expected, but I’m actually a bit surprised by what Christmas isn’t. For starters, I have my own wife and child to share gifts with, so it’s not about ME. It’s not about what I get because frankly, I really don’t want anything.

“Impossible,” you scoff. Everyone wants something. Sure. But the things that I want today are no longer molded from plastic or capable of being packaged in a box. Today, I live in a small apartment that is already terribly overcrowded with Stuff, and anything that comes in only makes it more so. Our situation financially is tenuous at best, which means that no matter how you slice it, I am not going to be able to give to my own child the kind of Christmas that I had growing up. That hurts a bit. We all want to give our kids a better life than we had and frankly, looking back on it, my sister and I had it pretty good. We were raised in a middle-income family during a period of minimal world war, in perhaps the most advanced and prosperous country in the world. We never lacked for anything. Today, it’s a little different. Today, the economy is not doing very well, unemployment is high, times are insanely tight, and our prospects for the immediate future are a little bleak. But we’re making it, and that’s something, because a lot of people aren’t.

Sometime in the last decade or so, the whole gift-giving aspect of Christmas has started to seem a little trite. And it’s not just me. Everyone I talk to seems to feel at least a little, that Christmas gifts are more of a chore now than a joy. It stopped being something we looked forward to, and became a task that we needed to do to keep the status quo. We go through the motions of giving almost out of obligation. But for what?… Santa? Christ? The memory of Christmas past?

For my wife, the Christmas season brings with it a whole bunch of really bad memories. She never had the care-free childhood that I did, and for her, a great deal of Christmas is a horrible nightmare that comes with stress and anxiety (beyond the normal frenetic orgy of greed that takes place at malls all over the country). She has to work extremely hard to separate the happy aspects of the season from the bad of her past.

My daughter, on the other hand, is perpetually trapped in the mindset of that excited five year-old. Even though her body is entering into puberty, she lives forever in the self-centered stage of psychological development where everything, and I mean everything, is about her. She is egotistic to the point of cruelty (as any five year-old can be) but backed by the angst (and weight) of a pre-teen adolescent. We have worked hard to try and instill in her the religious aspects of Christmas, and some of it she understands at least at a rudimentary level, but ultimately, it’s the toys. And why not? It was for me when I was mentally five. What right do I have to deny her that?

This year in particular, we really don’t have the financial stability to do the rounds of gifts to our friends and family that we have done in the past. It’s going to be hard enough for my wife and I to have presents appear under the tree for our daughter on Christmas morning, let alone each other. We fall back to gifts of “creativity”, such as pictures and food for family and friends, but even that brings it’s own set of stresses. I look more and more toward just being with my larger family and sharing a tale or two over a cup of apple cider than I do the rest of “it”. I find myself almost repulsed at the overbearing commercials on television for Black Friday sales, and the mere mention of Cyber Monday makes me cringe. The whole idea of “Christmas gifts” has become a negative. Perhaps it’s because people ask me, “What do you want for Christmas?” To which, my honest answer is – A job. Peace for my wife. An end to the medical bills. A future for my daughter. — But no one can realistically give me any of those gifts, and so I am forced to reply with something sickeningly materialistic — “Gift cards are good… Maybe WalMart?” Because I know there will be things I need from there, even if it’s just groceries. Deep down, I really really miss the days when I could have answered truthfully with something as simple as “Battleship”, or “a new bike!”