So...this isn't your typical Christmas fodder. You can save it for some other day if you're not up for loose ends today; I seriously don't mind.
And I did start this on the 24th. I don't know why Blogger wouldn't save the draft properly.
_
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.
2012 has been a big year for transition, from the kickoff in January ("A third year of slogging through adjuncting, and a third consecutive semester of having to live off my parents to greater or lesser degrees? Thanks, but I'm going to try temp work") to deciding with Albert in late February that I was going to be the one to move (although, honestly, I think I remember the moment when I really started surrendering to that probable eventuality, and that'd been back in, like, October 2011), to the temp job from late March to mid-October (my first forty-hour-a-week job that lasted longer than fourteen days!), to the late-October leaving of Binghamton. Now, almost two months into trying to become a New Englander, I've interviewed for a (very-possibly-a-long-shot) full-time, tenure-track job at a community college (technically not as faculty, but as something not unlike it in some ways). This either means that I'm headed, against my expectations, back into tutoring and teaching and some other things, or I'm going to still be jobless in January with about three weeks to decide what to do before my New York State insurances become void.
So it's also been a big few months, if not year, for self-absorption. I'm sorry about that, if you've noticed. Thus the carol above: I think it was the first one this season to actually make me feel like I was addressing God, instead of just coasting (or, that downfall stemming through my many consecutive years in singing groups, performing) through the carol, or the hymn, or half-listening to the sermon, in the midst of everything else I was trying to think about and process. I don't feel a lot of day-to-day anxiety, but I certainly have been distracted by a lot of metaphorical shiny (and not-so-shiny) objects - as well as sometimes some self-righteous crankiness.
Plus, it's been poignant to finally enjoy time with my immediate family more, just as I'm moving away. And it's hard not to want to protect them, too, except that I keep not even trying to do that even to the extent that I can. For 2012 was also a year in which my heroin-addict cousin died of an overdose, another cousin allegedly strangled his wife to death (I don't know whether the trial's yet gone through), another cousin had her husband separate from her and had some family stuff go down, and an uncle had a completely unexpected mental-illness episode (never happened before) that his wife (my aunt) appears to be using as an excuse to separate from him. This is the year in which I began to see (even without any big immediate reason to do so) that someday my parents really will die, and as they celebrate thirty-five years together and shop together for new wedding bands (which looked so sweet until I found out that my mom doesn't actually necessarily want them, and she and Dad don't really agree on how the buying process ought to go, and they've been trying and failing for months now to commit to some decision), I think of all the other things in the extended family that have fallen apart over the past year or two, and of how apparently no family without God's grace is either safe from or equipped to rightly handle tragedy, and I wonder how close we're coming to some edge. I have wondered on and off, for some time now, how I could even begin to witness to an extended family who hardly knows me, really, and shows no sign that they have any idea, in some cases, that they're not Christians already, or what Jesus and following him are really like. I look at the swath of brokenness, and I am overwhelmed by my complete inability to form words around everything in my head, and I fall guiltily, damagingly silent.
Which is not, of course, to say that nothing good has happened this year. Of course it has. Leah and I reconnected. I got a full-time temp job. I had a really good Easter and a nice birthday. My parents moved to a house I like, and we all celebrated their thirty-fifth anniversary. Ife got engaged. We had a gorgeous autumn. I got to go live near Albert. Jessica got married, and Albert and I saw Ken, Julie, Dave, and Christa for the first time in (depending on whom you're talking about) years or ever. Joe and Andrea had a baby. Lots of other stuff, too.
So my world has been pretty big, and I often haven't done a great job of handling it. But I'm trying to trust God, and I'm interested to see what happens.
Merry Christmas to my new friends from property management, both the ones I managed to give nicknames to (Ben, Jake, Vince, Cal, etc.) and the ones I didn't (like Yosra, whom I pretty much wanted to give the alias of Shoshana even though that doesn't reflect her background). And to Lisa, Janell, Sarah M., Abby C. (wish I could have gotten to know her better before the move!), Patricia, Mona, and Ryan. Merry Christmas to sponsor children and especially to military members everywhere - if Erik is still in Bahrain, as it appears he is, I hope his holiday is especially bright.
May God grant all of us peace in the new year.
12.25.2012
12.15.2012
In Progress
Because I don't know what to say on the other blog (ugh, if I ever successfully update it again) about this, and am trying to decide whether I can really suitably post anything about such things at all.
Grace is not her real first name, but it is part of her name.
The last Saturday before Thanksgiving, Albert and I got in his car on that day's sunny midmorning, he in a slightly mismatching suit jacket and dress-pant combo, I in a weirdly-cut black skirt (a little help from the internet suggests that it may have had a fishtail-style hem) that was the only semi-suitable one I had clean, plus a normal dress shirt. We remembered things to read beforehand, but I'd forgotten a snack. I consoled myself that, if all else failed, I could fall back on a cough drop.
We were heading to the funeral of someone we'd never met. Grace, older sister to two church friends of ours who're slightly younger than we (I think M. is twenty-five, and R. a few years younger than that), had died during the previous week under complicated circumstances, and attending the service (besides the card we'd somewhat belatedly sent) constituted more or less the extent of what we really knew to do for them. M. and R. belong to a tricky friendship class - friends towards whom you feel warmly, but with whom you haven't yet hung out in a formalized way; the ones you sit with at church functions or have been around for some weeks in a Bible study, but have never yet had over for a game night, or gone with for a post-church lunch. Albert also knew their mother from working with her for a fairly short time, but didn't really know her very well, either.
We arrived early at the church that Grace had attended - early enough that the only people up in the sanctuary were the members of the worship team. Among them were M. himself, who's good with a guitar, and Heather, who with her husband Adam (who I think was running sound in the booth) had hosted the Bible study at which I'd met M. in the first place last summer. I was maybe a little surprised - and yet not - that M. had chosen to sing. I might have wanted to myself, in his place; the trouble would have been actually getting my body to do it. When Heather Rivera had died back in college, it was one thing to practice a certain song or two with Chamber Singers for the memorial, another to actually sing without choking up.
But when the service started some time later - the sanctuary full by then, with chairs in the aisles because the pews weren't enough - the worship team sang true. By that time Albert and I had read the program; he'd noted how very close in age he and Grace had been, born in the same year.
Jenny, another friend of ours, had joined us at the near end of the pew, and had apologized in advance at the likelihood that she'd cry. I'd replied that I had tissues; eventually, as the service progressed, she did take some. So, a bit, did I - probably some combination of the dry-faced brothers (reminding me of a memorial long ago, John steady before Fernando's sobbing girlfriend - some people do tearless grief so bravely that it adds to my tears) and trying to imagine the unimaginable, what it would be like for my family to lose my only sibling.
About all I remember of the singing was the odd tableau of a swell of song, the thought of how we looked from right to left along the pew: Albert singing full-voiced, worshipful through sadness; me singing when I could around my tight throat; Jenny silent, either unable or not wanting to give voice to the moment at all.
Grace's body had been taxed by more than the diabetic coma that ultimately overcame her. She'd also struggled with an eating disorder and with heroin addiction - both, as I understand it, contributors to what had happened - and there was probably still another factor in the case, this one very private (the family does not know that Albert and I know), over which I can only draw a curtain.
With deaths like that, the family has a choice to make, from a wide variety of possibilities, about what story it wants to tell about the one who's passed. And I say with deep respect and admiration that Grace's family and pastor told hers vulnerably, evenly, and well. They traced out Grace's personality - her authenticity, her stubbornness - and the directions she took when, years ago, she was slammed with juvenile diabetes and her parents' divorce within months of each other. They recounted difficulties, hope, progress, relapse, and many things to love about her. Among the paintings (her own work) displayed along the altar, the sermon and eulogy sketched and colored her in: a troubled follower of God, fighting against a body of death.
Christ was her hope, and is her family's. They, respectfully but undeniably, said so, compassionately, assuring the gathered (as M. did) that they weren't trying to capitalize on the moment, but doing their best to give a reason for that hope. It was a gutsy move, and the right one.
After the service, Albert and I waited in a long line, which wrapped around the corner and down the stairs, to the fellowship hall. When we got there, the family was there to receive us all, and Albert and I tried to say helpful things before gratefully having the meal. Albert spoke to Grace's mother, proofreader to proofreader, praising the eulogy's content - offering, if she wanted it, a brief chance to be a craftsworker for a moment, instead of a bereft parent. We hugged the guys and offered to hang out sometime if they wanted to get out of the house. They haven't taken us up on it, but we hope it was some comfort to know that they could.
In the days since then, we've seen M. at church things - he's back to worship team, back to talking to us after the service. He seems to be doing all right. It's hard to say; we know him only so well.
But today, almost a month later, twenty-seven people were gunned down; twenty children's families are left to, perhaps, stare at a pile of presents and sob; and again we're all trying to find something to say, something to somehow encompass a dizzying expanse of heartache, find a way to resolve the unresolvable. How do you speak to someone of a perfect Answer when the Answer is so big you don't always know how He works? I don't dare say as much as I should, but some things are so true that I do want to say them - here, at least - about floods and tsunamis, about drug-laced tragedies, about the slow desolation of so many people I should love so much more truly: what I said to J. last month, both her divorced parents in the hospital from separate accidents, her own marriage in pieces, the only words that seemed to be of use to her, of all the ones I said: this is a good world that was broken. And what Reverend Matt wrote this afternoon about the shooting: this is why Jesus came, and this is why he will come again.
Grace is not her real first name, but it is part of her name.
The last Saturday before Thanksgiving, Albert and I got in his car on that day's sunny midmorning, he in a slightly mismatching suit jacket and dress-pant combo, I in a weirdly-cut black skirt (a little help from the internet suggests that it may have had a fishtail-style hem) that was the only semi-suitable one I had clean, plus a normal dress shirt. We remembered things to read beforehand, but I'd forgotten a snack. I consoled myself that, if all else failed, I could fall back on a cough drop.
We were heading to the funeral of someone we'd never met. Grace, older sister to two church friends of ours who're slightly younger than we (I think M. is twenty-five, and R. a few years younger than that), had died during the previous week under complicated circumstances, and attending the service (besides the card we'd somewhat belatedly sent) constituted more or less the extent of what we really knew to do for them. M. and R. belong to a tricky friendship class - friends towards whom you feel warmly, but with whom you haven't yet hung out in a formalized way; the ones you sit with at church functions or have been around for some weeks in a Bible study, but have never yet had over for a game night, or gone with for a post-church lunch. Albert also knew their mother from working with her for a fairly short time, but didn't really know her very well, either.
We arrived early at the church that Grace had attended - early enough that the only people up in the sanctuary were the members of the worship team. Among them were M. himself, who's good with a guitar, and Heather, who with her husband Adam (who I think was running sound in the booth) had hosted the Bible study at which I'd met M. in the first place last summer. I was maybe a little surprised - and yet not - that M. had chosen to sing. I might have wanted to myself, in his place; the trouble would have been actually getting my body to do it. When Heather Rivera had died back in college, it was one thing to practice a certain song or two with Chamber Singers for the memorial, another to actually sing without choking up.
But when the service started some time later - the sanctuary full by then, with chairs in the aisles because the pews weren't enough - the worship team sang true. By that time Albert and I had read the program; he'd noted how very close in age he and Grace had been, born in the same year.
Jenny, another friend of ours, had joined us at the near end of the pew, and had apologized in advance at the likelihood that she'd cry. I'd replied that I had tissues; eventually, as the service progressed, she did take some. So, a bit, did I - probably some combination of the dry-faced brothers (reminding me of a memorial long ago, John steady before Fernando's sobbing girlfriend - some people do tearless grief so bravely that it adds to my tears) and trying to imagine the unimaginable, what it would be like for my family to lose my only sibling.
About all I remember of the singing was the odd tableau of a swell of song, the thought of how we looked from right to left along the pew: Albert singing full-voiced, worshipful through sadness; me singing when I could around my tight throat; Jenny silent, either unable or not wanting to give voice to the moment at all.
Grace's body had been taxed by more than the diabetic coma that ultimately overcame her. She'd also struggled with an eating disorder and with heroin addiction - both, as I understand it, contributors to what had happened - and there was probably still another factor in the case, this one very private (the family does not know that Albert and I know), over which I can only draw a curtain.
With deaths like that, the family has a choice to make, from a wide variety of possibilities, about what story it wants to tell about the one who's passed. And I say with deep respect and admiration that Grace's family and pastor told hers vulnerably, evenly, and well. They traced out Grace's personality - her authenticity, her stubbornness - and the directions she took when, years ago, she was slammed with juvenile diabetes and her parents' divorce within months of each other. They recounted difficulties, hope, progress, relapse, and many things to love about her. Among the paintings (her own work) displayed along the altar, the sermon and eulogy sketched and colored her in: a troubled follower of God, fighting against a body of death.
Christ was her hope, and is her family's. They, respectfully but undeniably, said so, compassionately, assuring the gathered (as M. did) that they weren't trying to capitalize on the moment, but doing their best to give a reason for that hope. It was a gutsy move, and the right one.
After the service, Albert and I waited in a long line, which wrapped around the corner and down the stairs, to the fellowship hall. When we got there, the family was there to receive us all, and Albert and I tried to say helpful things before gratefully having the meal. Albert spoke to Grace's mother, proofreader to proofreader, praising the eulogy's content - offering, if she wanted it, a brief chance to be a craftsworker for a moment, instead of a bereft parent. We hugged the guys and offered to hang out sometime if they wanted to get out of the house. They haven't taken us up on it, but we hope it was some comfort to know that they could.
In the days since then, we've seen M. at church things - he's back to worship team, back to talking to us after the service. He seems to be doing all right. It's hard to say; we know him only so well.
But today, almost a month later, twenty-seven people were gunned down; twenty children's families are left to, perhaps, stare at a pile of presents and sob; and again we're all trying to find something to say, something to somehow encompass a dizzying expanse of heartache, find a way to resolve the unresolvable. How do you speak to someone of a perfect Answer when the Answer is so big you don't always know how He works? I don't dare say as much as I should, but some things are so true that I do want to say them - here, at least - about floods and tsunamis, about drug-laced tragedies, about the slow desolation of so many people I should love so much more truly: what I said to J. last month, both her divorced parents in the hospital from separate accidents, her own marriage in pieces, the only words that seemed to be of use to her, of all the ones I said: this is a good world that was broken. And what Reverend Matt wrote this afternoon about the shooting: this is why Jesus came, and this is why he will come again.
12.10.2012
So As Not to Leave You Hanging
I am, in fact, currently working a short-term temp job at a decent place that pays good money. So there was something in not getting the other job after all. And by "something" I mean "this is a lot better."
And now, having internet-ed my evening away and then some, I am going to bed so I can get up and work tomorrow.
And now, having internet-ed my evening away and then some, I am going to bed so I can get up and work tomorrow.