The annual angst filled holiday message

What is it with me and holidays?

Its not just the big ones its like all of them, but the big ones... or rather the family ones are the worst.

On the way to church tonight all I could think about was what I would say if I had a second before I died. I imagined it happening on the way to church, imagined it being the perfect time, since as far as I know I am at peace with everyone and everything in my life. It seemed only natural to be hit by another car or have my own slide on some ice and I might be in a coma for a few weeks and I might die some time around my birthday.
But I wanted everyone to know it was ok... and the words that I came up with were not the normal ones I think about but something more like
"God gave me the gift of seeing you through his eyes for a bit, and oh how beautiful you are, oh ow much I love you!"

but it didn't happen.

I made it to the small church, dark and quiet. Waited there for the people to show.
It was a small gathering but as large as we ever have. I was in a weird mood, contemplative maybe, or maybe just in my head... but from the first song I knew I was discontented.

"Oh, come, oh, come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel! "

And all I could think about were the captives of the current state of Israel, the people around the world waiting for some savior who has not come. Christians have lost all meaning of what it meant originally to believe in a savior, it was to believe in the ending of your misery. Christ for most Christians throughout time is not that, but rather the promise that this life is not eternal, that there might be something better... and I don't believe that we should wait.

So interpreting that song through the Spirit of Truth lens, means recognizing that God is with us now. Which I believe, but I don't feel it on these holy nights. I feel the absence, or rather the work undone. These holy holidays feel broken, like my family, I feel the loss more than the wholeness that is promised. I feel for the suffering who cannot celebrate, I feel a need to embrace so strongly that I shut down... I withdraw and its always this way.

Every holiday its melancholy mike, angsty boy, selfish if not sad... and tonight as the service went on I realized that part of it really was just sadness. Almost hidden and yet so heavy... by the end of the service I cried for the loss of my Grampa, because these small dark christmas eve services remind me of him, and though I believed in them very little at the time, I knew it meant something to be there... and it never will again. So I cried for my gramps. Cried for lack of fully authentic episcopal regimented traditions (which tonight certainly was not).
Cried, as I believe I cried then, every holiday saddened by the distance between my family, saddened by the extra hardship, the unsaid things that couldn't be said like "I miss you" or "I love you" or "things shouldn't have happened that way" (at the very least). That feeling that young children have when they have divorced parents where when they are with one, they want the other until they are with the other and realize they want both and it won't ever happen...
Cried like maybe I cried when my grandmother died, not because I knew her well, or loved her well, but because my father did. Because there is a hole in his heart where the love he exchanged with his mother was kept, and now its bigger with my grampa gone too... and in her case, Christmas was when she died so though he was with us, he still seemed somewhat hurt all the time.

But there is something else there too...
Its that whole cheesy rejoice! thing, that whole "Merry Christmas" thing that doesn't look lightly upon my scroogery. The anxious shopping, the guilt and pleasantries, bah humbug.

Rejoice for your salvation? or rejoice for your materialism? or rejoice for your desire to fit in?

Why are these days different? Either rejoice for your reasons daily or perhaps in the moment or shut up.

Fake merriment for what? Bah humbug.

If the point is to take a moment to love your family or your god, then why plasticize it? Why gift wrap it? Why even make it sacred as if to say the other days aren't...


But today I was fed by the Lebanese. Lunch from Emily's and dinner from Soho, I am glad they come in so many varieties or I would not get to eat. It struck me my family is dependent on a small restaurant for all we have left of our traditional ethnicity. True each family has a recipe or two, but rarely do they make them... so its all about Emily's.
I wonder if the people there know about families like mine. Know that they carry a weight for us that if dropped would mean ties severed finally.

It makes me wonder and it makes me cry to be so American now.