Snow, silence, and a holy kind of loss
On the first Christmas Eve of Covid, the church I served as pastor at that time joined our next-door-neighbor Methodists for a joint service in Westside Park in the heart of Champaign, Ill.
The service was perfectly pitiful and oddly beautiful in a Charlie Brown way. Bitter wind from lead skies careened through barren branches. The service drew a sparse, bundled crowd.
We resembled a bank-robber convention in our face masks.
I was asked to read the Nativity story. Remember how breathing into a face mask steamed up your glasses? I could barely make out the words smeared on the page. I felt like a beginning reader, sounding out each word, hooking phrases together like cars of a fragile, toy train.
Single verses of hymns cued from the Methodist church’s carillon across State Street echoed to the hard ground like metal hubcaps. When it came time in the service to light individual candles from the Christ candle, gusts of wind wreaked havoc.
The Christ candle blew out so many times we stopped relighting it. Somebody said the light of God’s love never goes out, which is theologically accurate, but our source of light for this outdoor service had, decidedly, taken wing. We were a congregation of Three Stooges beset by comic disaster.
To my surprise, some people pulled from winter pockets industrial-sized fire-starters and began lighting candles like arc welders at a steel plant. Sparks flew. Some had battery-powered candles they clicked on. The only thing I had in my pockets was lint and car keys. Had my prepared neighbors once been Scouts? Arsonists?
We shivered together in tight, huddled pods, backs to the wind, protecting our lit candles with cupped hands.
We were freezing.
It was lovely.
The Methodist pastor encouraged an offering to the Red Cross for a local family of four who were burned out of their home early that morning. We lifted prayers. I had a discretionary fund at First Pres that I’d drain for the cause, and I knew this tight community would not leave them bereft. Picturing them bivouacked at a local hotel, possessions and plans in ashes, shifted my perspective of the manger.
This is about the time snow began.
An enormous St. Bernard, accompanying one of our flock, seemed nonplussed by snowfall, but this southerner, who had never come close to a white Christmas, was enthralled. The congregant dog, the fiasco of candles, the carillon clattering carols from the bell tower, the family at the stable and the family at the Holiday Inn, and the urgent snow completed the Charles Shultz scene.
Stinging wind glazed my eyes with tears, blurring the lights from the condos ringing the park. Snow shawled around our hunched shoulders and astonished brows.
The crowd scattered in twos and threes after the benediction.
Rachel and I lingered a few moments with the Heckers, Methodists all. John always laughed at my jokes, which is to say he is a brilliant man. Had this been spring, we might have chatted for an hour on this sidewalk or strolled together for a late dinner at Peking Garden.
But standing around any longer on this night, windchill might flash-freeze us in place. We waved goodbye with gloved hands the size of flippers. Rachel and I trudged alone, heads down, across the street for the parking lot behind our darkened church building.
This was our first Christmas without all three of our grown sons at home. John Mark, isolated in our guestroom, simmered with low fever. In the days of Covid, people died from less. Benjamin and Joseph had rightly cancelled their trip late that morning to avoid their little brother’s illness.
This wasn’t the holiday for which we had planned. The stockings were stuffed for everyone. The table was set for five. Beds were turned down for a full house. Rachel and I were in no rush to return to this emptier-than-hoped-for house.
Snow brought deep, uncanny silence.
I absently put my arm around my wife. She said she loved me. Snowflakes swarmed the streetlamps like summer moths drunk on light, flapping a million lacy wings.
This was as beautiful and lonely a walk I’d ever taken.
Edna St. Vincent Millay knew loss: “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.”
In our muffled walk to the car, I felt like I was slipping into that bottomless hole, floating in a way that resembled flight, but falling just the same.
Our Christmas plans needed to be abandoned, but I could not let go yet. Snow was in the process of making rough places smooth. I was, too,
You may have children of your own. Having done your best to teach them to walk, they now stand solidly on their own on the other side of the world.
Missing them and regretting what might have been, you hover on wobbly knees. Wind stings your watery eyes. Hurried snow descends hushed and white, hallowing the iridescence between your side of the world and theirs.
The Rev. Matt Matthews is co-pastor of Waldensian Presbyterian Church with his wife, the Rev. Rachel. He is a columnist for The Paper.
