In the season of the birth of The Baby, the first-born son, the peaceful prince, the one whom the wise showered with gifts, there is a voice crying in the wilderness. The echoes of the slain innocents foreshadow a nearer reality than Easter. The guaranteed story ends differently this time. Again. After the manger, the swaddling, and fifteen months to get up on his feet the Perfect Hope, the Promise One dies, face down, alone, and with no hint, portent or crumb of meaning. He’s already dead and getting cold when Mary and Joseph manage to hold him for the last time before the authorities claim his corpse and take it away to cut it up for proofs. Then what’s left goes to the fire.
God is not Love. If the Idea “God” applies to something, God is God. I often feel something like being loved when I draw breath and open my eyes, inexplicably alive another day. But God is also the ravenous Hag who rends her living, screaming children and devours them in the night. Also the petty tyrant, the One Perfect King whose fatherly mania demands the attributions “All” and “Powerful.” The Shepherd of sky and fire who rapes or slaughters his sheep and directs adherents by example to do likewise. Obviously neither Justice nor fairness apply to the sudden death of a 15 month old apparently healthy child. Odds are a joke. What are the odds of two generations in a row in the same family losing the first-born son as a toddler, with no connection any one can find between their ways of passing?
I don’t “have a special angel now, in heaven.” I have an empty hole where my heart was, perfectly shaped for an expensive wooden box full of ashes. There may be angels, or other angles, or a Snuggly Papa God, but you don’t know that for believing it, and I don’t have that. What I have is negation. The lasting promise that anything I think, do, know, want, hope, is at best profoundly limited in scope, instantly eradicable, and, though I am beyond words with gratitude for my small community, irrelevant to the vast majority of beings alive today. What I have is indisputable empirical support for the idea that very little Matters.
Many thing matter, of course, but they are beautiful or valuable to me and maybe a few others because it is possible to touch that specific child. This caress, or the ingenious working of those mechanisms or impact of these phenomena may change the quality of this day, in particular, or maybe, at most, the next generation. But the entire planet going up in a blaze of nuclear arrogance might be, at best, a bit awkward. But probably not really. Who’d notice?.
Merry Christmas, because your most beautiful, innocent, perfect, healthy, blossom of Hope may already be dead in the next room, and that last warm hug may have just become the Last before the rigid cold set in. Hold those you love tightly - not to keep them safe, because you can't, but because each touch begins an ending. An end to the future. An end to the fantasy that All will be Well. It won't. It will simply be all there is. And each warm, fleeting touch is dearer to the body and nearer to a human Peace than can be promised by straining toward a Hereafter.
Sorry.
