Christmas… a meal of Vinegar and Divinity

My grandmother made candy.  Sugar boiling and cooling into Southern Confections.  Peanut Brittle… Martha Washington’s… Peanut Patties... and Divinity.   Have you ever tasted divinity?  It is a cloud of powdered sugar pasted together with more powdered sugar, and don’t forget the dusting of powdered sugar on top… with a few token bits of pecans in the mix (to cut the sugar I suppose).  It is rich and sweet and delicious and sweet… oh and… also very sweet.  It is possibly the sweetest sweet thing in the entire universe.   It is sooo good in small quantities, but I’ll pass on a plateful.

She also pickled things.  Garden things. Okra and tomatoes snuggled tight in mason jars… boiling in batches on her dark brown electric stovetop in Red Oak, Texas.  Vinegar and dill and peppercorns permeating the humidity in the air as the window unit cranked cool across the wood paneled kitchen.  Have you ever really taken in a whiff of vinegar… a nice long inhale of the white variety?  Doesn’t it make your nose hairs curl to think of it?  Did you just get a little catch in the back of your throat? 

I sit now, right in the bulls eye of this Christmas season and I realize that we are all consuming a meal… of divinity and vinegar.   Underneath the carols and decorations and traditions… we are all tasting and sipping.  How’s your menu this year? A little nibble of candy and a drop of bitter?  Or is your meal liquid and burning… with tears lurking at every tinseled corner?

When December rolls over, we reach for our holiday spectacles.  You know the ones… last year they were folded (or violently thrown) into the boxes with the ornaments and tangled lights. Bifocals or trifocals or readers or magnifiers, or maybe blindfolds.  Some of us put our glasses on happily and with great anticipation, and others grudgingly and with a heavy sigh.  A gaze through some lenses reveals almost blindness… no light coming through the glue and tape holding shards of glass together.  

Our Christmas glasses make us see thing differently.  Everything is exaggerated, big is gigantic, small is trace, wide is narrow, light is brighter, darkness is so dark.  So incredibly dark.  Truth is… those glasses sometimes give us a splitting headache and beat us up and wear us out.   

Lonely and lost and broken and sick and tired through our glasses we see that everyone else is happy (lie)… and everyone else has such lovely holidays (lie)… and other families sing carols around the tree and never get mad or irritated with one another and never miscommunicate and never hurl sticks and stones at ones they love (lie, lie, lie, lie, lie). 

And yet we all sit here together at the table.  This holy table.  Could we take those glasses off for a minute… just a moment… could we take a deep breath… join hands… bow heads… acknowledge the grief and hurt and joy and abandonment and innocence and immaturity and skinned knees and black eyes and fullness and emptiness.  Spread before us are platters of divinity and goblets of vinegar… green and red lights hang around rafters above our drooping shoulders and unrealistic expectations. 

May we be kind to one another.  May we be kind to ourselves.  If your glasses are twinkling neon this year, spread your joy with gentleness… look into dark corners for the ones hiding there.  Don’t bash the hurting over the head with peppermint and pine trees.   Maybe just a sip of water offered and taken.  A taste of grace. 

And if your glasses are of the darker variety...  If the pain overwhelms and the losses are too much… just too much, let yourself find some comfort in the shadows. Tip-toe lightly around the edges of the festivities.  Just please don’t wander too far into that cave. Don’t let yourself forget there’s light in the world… keep it always at the edges of your vision.  Let light fragments settle over the stagnation, the pain, the wounds. It might sting a little at first… it might make you cry. So cry. Again. Cry some more.  But hold tightly onto that light seed… a hand in yours… or a cozy blanket… a fire in the fireplace dancing… they’re all bits of Him you know.  Those microscopic atoms of illumination are Jesus crumbs.  He started this whole bitter sweet thing. 

We nibble divinity on a plate as we celebrate Divinity in a manger… and we sip our share of vinegar, as He did… the shadow of cross falling upon joy.  Before we put our glasses back on, let us not forget what is coming… beyond the crumpled wrapping paper of our lives… beyond the dirty dishes… on the other side of lonely… there is Light.  There is Hope.  There is Love.  He was born.  He was beaten.  He is risen.

He shed tears too… and He collects ours. “He was despised and rejected--a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.” Isaiah 53:3. He brings beauty from ashes.  What does that mean for the sister whose brother is in prison, falsely accused… or for the mother who lost the child she loves… or for the widow who listens still for breath beside her… or for the brother who is left after hopelessness settled over life? 

I do not understand the hurt of this world… it is evil… We were not made for it. We were made for Eden.  But I know that He sees it all… and I’m so thankful that I don’t.  And if He sees it all… and STILL believes the reward is worth the cost… then I choose to believe it too.  I hate it.. rail against it… ask for answers and get none.   I’ve turned this two-sided stone of faith and unanswered questions over in my hands until it is smooth.  I lean into the weight of God’s goodness… and vow to cherish the joy and heaviness… and give thanks in ALL things.  I am compelled to do so.  

 I think I’ll leave my glasses at home tonight.