A smile rested on dad’s face the day we celebrated his 90th birthday. A farmer throughout his life, his closing years revealed a man whose storage silos overflowed with gratitude.
My father was prone to muttering. A common refrain between intakes of breaths—after breakfast, in the calf barn, on the drive to Mass: “I love my life.”
I repeat the phrase on a regular basis. Sometimes with clenched teeth. But on holidays like Christmas, I want to shout it out like a kid atop a grain bin scanning a landscape bursting with harvest.
Holidays find me exceptionally grateful. However, I serve in a mission diocese and my closest kin live a thousand miles away. My parishioners know this and many invite me over for holiday meals. Gregarious by nature, I am tempted to accept the kindness. But I decline. “Christmas is for families,” I tell them, (then promptly beg for a rain check!).
Occasionally I attempt to explain that the parish Mass comprises my family gathering. The older I become, the more my father’s phrase echoes within my soul, particularly when I gaze upon my flock. Sometimes, when placing the Divine Presence in their hands, I must check my emotion.
But what of post-Mass solitude? What is it like to feast on warmed-up turkey in a rectory kitchen? To open Christmas gifts in the sole presence of my dog?
In the beginning, separation from family was disconcerting. The love of parishioners—though deep and sincere—never quite filled the gap. Then, slowly, I began to realize that physical separation yields spiritual connection.
Laity encounter similar moments. It shows up in the mystified look on the face of a father walking his daughter down the aisle on the day of her wedding. It quivers in the voice of one’s spouse while conversing with faraway grandchildren on the phone.
You may have felt its more extreme form in the tremor of your hand while inscribing an inmate number beneath the name of your son on an envelope. Or felt its chill against your face pressed hard against a pane of glass in a time of pandemic.
Only the breath of God can fill the separation such moments expose.
What is it like, this breath of God? It is like breath: a mother’s breath on the skinned knee of a child; a prayer of praise whispered into the wind atop a snow-capped ridge; the sigh of the friend whose hand grips your neck as you sob on his shoulder.
Yet the breath of God is more than air. It is also
ruah, the shout from which all creation springs. This means that when souls hear the sigh of God's spirit on the wind, we instinctively reach for something of Creation to grasp. Something solid, something stamped with the handprint of God.
I know a family in Minnesota who, on Easter Sundays, comb the banks of the Mississippi River for petrified wood. Tracing the grain of wood-made-stone, the children touch something of the mystery of a wooden Cross that pressed its power against the rock at the entrance of a stone-cold tomb.
At the touch of a river’s stone, God’s breath enters a gap in the soul.
In the season of Christmas, a friend of mine hikes nearby canyons, collecting fragments of meteorites. No larger than pebbles, the pieces of fallen stars, cupped in the palm of his hand, evoke the wonder of the Magi.
So, too, for this priest, the slain Lamb cradled in my hand bridges centuries of time, from Calvary to the altar where I stand. And in my soul, my father’s refrain echoes down the years, his gratitude falling like rain in this valley of tears.
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