Lesley's Blog
It's Christmas soon and we have finished the Christmas cards and letters, sent the presents (mostly cash) and are now waiting but in a different way than the waiting I spoke of in my last blog. The final result at the end of that waiting, after a second MRI and several biopsies was that the mass was benign. The relief was huge and Thanksgiving in St. Martin was filled with much gratitude.
So what about this waiting for the New Birth of Christmas to come? T.S.Elliot opens his poem "Journey of the Magi" with the lines "A hard time we had of it, the worst time of the year for a journey and such a long journey" and any woman who has given birth without the assistance of modern pain medication knows that giving birth is also a very hard time. But once it is all over and the birth has arrived, the pain and agony fade. The wise men had a hard journey as they responded to a call to travel to see a special birth and
Mary gave birth in a drafty stable without any pain relief and in that era, the infant mortality rate was probably quite high. And yet the waiting and the agony was all worth it. And so it is with us if we can hang in there and see it through. The stories reassure us that New Birth will come but it is not simple and often entirely different than we imagined. Meanwhile, we wait and live each day with as much joy as we can, knowing the call that we are following will be answered in an, as yet, unknown way.
But the New Birth is not the definitive moment, for in our lives we die and are reborn over and over. There are times when it seems relatively calm and we can enjoy the fruits of the Birth without too much of the Death interfering. Then there are those other times when the Birth seems very elusive and the Death is all around us. It is at these times particulary when we can remember about Christmas and open ourselves to a modicum of hope, peace and joy.
Merry Christmas.
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