The Unbroken Thread

Happy Christmas.

It is upon us in this hour, this time, this day... after all the fuss, the frenetic pace, it smiles as it does each year finding us in some of the same places and in some different phases.

I always flip through the rolodex of my life on this day, remembering the last 30 Christmases (well I guess I don't remember the first few that well) like they are all connected in one amazing thread charting my successes, my growth, my defeats, my darkness, and my light.

Technically Christmas has not really begun. I have not done the ritual of heading to my Mom's and opening gifts and waltzing to see our Christmas film, but I have already been touched by Christmas.

I write a lot, in this land of musings I have shared 257 writings with you, my friend, my reader spirits. Much has happened in these past two years, but let me simply write that I was not sure that I would ever enjoy Christmas again, ever really feel connected to it, no matter what I tried to do, I felt adrift and as though I was living THROUGH it, not in it.

And I have every reason to be in that place right now; there are difficulties looming and death still bows to the family again...

YET...

I find myself renewed in the faith that once walked hand in hand with me.

I hear the voice that I stopped hearing so many years ago, that voice that brought me purpose and joy... a voice that I left, but I now realize NEVER once left me.

That being the voice of God.

So on this day where some celebrate God being born in flesh as a baby boy, let me say:

Thank you God for NEVER leaving me even when I did not hear you,
when I lost all faith in You,
in me,
in life,
in who I could be.

I cried at my church service tonight for several reasons:

Life:
I feel you singing in my very veins, a song that makes me smile from a place I thought dead, but this death was only imagined... this song that makes me whole kisses my cheek and winks at me like a returning friend...

Death:
I love you Dad.
I love you Grandpa...
and to my newfound friend, I am with you on the difficult journey of the first Christmas without, feeling that your thread is broken...

but let me tell you this:

It is NEVER broken, it but branches off to another strand and when you least expect it, there will be something glorious right in your midst, your heart will beat as it did before,

but this time it will beat with more passion and more determination and with a new rhythm that remembers and sees, is a witness to those who are "gone".

Today I had a wonderful meal with my Fictive Kinship Guild (most of them), attended a church service that moved me to tears, was able to lift my voice to the cosmos and link to the thread of the past, the thread of what is to come, and sing to God again. To delight in His presence is a homecoming I thought lost, to sing to my Grandpa and my Dad and lift my voice in power this year, in strength and proclaim:

I sing this year for YOU who is faithless, who is lost, who is sad, who is wandering...

Take my hand, I have been there and I will help lead you home.

Overwhelmed at the beauty that is within each of us on this silent night, this holy night,
Dustin

Bevan gave me a CD from Canada entitled the Canadian Tenors and I laughed because he said he gave it to me because they were all good looking. Ha. I felt lead to open and explore the CD and was taken with the next lyric. Then I placed the CD in my laptop and listened to the music of my heart. Coincidence, I think not my dear ones:

"Watching Over Me" (Jack Lenz, Charles Dickens)
The pure, the bright, the beautiful
that stirred our hearts in youth
The whisper of a wordless prayer
the streams of love and truth
A longing after something lost
the spirits yearning cry
Striving after better hopes
these things can never die

There will always be a shining
sun, there will always be the
rising of the sea
There will always be an angel
watching over me

A timid hand stretched forth to
aid a brother in his need
A kindly word in grief's dark hour
that proves a friend indeed
So shall a light that cannot fade,
beam on thee from on high
And angel voices say to thee
these things shall never die

There will always be a shining
sun, there will always be the
rising of the sea
There will always be an angel
watching over me
There will always be an angel
watching over all