It began on a July afternoon this last summer. I was cleaning. Now cleaning is an activity that never puts me in a really good mood. In fact, I tend to become downright crotchety, in spite of the reality that my husband, Dan, does more than his fair share of home maintenance. The dog and cats know they can eat off the floors, even if we can't. In this congenial state of being, I reached up to dust off Dan's dresser, including the sundry items resting on top. There was a box. I had dusted it before. But I took the lid off and recognized this finely polished rock, with a fossil embedded in its surface, the imprint of a creature who knew life hundreds of millions of years ago. It was a gift I had given him a few Christmases back, and here it was still in its box. A few inches away was an intricately carved wooden spoon, caked in dust--a gift I had brought him from Wales--the spoon not the dust.
So here they were, this splendid fossil and this endearing spoon stagnating on top of his dresser. I guess he didn't really like them....or appreciate them. After all, they didn't conform to my idea of what I would have done with a fossil--find just the right place for it in the varied collection that adorns the mantle of our fireplace--or my idea of what I would have done with the Welsh spoon--add it to the other memorabilia that grace our kitchen walls. So my hurt turned to annoyance turned to anger turned to picking a fight. "But I do like them; I like them very much....I just didn't know what to do with them," he countered--defensively. I smoldered....and continued to clean with a vengeance.
Then something--maybe a stray ray of sunshine, maybe the sheer myopia enveloping me--turned my head at a different angle. I gave these gifts and am still giving them, wrapped in expectations that are mine. Maybe I never even gave them away; maybe I sold them, extracting an unwritten price.
How many of our offerings are wrapped in the trappings of our hopes and expectations? Especially those gifts into which we pour so much thought.....and taste (ours of course)....knowing that what we have chosen is simply the perfect whatever for whomever. When that perfect whatever is unwrapped, we watch a face for signs of pleasure or disappointment or even worse, apathy. It's as if we were being unwrapped.
No wonder, as Christmas and Chanukah approach, our anxiety tends to soar. There are all these expectations around giving and receiving.
Comic relief for all of this comes in the form of Jean Shepherd's film, "A Christmas Story." The setting is the late 1940's, maybe the early 50's, in Detroit. The key players are a 50's-conventional mom and dad and two young children--in this case, two little boys--one seven, one, nine. All the nine-year-old wants for Christmas is a Red Ryder BB gun. And his mother's response is always, "But you'll shoot your eye out!" The parents argue: "He'll shoot his eye out."...."No, he won't!"....back and forth. Since this was a "Father Knows Best" era, you can guess what was under the tree on Christmas morning. Now the deliciously quirky subplot is a gift that arrives mysteriously for the father in a box the size of a refrigerator. It's a floor lamp, with a ceramic base that is the likeness of a woman's leg. "It's gorgeous!" he gasps and places it directly in front of the living room window for all to see. His wife is mortified, and "The Christmas Story" continues to its rollicking conclusion.
That quest for what we really want is sometimes right out there in plain, simple, and relentless begging....and sometimes it is buried so deep and far from what those closest to us could possibly imagine that only through an act of magic or supreme coincidence will we ever get what we want. Is it really a surprise that post-holiday depression has become so common? For weeks we've been loading up with hopes and fantasies that can never be met by real people, least of all ourselves. We wrap or unwrap the same present over and over until the simple item inside becomes wholly irrelevant.
An adult friend of mine told me tearfully of the Christmas morning that she went downstairs as a child and, surrounded by her family, unwrapped her special gift from her Mom and Dad--underwear. She was crushed. No sled, no ice skates, no doll.....underwear! "How could they?" she asked me with disbelief and years and years of hurt and resentment? I wonder how many times over the years she has unwrapped that underwear, in effect giving herself again and again a lethal dose of the low self-esteem for which she held her parents accountable.
Are we only worth the gifts we give or receive? We can respond with a knee-jerk "No," but what about those times when we have given our friend or partner or spouse or child exactly what they hoped for? We revel waving our wand with the magic of a fairy godmother or Santa himself. And what about those times when we have received just what we wanted....our version of the Red Ryder BB gun or the larger-than-life leg lamp? We feel celebrated, even loved.
Every gift carries the potential to be wrapped in many layers and to be unwrapped--by the giver and the recipient--many times. It comes with choices, choices that resonate with the history and hope of the relationship.
Take a very big gift. As a young Presbyterian I committed to memory a number of Bible verses. At the top of the charts was John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that He gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." How might we understand this if we loosen ourselves from a traditional interpretation? The Source of Life gives to all creation its beloved progeny, trusting that this great gift will be affirmed and life enhancing and everlasting.... What we know historically is that the person of Jesus was indeed life enhancing and that his message of love and compassion has come down through the centuries. We also know through the narrative of the New Testament that the person of Jesus was sporadically affirmed. When the political climate threatened, his companions denied they knew him. One even betrayed him, ensuring his arrest and ultimate execution. However we interpret the accounts of Resurrection, the message comes through that when a great gift was given with great love, it was not received in kind.
Does not each of us give to the world our beloved progeny--the creations of our hearts, minds, and hands; the creations of our bodies; indeed, our very selves? We are a gift and we bequeath gifts, trusting beyond trust in the capacity of our greater world to accept, to affirm, and to embrace who we are and what we're about.
Like the onion described by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, we are formed with many layers. As we give of ourselves, we shed these layers of protection. In the peeling, we reveal our essence. This is our strength and our vulnerability. It is certainly our gift. We present ourselves to our world, and we partake of what others present to us, others who are just as uncertain as we are as to how their many-layered selves will be received.
Giving and receiving is high-risk activity. How much more might we hesitate to take such risk if we knew that to give of ourselves, to share who we really are, underneath the wrappings, includes a reality that has already been scorned or feared....the reality of AIDS, for example? It can be an act of daring and courage to proclaim, "I am who I am, and this is who I am." Joe Miller reminded us that "we can participate in the divine if we....act and share the truth about ourselves....Closets are coffins--places to come out of with the faith that even in the act of just doing so, we are being good to ourselves and giving others the opportunity to act upon their compassion and their love."
Do we not all come out of a closet, fearing initially that they--whoever "they" might be--will not receive the "I" who has been hiding there, hoping against hope that we will be embraced in love, compassion, and understanding? In actuality, we come out of many closets many times; we emerge and emerge again through the countless layers that protect us for awhile and then outlive their usefulness.
For some of us, coming out of the closet refers to sexual identity that is not deemed mainstream. For others, it means we are finally going to share the reality of being HIV+. As we approach World AIDS Day, how many among us are still terrified to share a reality that calls so desperately for acceptance? We're the gift that is not quite sure we want to be unwrapped, not quite sure we want to be "good to ourselves and give others the opportunity to act upon their compassion and their love."
That offering of self laid bare just might not find acceptance and delight on the other end. Then again, it might. All the more reason to learn to love ourselves, to value ourselves as a great and precious gift worthy of great and precious love.
We can't read another's mind or heart, nor can they read ours. Shedding some of our manifold layers says we're willing to take the risk of being misread, misunderstood. I keep close at hand the comic strip of "Hagar the Horrible" where Hagar the king is slumped over a table, his head in his hands, sighing, "Nobody understands me!" His companion responds, "What do you mean?"
How to give, how to receive, how to understand and be understood, how to love and be loved.... are not these the questions we grapple with, intensified by the advent of our December holidays, intensified by the proximity of World AIDS Day?
AIDS is still very much with us. While the life expectancy of our sisters and brothers and daughters and sons and mothers and fathers and lovers who live with AIDS and who can access medical care is considerably longer than it was only a few years ago, there is still no cure and there is still fear. We can all continue to learn from those posters that our AIDS Task Force mounted in the buses and subways of our city over a decade ago:
"AIDS is a human disease. It requires a humane response."
and
"AIDS. The more you understand, the more understanding you'll be."
As long as our congregation is a community of faith and love, we will encourage "[speaking] the truth to ourselves and to each other," recognizing the extraordinary gift of self--vulnerable, fragile, many-layered self. We will emerge from our closets, knowing that whether we are scorned or feared or misunderstood, we are a gift worth giving and receiving.
As we approach our December holidays, let us understand that no matter what material items we exchange, they are symbols of our need to love and be loved. Just so, the babe in the manger embodies the gift of love. The oil that burns in the temple for eight long days burns with the passion of a gift exceeding expectations. The families gathering around the meals of Kwanzaa inspire us all with the celebration of a history and legacy that inform our religious movement's Journey to Wholeness, a gift to us all.
The gift that shines the brightest, that sparkles the most, is the gift of self....our time, our energy, our presence. Once born, we take the risk of offering this gift to our world. If a creature that knew life hundreds of millions of years ago and made its mark in a rock inspired reflection for today, is it not possible that even now we are leaving our imprints in the matter of the universe for whatever life forms happen to inhabit this universe in the millennia to come?
Life in its wondrous mystery is the greatest gift of all. And with every sunrise, we have another opportunity to unwrap it. Carpe diem. Amen. Copyright AllSouls 1998.