Time Lies

On one level this seems like the longest Advent ever. And I think that’s because the decorating, the bringin’ in o’ the tree—those are ALL thats happenin’ in this Year of Covid. I look at our tree, our mantel decoration: it’s like they’ve been there forever and they always will be.

On another level, it seems like Advent isn’t really happening at all. It’s like back in March when people turned on their Christmas lights during the first lockdown. At my BMD’s request we did too, although nobody can see it but us. It depressed me. At this point I can’t articulate why.

Now our lights are on, and they shine through a seasonally perfect burden of snow! How could it be otherwise? THIS is the real thing! Right?

Yes and no. (god how I HATE that expression!)

Here is the verse I’m putting on my Christmas greeting this year (along with the picture of my house in snow which was posted here a week or so ago). From Edwin Arlington Robinson’s A Christmas Sonnet (To One In Doubt (1923):

“Though other saviors have in older lore/A legend, and for older gods have died,/ Though death may wear the crown it always wore/ And ignorance be still the sword of pride,/Something is here that was not here before/And strangely has not yet been crucified.”

..”something is here that was not here before”…that is the miracle of birth, of the delivery room and the Nativity in the stable—and of our country, of 1776.

Credo.

This is what I believe. “These fragments have I shored up against my ruin.”

God save the United States. God bless and keep all of you.