Jun 10 2010
published: Life Between the Holidays
Holidays. I think about the word as I mouth the lyrics to “O Come Emmanuel,” a 900-year-old Christmas carol I’m listening to today because I’m already scripting a Christmas program for the performing arts group I co-direct.
Holidays. High points. Holy days. Life swirls around them like a river around jutting pinnacles of rock. They direct the ebb and flow of our lives. They are collectives of memories and teachings; they are an intensity of significance that defines spirituality and semester alike.
Christmas gets most of the attention, at least if your background is secular or Protestant. Easter, it could be argued, has the greater significance. God could have been born into the world and then just left, and we’d not be any better off. It’s the drama of the Passion Week that has really changed things. So it’s good that we note these days. That we celebrate them. That we decorate our homes, change our diets, and attend special church services to remember the high points that promise to transform our lives.
But what about life between the holidays?
Can the everyday, the Monday afternoon or Wednesday morning or Friday dusk that does not mark the incarnation of God or the death of sin or the resurrection of the King of Kings — can that day be significant too?
I wonder about this as the familiar strains of the carol fill the warm spring air. Holidays are inspiring, like the high points in my own life — weddings and births and even, in a strange way, funerals. But what about life between the holidays, between the high points? What about everyday, run-of-the-mill, uninspiring work days in which we just raise children or clack keyboards or dig fence posts or fight off the flu? Where’s the sacrament, the holiness, in that life?
Wow. This article was powerful. Over the past couple of days, I had lamented the endless circle of chores, school, and babysitting, and wondered (in a fit of human weakness) what was the point of such an endless routine. Your aritcle renewed my desire to be holy and to worship God! Thanks!