It’s black Friday, and I’m sitting in a hushed house with ribbons of steam rising off my mug of coffee, as the early morning light cascades through the east-facing glass panes, sifting through the draperies all warm and smoldering. Tiny dust particles levitate in it. A sure sign I am overdue for dusting and vacuuming, but for now I’m content to sit and watch them drift and float through the orange-yellow glow.
Such a small wonder.
I reminisce back to when I was a child. The way I would rush down from my frigid upstairs drafty farmhouse bedroom on winter mornings and lay in the spot where the sun came through the window in a tall thick beam of light, falling across the living room carpet. There too, I would lay and stare up at the dust particles doing their flighty thing in the thick earthy hues of dawn. This was my warm morning welcome place as I would wait for my dad to stoke up the fire in the wood stove to an eventual toasty home.
Such a simple pleasure. So basic and everyday. A gift of the mornings.
But now I snap awake to thinking about how on this very day people are being trampled into the ground in their race for more of the latest stuff so they can add to their mountains and piles and climb up on them and keep watch for the next newer and next latest thing to appear on the horizon.
How strange we humans are that just a few hours after naming the things we are grateful for, we enter Advent – a time of anticipating the birth of Emmanuel, “God with us” — by rushing the doors of department stores, fighting for shopping carts, needing the latest upgrades and technology and clothing styles and kitchen gadgets and odd useless stocking stuffers, snatching things as we smash through the crowds, and then grumbling as we wait “forever” in the checkout line.
We consume to the point of miserable gaseous bloating. Yet, we never seem to be able to stop this rushing addictive consumption that leads us to the wasteland.
At the end of the day, in our fevered exhaustion, we disgruntledly whine and swear we will never do this miserable Black Friday thing again… until we crack open the front door next Thanksgiving and the fat fleshy newspaper stares up at us from the stoop, and we can’t resist the urge to plunge ourselves deep into its folds and hold in our clutches the seductive promises that this new thing will definitely and finally lead to happiness and contentment.
What is this madness we call Christmas?
I trail my thoughts back to the magic happening right now, just inside my window. And I realize this is no small wonder at all. It’s incredible. Wonder-filled. It’s the perfect coalescing of air and light and movement and temperature and tiny particles adrift. It’s amazing. A gift. And it will never happen just exactly like this ever again.
I’m so glad I didn’t rush away and miss this gift of the morning.
Sifting for the Sacred 