Thursday, December 18, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Closer and closer
Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD,
when I will raise up a righteous shoot to David …
This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about.
When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph,
but before they lived together,
she was found with child through the Holy Spirit.
Is there a baby in the house? They just keep comin’ and comin’. Finn in March, then the next day in the same hospital corridor, Ruth was born into our friends’ George and Anne’s new family. Last month our nephew Christian and Adrienne’s second daughter Sunnie was born just a few days from their son Elim’s birth day.
Baby dedications at Grace require more and more time during the service. The babies are coming, the babies are coming.
It is through the Holy Spirit
that this child has been conceived in Mary.
She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus,
because he will save his people from their sins.
At the same time our friends and family are growing older, some settling into twelve or more years of school, some in the middle of work and career, some learning the ropes of retirement.
Margaret and I notice our weakness while we remember our strength, and the contrast confuses us, so we set out to accomplish more than we have energy for. We take naps to make up, but then too soon we need another one.
And of course, we also notice illness and wonder what will happen next. Or maybe one of us will fall and break something … we don’t know. My body makes two million red blood cells a second, but that blood flows through my 76-year-old body, which is gradually wearing out.
I shrug my shoulders then, exhausted from worrying about the future I cannot know. I’d rather just pray more in the extra time I get as my “duties” are reduced. So many poets write about their experience with this, and their words ricochet around my brain. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea … till human voices wake us, and we drown.
A Scottish poet writes about the death of her brother, and her pilgrimage honoring their mother’s death and then his:
Around us, sounds of an old, familiar hymn—
Come home, come home—
Ye who are weary come home—
At first, a chaos of sound—
but then, clear, distinguishable. And so,
he let them come, voices like
odd, remembered dreams—
companions on the road. All of them
held within that darkness framed in light …
the air rising sharp in rising dark,
the day a long road carved from loss.
My brother had traveled on beyond us all.
We looked out toward whatever was shining
far away—attentive to evidence of some
great migration. And searching, always,
for some small sign of flight.
In Holy Listening, Margaret Guenther wrote, “The spiritual director has the double task of holding up the demands of absolute responsibility and the promise of absolute forgiveness.” She might hold them up, but it’s me, the guy on the block, who must pluck them out of the air and make them mine. God’s gifts wait to be claimed.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
As I minister to my wife and she ministers to me, we discover untapped veins of grace within ourselves, more of God’s gift which becomes visible only slowly, in whatever time we’ve been given.
Our days may come to seventy years,
   or eighty, if our strength endures;
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,
   for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
Teach us to number our days,
   that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
It takes a lifetime to become wise, and a lifetime to pass it on. The passage always goes both ways. We can ask questions, plant seeds, and then wait and watch them grow. When we’re around that band of brothers, Miles-Jasper-Finn, I soak up their free enthusiasm, watch them jumping up and down, moving as fast as they can. They don’t take time to weigh and ponder the nature of things; they are nature.
I am happy to have been back there then myself, and grateful to do more pondering now. James Joyce recalls as best he can his own infancy …
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo.
… and James wrote too of his coming of age:
Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
What did Isaiah say when he was an old man, listening again to Yahweh as he had hundreds of time before? What did he hear from heaven?
Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,
which means “God is with us.”
 Then Matthew, scouring the words of the prophets and remembering the words of his Lord, wrote on his own particular scroll words that surround our lives young and old with joy.
It is through the Holy Spirit
that this child has been conceived in Mary.
She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus,
because he will save his people from their sins.
(Jeremiah 23, Psalm 72, Matthew 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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