A Season for Unruly Gratitude

The Christian season of Advent is all about anticipation, or waiting with anticipation. Scripture fills our days not only with what has happened, but with the confidence of God's grace coming into the world with fullness, with immeasurable wonder.
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We do it so that we can have a semblance of peace at the dinner table, a table often fraught with the stress of small children. I picked the practice up from a Catholic Worker House, a community committed to peacemaking. Maybe that explains why we do it, or at least why we started doing it. It's called our "low point" and "high point" talk, where each person gets to speak for a moment about what was best and worst about the day.

At dinner, I usually announce that people within certain age brackets may speak. This particular piece was definitely not the Catholic Worker's idea -- the group I stayed with were anarchists. I'm Presbyterian, decent and in order. Not so much anarchist. But my children are anarchists by nature. Even so, they seem to like order (or tolerate my need for it), so I work by age groups.

I start at the upper end, between ages forty and higher. Our "conversation" is really not so much "conversation" as an opportunity for one person to reflect, somewhat independently. As I said, we instituted this practice in order to secure some kind of peace at the table (groans and eye rolling over "what's for dinner" otherwise dominate the table talk). However, apart from being distracted from their issues with dinner, almost always something surprises me, things I have forgotten or simply overlooked.

Last night, Rebecca, my wife, started. Her high point, she said, was collecting the tree from the tree farm in Wisconsin. This ranked pretty high for most of us around the table. Gabriel, my five year old, was more specific: cutting the tree down was his high point. He also noticed the stumps of the trees that had been harvested -- I had not noticed a single one of them.

As you can see, the order is not without some fuzzy boundaries. Our three year old, Iris, ignores the age rules altogether -- she is a free radical. Amid these, my wife's low point: She had hurt her back earlier that day. She had told me this, but I'd forgotten until that moment.

My high point, along with most, was also going for the tree. It's always striking to me how set we are on the "perfect" tree which, in fact, doesn't exist. Then of course is the conflict between those of us who want a wide tree and those who want a narrow tree, or a tall tree or a short tree, or a tree somewhere between. A tree is nominated, and then all the critical tools of arboreal assessment come out: it's lop-sided someone says; another sneers, "Are you kidding me?"; more diplomatically, someone else, usually one of our older daughters, cries out, "Look at this one!" And we move in a different direction, the failed nominee left behind, as we go to the next potential victim of our Christmas cheer.

"What's your low point?" Rebecca asks me. I think. I don't have an immediate low point. It's not always easy, actually, when you're put to it, to come up with a low point. Is it because there aren't any? Or that there is some bias towards having a high point rather than a low point? I'm not sure. Anyway, my low point was more vague, just feeling the grey clouds of middle age, I guess. Not much comment from the table, mostly impatient, "Can I go now?" from Gabriel.

Then I open it up. It never really was closed, but for the sake of form, I declare, "If you are between the ages of nine and eleven, you may now speak!"

I turn to Gwendoline, our oldest, what was your high point? "Going to your office, the library, this morning." Again, amid the grey clouds of middle age self-absorption, I'd forgotten this, or not attached importance to it. For our two oldest daughters, sitting with me in the library (I work at a university), reading their books and writing in their journals as I graded papers, this was a high point.

Their low point? It was the last day of en pointe class in ballet. But in a way this "last" was actually a turning point for the future: This week begins their rehearsals for the Nutcracker performance. Sometimes the kids, again anarchists at heart, shoot forward in time, looking forward rather than back: anticipation sweetens every day, it seems, no matter its highs or lows.

The Christian season of Advent is all about anticipation, or waiting with anticipation. Scripture fills our days not only with what has happened, but with the confidence of God's grace coming into the world with fullness, with immeasurable wonder.

Our children seem to intuit this dynamic, rarely confining themselves to what has happened, but also readily giving thanks for what will happen. Perhaps the unruly gratitude of children, which seemingly confuses the anticipated future for the realized present, inserting the one into the dreary middle age of the other, shows uncommon wisdom.

As I write, Gabriel, five years old, has got out of bed. It's still early. The tree is lit, decorated with tinsel and lights. Dressed in jim-jams, he's squeezed himself in, beside me on the love-seat in our living room: "I dreamed Santa was coming last night," he tells me, yawning and watching as I type. "Was that a good dream?" I ask, still typing. "Yes, it was. I saw the reindeer; they were playing peek-a-boo with me."

So my Gabriel dreamed of magical things, something he shares with me at the beginning of the day, dreams of an unconditioned future shared amid days collected, days narrowed in their remembering.

In Wendell Berry's book, Jayber Crow, the main character, Jayber, reflects something of this feeling of the wide-open future of our youth and the narrowing of time as we age: "Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory . . . And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time."

He speaks then in the voice of the old man, more memory than time:

I wander back in my reckoning among all of my own that have lived and died until I no longer remember where I am. And then I lift my head and look about me at the river and the valley, the great, unearned beauty of this place, and I feel the memoryless joy of a man just risen from the grave.

Perhaps this is the wisdom of Advent, the practice, daily renewed, of unruly gratitude, as one "just risen from the grave. . ."

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