Season of Gratitude

Charley and I are those people. I have friends who leave their Christmas trees up until Easter (please pray for them). It’s not that they’re lazy. In fact, many of them will take their lives into their own hands, climb a shaky ladder, and remove the lights strung below their gutters in solidarity with those who recognize that the Christmas season has come to an end. This solidarity notwithstanding, they remain loyal to the belief that the Christmas tree deserves its rightful place as seasonal décor long 

Pastor McLane Stone

after the last jingle bell has been laid to rest until next December.

Not in the Stone household! Last night, after the kids had gone to bed, Charley and I spent the better part of an hour carefully removing each ornament, wrapping it in butcher paper, and placing it in storage to recover from a particularly difficult season (Leighton believes that each ornament deserves a place in the grandstands as his toy motorcycles jump distances that would make Evel Knievel gasp).

As we did our regretful duty, we couldn’t help but voice our sadness that the Christmas season is over. Like many of you, Christmas is a time for life. It is a celebration of the good gifts that God has given us. Joy is the theme, and we indulge it at every opportunity. Our Christmas tree stands at the center of this season of gratitude, and dragging it from the living room, its branches dropping needles in protest of its unjust sentence, feels not like life, but like death.

Reflecting on this dichotomy—life and death—I was reminded of my favorite poem, one I have shared before. I believe that good things never go out of style (just ask Taylor Swift), so I thought I would share it with you again. It is a poem about life and death and how the two are drawn together in the birth of Jesus Christ. A child is born, the old world is put to death. Joy!

The Journey Of The Magi
by T.S. Elliot

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

​In Christ, McLane