EPISODE 840: CHRISTMAS IN NEW YORK
Merry Christmas from Indiana, Garfield, Obi-Wan and everybody else here.
Night of the Nativity, Jeff Johnson
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Merry Christmas! I write you from my childhood bedroom in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, where I have spent the last week hanging out with my parents and seeing family and a few friends.
For some reason I woke up very early this morning. It’s still really dark, and there’s that fragile, delicate silence that is often so hard to find in the holiday season. Even the clickety clacking of my typing seems loud.
This Christmas is a pretty different experience for me, as you might imagine. But really for many years the Christmas liturgy has been sort of a strange, strained experience for me. It was always good to be sitting with my dad at church at Midnight Mass while my mom sings. But for some reason I just couldn’t really feel anything.
Then in 2017 I spent Christmas with my Jesuit friend Joe Sobb at his little parish in Perth, Australia. Midnight Mass was at about 5 in the afternoon in a small park near the church. (It was summer there.) Everyone rolled up with comfy fold out chairs and picnic blankets. The Gospel story of the Nativity was acted out by grade school children who from time to time would simply wander off. And every once in a while, as my friend preached about God wanting to be with us in the ordinary mess of our lives, I’d see children in the backyards of the homes abutting the park fly up past their fences, faced filled with delight to be bouncing on their trampolines. And for the first time in so many years I felt at home.
However or wherever you spend these days, or whatever they might mean to you, I hope they bring you comfort and joy.
I wrote a little piece for Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture about finding Christmas this year on empty streets and dive bars of New York. I’m going to put the first little bit below. If you like it, you can find the rest here.
Merry Christmas!
At the heart of our celebration of Christmas lies a great paradox: God Almighty chooses to come to Earth and dwell with us but then shows up as an ordinary newborn, the son of a carpenter, far from the center of anything.
On one level, the whole history of the Church is the story of Christians struggling to accept the terms of this paradox, the grandeur of God embracing the ordinariness of our humanity. And I probably tend to err on the side of the ordinary. When it comes to Christmas, what fascinates me is the smallness of the event, the sense of it as really a non-event on the landscape of the time. It’s like a footnote in someone else’s story.
New York City is not exactly known for its understatement. (The tree at Rockefeller Center this year is eighty feet high. Last year the windows and lights at Sak’s Fifth Avenue took 250 people 40,000 hours to complete.) But this holiday season I found myself closer to the mystery of Christmas wandering down side streets and sitting at little bars.
BETHLEHEM
I’m having dinner with my nephew and his fiancé, but I get to the restaurant way too early. In July I moved into a new place, and I’m still getting used to how fast the express subways can get you around. It’s such an unexpectedly nice evening, I decide to wait outside.
Unlike many New York City blocks, the one I’m on has no prevailing look or purpose. It’s just an amorphous collection of office buildings and residential addresses. An endless row of cars snake down the block, preparing for the stoplight at the corner to change. During the day a scene like this is usually accompanied by regular blasts of honking, but tonight there’s an unexpected stillness. You can hear sounds of the city in the distance, the whirling siren of an ambulance. Yet from here it’s like gentle splashes of color on a dark canvas.
Down the block, a little girl sits on her father’s shoulders. She extends her arms and calls out something. I can’t hear what. A cyclist glides by, his wheels clickety-clacking. The sound of it is so bright and pretty in the silence.
For some reason, as I stand here my mind keeps drifting back to childhood. I’m sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car after Christmas Eve at my grandmother’s house, looking out the fogged window on a gentle, sleeping world, while my dad sings along to old songs on the radio.
A New York City side street on a nice evening has a similar hushed beauty to it, a sense of quiet presence that somehow has the quality of the sacred. Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents once famously imagined a young man standing on a similar street spontaneously singing, “Something’s coming. Something good.” I get it. I feel it, too.
Read the rest here.
From my holy family to yours, Merry Christmas!
Loved this piece Jim, and your Nativity! Thank you⭐️❤️🎄🙏🏼
Thank you, Liz! Glad you liked it.