Even Here. Even Now

 In years past, the barn has been given over to Advent.  The equipment has been pushed aside to make room for a lighted tree, wreaths and a piano, holiday treats and carols, and the eventually hushed recollection that we are someplace reminiscent.   Even in this barn – even in this metal building with a cement floor whose only livestock has been an occasional brooder with baby chicks – holiness could be born.  

 

Remembering that it happened once

Writes Wendell Berry,

We cannot turn away the thought,

As we go out, cold, to our barns

Toward the long night’s end, that we

Ourselves are living in the world 

It happened in when it first happened.

That we ourselves, opening a stall

(A latch thrown open countless times

Before), might find them breathing there…

 

Somehow, even in this enclosure smelling more of diesel and grease and soup and cinnamon than hay and manure and animal sweat; even in this collection of red sweaters singing of snowmen and bells, silent nights and a prayerful Dona Nobis Pacem, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in our very midst.  And into the night and the encircling days and the poignancy of it all reawakens a dormant reverence.  Eventually the room is left dark and the door is locked and the last of the taillights disappears down the drive, but the songs somehow reverberate in and beyond this silent night made audible.

 

In years past.

 

This year, like the one it follows, the barn remains dark and crowded with tools instead of friends.  The tractor dominates the corner instead of the lighted tree.  Empty buckets an apparent metaphor for yet another COVID Christmas.

 

But “apparent” is the revelatory word, for we have long-since known that appearances can deceive.  Holiness, we have long-since heard it preached, has this quixotic habit of appearing where we least expect it – in barns, yes, and babies; but even in less likely vessels…

 

…like me and you, like living rooms and Zoom, like memories and hopes and songs sung on mute, like the space cleared by the clear-eyed conviction that no place is infertile; that no place is beyond the germinating potential of redeeming grace, and reconstituting peace.

 

Even amidst a pandemic.

 

Even here, and now, on this less-than-silent, socially distanced night…

 

…we can sing.