Powerless

Christmas morning dawned at our house, and the grandson and his parents were awake, as was I.  The dogs were pestering for food, and those who were awake were blurrily petitioning for coffee.  I made two out of four cups of coffee, and then, Zap!   The power went out.   We were stunned for a moment, and then we all began to cope in different ways.

My mind went to a plan where in two hours I would start a fire in the fireplace, earlier if anyone became too cold; after four hours I would haul out the never-used generator and hope I could make it work so that the contents of the freezer wouldn’t thaw out; and noted that the gas grill outside could be deployed for cooking breakfast, and that it was cold enough outside to keep freezer contents frozen if needed.

By this time my wife and my other son had appeared, wondering what had happened.  My oldest son, Nathan, felt that his cell phone needed to be charged, and while this could have been done using a car outside, the immediate focus became my wife trying to put eight D batteries into a charger hub in the correct positions.   Rachel hadn’t had any coffee yet, so this process took more time and generated both frustration and amusement.  

Jeannette, my daughter in law, wanted to make coffee so she began to deploy a travel coffee maker, hoping to find or make hot water through various stone-age methods. 

My son Daniel just sat and talked with my grandson, Owen.   I suggested that we could open presents and wait for the power to return, but everyone was engaged in their various pursuits, and I decided that my time was best spent lying down somewhere.   This, my Protestant coping mechanism, also known as the Presbyterian Sleep Response, was the course I followed.

Thus, lying down, it occurred to me that we were suddenly thrust into the circumstance of the Nativity:  Stone-age technology (well, OK, Iron-age), a very small child, the strange stillness of the non-mechanized age, a few animals, Fergus and Bear, our attending Shetland Sheepdogs, by their nature both alert and insistent - in the chaos and the silence it was yet a morning bearing a sense of the sacred, and much of the circumstance was beyond our control.  Was the Holy Family similarly occupied with basic yet distracting tasks like figuring out where to find food in the middle of the night, with getting water for Mary, with the oxen drooling in the manger, with finding enough light, with, was the baby OK?  And then into this confusion, I’m sure Joseph and looked up and said to Mary, “Uh-oh – we’ve got company…”

Here come the shepherds.  Company.  And there you have it, no cleaning up the stable for guests, no snack trays, no beverages, adult or otherwise.  Shepherds.  Perhaps there was weird angel noise and a peculiar star, and after some time, camels.  Guys on camels.  Wait, royalty on camels.  All this before Joseph has a dream and the Holy Family has to get out of Dodge and head into Egypt.  Chaos.  Latter day psychologists would call this stress stacking.

At our house, we didn’t have mooing cows or braying donkeys or spitting camels (they do that, you know), just dogs, some limpid coffee, monitoring of the CMLP power outage map on a now-charged cell phone, trying to monitor the status of Rachel’s mother in the hospital, and that strange suspension of the normal, where we were confronted with silence and one another, and the wonder of a child in our midst.   And on the night before, our sense of our morning moment was shaped when Trinity was filled with angels and heavenly choirs: All of You, with whom we worshipped.

After two hours the power came back on, and the usual Christmas morning rituals were fulfilled.  This, then, was Christmas.  We were powerless and disoriented.  We were warmed in silence and one another.  The grandson/child in his wonder was himself incarnational, and recalled to us and magnified the long ago, yet ever present, coming of the One who spoke into, and restored, our hope, and our light, and our power, shining into the ages and ages.

Amen.