A lonely Christmas

Christmas 2003 was probably my loneliest and most blessed. My internal life was undergoing what St John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul.

Outwardly things were not that great either. I had come to final realisation that I was on the wrong path career-wise; most of my immediate family were living in England; and we had, six months earlier, buried my father.

The real relationship my father and I had was when I was about nine years old, just before my parents divorced. After that I hardly saw him. Hence the depth of the grief that I felt for him took me by surprise.

The Jewish faith has a practice they call Kaddish, where the child is required to say and lead prayers in the synagogue on behalf of his or her deceased parent. Luckily we Catholics have something similar whereby one can give to the priest a name to be put on the Pious List, but it is not as concerted and personally fulfilling as Kaddish.

It was during the usual Christmas rush that I had a pressing need to visit my father’s grave, about 30km from my hometown, Queenstown. I decided I might as well spend Christmas with his brother there, the only person left living on their rural homestead. When I arrived the house was locked, giving me anxiety that he might have decided to visit friends and family for the festive season. Just then I heard a ditty coming from the riverside. For lack of things to do I decided to investigate.

I met the singer before I got to the river. He was driving a cattle-drawn coach loaded with buckets of water. We exchanged a few civilities. He told me my uncle must have gone to fetch sheep from their feeding fields. I proceeded riverwards anyway, sat at the banks under tired willows with croaking frogs singing the sins of Pharaoh.

Rivers are instructive and fascinating to watch. In a river stream, where inhibitions occur, the water swirls. A swirl creates noise but does not run deep. If it tries to take shortcuts it often eddies, spins off and dies, due to lack of depth; or scatters into a swamp that can be disease festering. If the eddy is lucky, it gets caught up in the deeper current of the river to become part of the wider, silent stream again. No stream runs higher than its source.

Parents are natural channels for the run of their children’s lives. Without banks, channels become swamps that breed infectious diseases. Channels that are too deep become choking dungeons where children can’t breath, or take a better view of the world around. Channels of proper depth and right direction, like rivers, carry their children as tributaries to the fertile depths of the ocean, where life gestates life and deep calls unto deep.

Back home my uncle had returned. We cleaned our forefather’s graves, laid a stone; and sat under the deep silent skies. I was then suddenly attacked by Pascal’s dread: When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

If you have unresolved issues with your loved ones, now is the acceptable time. Our days are just 70 years, 80 if we are strong. All of us deserve at least one lonely Christmas to turn away from Aaron’s molten calf and Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image so as to be surprised by silence. Pray that the Lord of the skies teaches us to number our days so as to gain wisdom.