Snow Days and Lent

Every year around this time, two things happen to me:  I start thinking about pancakes.  And I really want to watch “The Quiet Man.”

Why pancakes?  For years, we belonged to a church in Maryland that had a pancake supper for Shrove Tuesday; it was great, and we always loaded up on pancakes, link sausage, and maybe some token fruit, with plenty of maple syrup.  It turns out that Shrove Tuesday – Fat Tuesday, the traditional feast day before Lent – is, actually, worldwide Pancake Day.  And as for “The Quiet Man,” we always watch this classic movie in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, which falls fairly close to the start of Lent.  We’re not big on green beer, but we do like our Crock Pot corned beef and cabbage, potatoes and carrots.  Clearly, my stomach knows what season it is!

This is a good day to be thinking about Lent.  Yesterday was sunny and mild, but today, we woke up to six inches of snow and a two-hour school delay.  It’s snowing outside now, the sky is gray, and all is quiet; the blanket of snow is a giant muffler.

I love snow days.  I didn’t have much experience with snow as a kid in Texas or Mississippi, but when we moved to Kentucky, we hit the mother lode:  The winter of ’78.  I was in middle school, and we had 30 snow days!  One blizzard right after another.  We paid for it months later, with extended school days and a shorter summer break, but during that winter, it was glorious!  How delightful to wake up to daylight, instead of the usual early-morning winter darkness, and to know that once again, my mother hadn’t woken me up because school had been cancelled!

On one of those days, my brother and I set out in the bitter cold and walked a couple miles through the snow to the movie theater to see “The Black Hole,” a highly unscientific Disney space adventure.  By the time we got there, the movie had just started and we were snow blind: we couldn’t see anything!  But we wanted to get our seats quickly, so we picked a row and made our way to the middle, saying “excuse me, excuse me,” as we went.  When the movie was over, we realized that we were the only ones in the theater!  We had excused ourselves to empty chairs!  We about died laughing.  What an adventure!

The best thing about a snow day is the gift of time.  I think that’s what Lent is supposed to be.  I think that’s what our Sabbath should be, frankly, and for most of us, it isn’t.  Lent is time for us to center ourselves on Jesus, to pray and think about Him, and about what He wants us to do and be.  I’m pretty sure nobody ever looks back on life and says, “I wish I’d been busier,” or “I wish I’d worked more,” or “I wish I’d taken less time to thank God for all my blessings,” or “I wish I’d prayed less.”  My prayer for all of us this Lenten season is that we use this time to draw closer to God.

This is a Lenten devotional I wrote for a booklet for Prescott United Methodist Church; the people of the church also write Advent devotionals like this one I did a while back.

©Janet Farrar Worthington

 

 

 

 

 

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Random Holiday Thoughts

Could we just talk for a minute about the creepiness of the song, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside?”

If for some inexplicable reason you haven’t heard this song in one of its many iterations at the mall or on holiday radio stations, it goes way back to 1944. I know, because I looked it up on Wikipedia, which describes the song as a “call and response” between a man and a woman, originally identified in the song sheet – creepily – as “mouse” and “wolf.”

Clearly, this was before “no” meant “no,” and a wolf whistle was … what, a compliment?

Here are some lyrics: The woman says, “I really can’t stay,” and the man says, “But Baby, it’s cold outside.” Then:

“I’ve got to go away”

“But Baby, it’s cold outside.””

“This evening has been”

“Been hoping that you’d drop in”

“So very nice”

“I’ll hold your hands, they’re just like ice.”

Okay, so we go from maybe he’s concerned about her safety in hazardous weather, to, he probably doesn’t actually give a crap about her safety or the hazardous weather. He just wants her to stay for two reasons: she’s there, and she has a pulse! He can work with that!

Also: he calls her “Beautiful,” and “Baby.” Does he even know her name? Does it matter?

I’m sorry; I was an English major in college. I can’t help myself.

But at best it’s awkward. Later on, she says flat out, “The answer is no.”

Then, as Bill Cosby’s dates allegedly wondered, “What’s in this drink?”

Meanwhile, he says, “What’s the sense in hurtin’ my pride?” Yes, because it’s all about you! Followed by, “How can you do this thing to me?” Seriously? Is he Charlie Rose, casually standing around naked after his shower? Or maybe he’s Matt Lauer, with his secret Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery buttons under his desk that lock the office door? What’s missing, Harvey Weinstein telling her that either she’ll never work in this town again, and/or he’s going after her family?

And toward the end, when she repeats, “I really can’t stay,” he says, “Get over that hold out,” or “old out,” I can’t really tell, but it sounds a little bit like the tone has turned from playful to: I already paid for your drink; let’s cut to the chase! I’m on the clock here!

Then in unison – symbolic unison, my English major self says – they both sing, “Baby, it’s cold outside.” And suddenly everything’s supposed to be peachy.

Now, I’m going to come right out and say, the song is catchy. It’s clever, and the tune kind of gets into your head. The Dean Martin version is very good. My personal favorite rendition is by Brian Setzer, who also adds a delightful guitar solo, with Ann-Margaret, whose singing voice is as lovely as ever.

But the giant elephant in the room is the clear fact that the guy is not going to take no for an answer.

What’s in this drink?

“I Believe in Christmas.”

Changing the subject: You know my love for Hallmark movies. In fact, I even own a shirt that says, “All I want to do is drink tea, bake Christmas cookies, and watch Hallmark movies.” I adore Hallmark Christmas movies. But just like the phenomenon I have previously mentioned, about the hair of the leading men and ladies dyed a shade too dark, there’s just a shade too much Santa.

“I just want my son to believe in Santa Claus.”

“We all need to believe in Christmas Magic.”

See, the thing is, Christmas is a holiday dedicated to celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ! Christ, Christmas… the reason for the season… And frankly, why go to great lengths to make your kid believe in Santa Claus – I admit, I’ve done it, once snipping a curly lock of snowy chest hair off of our liver-and-white Springer Spaniel, Penny, and pretending to find some of Santa’s beard hair, which, I acknowledge, was weird – when, eventually, they’re going to suspect that maybe, just maybe, it was not actually Santa?

Instead, we see supernatural Santa doing magic, matchmaking, transporting from the North Pole to a train, to a street in a small Hallmark town, putting up roadblocks to delay the wrong suitor so that the right suitor can finally make his move. We see a magic stocking acting as a sort of divine Providence. We see Santa’s wife having her own powers, going around helping people find love. We see Santa’s daughter helping people and actually finding love. We see Santa’s lovable and sometimes cranky elves busy making toys in undercover towns in the far north. We see Santa’s reindeer… well, they don’t have speaking parts, but still.  And kids write letters that are like prayers… to Santa!

It’s not about Santa! Believe it or not, it’s not even about presents!

Similarly, Easter is not actually about a large rodent tenderly breaking into your home and placing candy and toys in baskets lined with plastic grass, although some might argue that Peeps are heavenly, and so are malted eggs, and of course jelly beans.

© Janet Farrar Worthington

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Advent and Signs from Heaven

Every year at Prescott United Methodist Church, we put out an Advent devotional, a little daybook of stories written by people in the church for everyone to read.   It’s the other kind of preparation for Christmas – not Black Friday, or Small Business Saturday, or Cyber Monday, or Giving Tuesday, not online shopping or trudging around the mall, not gifting and regifting and decorating and baking and either sending Christmas cards or thinking of sending Christmas cards and somehow not getting around to it (I fall into this category).  Preparation of the heart, you might say.

This year’s Advent theme was a weird one: “Tear Open the Heavens and Come Down” and it must have stumped the congregation because, toward the end of November, there was an urgent call for entries. I thought about it, and I kept picturing that fourth wall in the theater – the invisible barrier that keeps performers on the stage from talking directly to the audience.

It used to be that, although God was always with his people, there was that distance. Nobody, for instance, dared to go into one secret part in the temple – God’s special dwelling place, blocked by a thick curtain. Clearly, the Hebrews knew God was with them; they’d have to be pretty dense, as they wandered through the desert for 40 years, not to notice the “pillar of clouds that went before them by day to lead them on the way, and the pillar of fire by night to give them light.” (Exodus 13:21). But this innermost sanctum was off limits. Trespassers would be prosecuted: think of that gruesome “face melting” scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when the Nazis opened the Ark of the Covenant.

Jesus changed all that.   Right after his birth, the sky filled with “a great company of the heavenly host” (Luke 2:13) – glorious angel songs of praise, with a message that didn’t get heard much in that brutal time: Peace on Earth.

The fourth wall was broken again right after Jesus was baptized (Matthew 3:16): “At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” Some people thought it was thunder.

Later (Matthew 27:51), right after Jesus was crucified, there was another break in the clouds. A really big one: “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.”

Maybe there are signs from heaven all the time, and we just miss them; maybe we just think it’s thunder.

Once, on our farm in Virginia, the air grew very still and the sky turned bright green. I had never seen anything like it. I called the kids to come outside and see; we sat on the porch and marveled at it for about 20 minutes. We brought out some popcorn and juice boxes. It turns out that what we saw was a telltale sign of a nearby tornado: nature’s way of saying, “Stop gawking and take shelter, you morons!” The sky was bright green because of all the vegetation that had just been sucked up into the air. Oops! My bad! Who knew? Apparently, a lot of people, just not me.

A few years later, right after my mom died, my dad and I were driving back from the funeral home. We had just picked out a casket and made the kind of arrangements that nobody ever wants to make. My mom had been in a coma, and although her eyelids were partly open and we could glimpse her beautiful green eyes, and although we talked to her a lot, she wasn’t really awake and she never responded. It was a cloudy, cold December day, about as bleak-looking outside as we felt inside. But suddenly, this little patch of sky opened up, the sun shone through it, and – I’m not kidding – it looked like a beautiful green eye. We took comfort in it.

The green sky in Virginia was a sign that I didn’t recognize. The green eye in the sky was a sign that we didn’t expect.   We didn’t really need it to know that Mom was with God, because, with that fourth wall broken, Jesus was right there with us. We knew. But still, it was nice.

In the Bible, Isaiah cries out: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you! … Come down …and cause the nations to quake before you!”

Isaiah wanted his nation’s enemies to receive a cosmic butt-kicking, from a distant and mighty God. I wonder if he would have recognized the baby in the humble stable. I wonder if I would have. Maybe the fourth wall that needs to be open is the one in my heart, so that I can see the signs that God wants me to see.

© Janet Farrar Worthington

 

 

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Light Up!

The darkest nights I’ve ever spent have been in a car, late at night, on a cold, lonely stretch of deserted highway.  Years ago, when my husband, Mark, was a resident at Johns Hopkins, we always spent Christmas with my family in South Carolina.  Mark didn’t get much time off, so we usually left at rush hour on December 23.  We spent almost all of the trip on roads that ended in “95” – first, the Baltimore Beltway, I-695, then I-95, then the D.C. Beltway, I-495, then back on I-95 all the way down to Florence, S.C., where we cut over onto a smaller highway to get to Columbia.

I-95 runs from Maine to Florida, and it’s one of those intense, stressful interstates.  If you’ve ever been on it, you know it can be a hellish racetrack, where you have to speed for your life just to avoid being flattened by an insane truck driver, where tailgating cars (oddly, almost always from New Jersey; no offense to New Jersey) flash their brights at you, and cars with Miami plates zip by at 90 mph, darting in and out of lanes in spaces you didn’t think a car could fit. 

And then, quicker than you can say, “Where’s my Zantac?” it can turn into a parking lot, where there are so many stopped cars ahead that by the time you start moving again, you don’t see any sign of a wreck.  From Baltimore heading south, the traffic doesn’t clear out until you get past Richmond, Virginia. 

But after that, on those long pre-Christmas drives, it wasn’t too bad, and as the evening grew later, we would start hitting some stretches of road where it was just us.  No other lights but our car.  Temperature in the 20s.  Dark, cold, and lonely out there on the highway. 

But every so often, we would see houses in the distance all decorated for Christmas.  Mostly little houses, with just a string of lights, or a homemade star with a flood light aimed at it, or a solitary decorated tree.  No fancy light shows, no inflatable snowmen or Grinches, no generators keeping snow falling in plastic snow globes.  We’re talking pretty humble stuff here. 

lights tree stringIt made me so happy to see those lights.  They were isolated bright spots, beacons guiding us down the road toward my family, who always waited up.  My mom would have a pot of soup and some warm bread ready for us, and those good smells filled up the house.  The house would be decorated, all the lights on, and my dad and/or my brother might even be standing out on the front porch in their pajamas, watching for lights, too — our headlights.

I started thinking about those long, cold, mostly dark journeys when I was writing an Advent devotional for my church, and this is what I have figured out: 

holiday lightsBasically, every time you hang a Christmas light outside or even turn on a porch light, you are taking a stand to the outside world against the darkness.  You are sending out a little dot of cheer, spreading a little hope, maybe boosting someone’s courage just a little bit, too. 

Why do we light candles and sing “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve?  Why not just sing?  It’s a perfectly good song all by itself.  Christians around the world do it because it’s a visual – an “optic,” as the politicians might say:  To us, the lights are visible manifestations of our hope and faith that God can change a dark and cold world.  Has changed it.  Light means hope.   In the Bible, the book of John starts off by saying of Jesus: His life is the light that shines through the darkness—and the darkness can never extinguish it. 

I don’t know what you believe, but I hope you believe – because I do –that even in the darkest places, there is a glimmer of hope that can’t be killed.  That where there is evil, there is still good, and you can draw strength from it.  That even if love may not conquer all, it endures, long after hate does whatever it does – turns into a hard nugget and implodes, or disintegrates, or fades away. 

So – if you want to, that is, no pressure here — light up.  Send out a little dot of cheer, and take a stand against the darkness.

© Janet Farrar Worthington

 

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