Traveling the Road

I’m old enough now that there are more than several anniversaries that I find myself marking. Obviously there is the anniversary of my engagement to my husband Michael, and of course, there is the wedding anniversary that we have faithfully celebrated for twenty-seven years. There are other anniversaries—our own birthdays, birthdays of our children, birthdays of our parents—and now the anniversaries of their deaths are times we remember as well. Even more mundane anniversaries like the surgery I had in 2001 or a particular personal triumph like my graduation ceremony in 2008 when I received my second degree from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English program are worth noting.

Robert Frost, who was long associated with the Bread Loaf Program, wrote a poem that most people can at least recite a few lines from. “Two roads diverged in yellow wood…” The roads taken and not taken are strong metaphors for my life, and the marks the journey has left on me come in the form of those anniversaries.

And so I think that what I am doing as I sit here writing tonight is marking the events of another December and considering how the road I’ve traveled has left its mark on me. Perhaps it’s not a bad exercise at all to allow one’s mind to wander back over the pathway of one’s life and to consider how one has been shaped by the journey itself. Nothing has shaped my life more than my journey in the Church.

It’s almost the end of the Advent season. Christmas Eve will be here in less than five days. We’re having a modest Christmas in this household for several reasons, but most importantly because both Michael and I have become acutely aware that the season is first and foremost a spiritual celebration. In the past, we’ve provided many gifts for our children, but now both of them are out of the home. I stopped trying to give gifts to my extended family once my nieces and nephews began having children. Here, at home, it’s just us and the dogs. My mom will have her traditional Christmas Day brunch, but for the first time in all these years of marriage, we have opted not to make the three hour drive there. Instead, we’ll attend Midnight Mass at St. James, where we’ll welcome the Christ child, and then we’ll sleep in on Christmas morning. We’ll have dinner with friends later in the day, and save our gifts for Twelfth Night.

In many ways, this way of doing Christmas will be a paradigm shift for me. So far, I haven’t felt any angst about not having gifts for people to whom I have often felt obliged to give something. Instead of shopping, I plan to volunteer at one of our local charities. My deepest desire is to “sit” with the mystery that is The Incarnation—to let the Christ Child be born in me in a new way, a way that makes the event a truly spiritual experience. I pray that you, too, will find your road to a joyful, peace-filled Christmas, and that ages hence, you will be telling your story, not with a sigh, but with the realization that you found the path that made all the difference.