Photo: View of sunset, from the sea wall of Stanley Park, Vancouver, Dec. 1, 2011.


How strange...last night as we listened to Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra performing Handel's Messiah, amid a crowd of people seeming in the spirit of the season, the words "Adrift at Christmas" came to mind when I thought of how I fear to face this first Christmas without our son, brother, brother-in-law, uncle, this family-focused festive time we feel so outside of this year. Today my head was filled with images of a storm-wrecked ship adrift, and I tried to put some of the words to paper.

ALL ADRIFT AT CHRISTMAS
How swiftly change past friendly seas
to ravening waves of chaos.
Where once all hands together held
our guiding sail, our trusted wheel,
now severed lie the lines, and loosely swings the wheel.
Now the sails slap despondently.
No progress in these sluggish waters;
we are a shipwreck
from the storm that hit us unforeseen.
Weakened by that storm,
we each of us, the few now left who sail in her
are caught in coils of broken lines,
and so involved in our own web
we do neglect each other.
Other ships sail smoothly by,
bound for safe, sure harbours.
We see no reason why we should,
and couldn't find it if we did,
the night so dark and starless.

From this I turned to my reading for the day (actually I'm a little ahead, it's the December twentieth reading) in Watch For The Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, Orbis Books, 2008. Entitled "Shipwrecked At The Stable", by Brennan Manning, (page189) it quotes José Ortega, "The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from fantasy and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth--that to live is to feel oneself lost. Whoever accepts this has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around, for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.  All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality."