to begin christmas.

I just rang in the Advent season by attending a Christmas concert at our church. I had the feeling, though, as I was contentedly listening to the string quartet and the choral arrangement, that I was in a real-live Stuff White People Like blog post. Kind of eerie.

The Christmas concert reminded me of SPU's famed, tacky, but irrationally endearing "Tradition" night. More specifically, I was thinking back to last year's Tradition, in which Tommy Castle and I performed with Patrick Hickey.

I'm searching for the right words right now, but coming up empty handed.

I thought I'd simply say his name, so that those of you who knew Patrick could remember him right now, too.

That night at Tradition, Patrick, Tommy and I performed a Christmas poem together...sort of a poetry slam meets ambient rock with Christmas tree sweaters.  A video of it is on Patrick's facebook page... though I can't tell you what emotions just hit me when I went to his page to see it. It's not a place to go lightly. 

Sigh. But simply as a Christmas poem, I thought I'd post it up. It seems fitting. The text is below; the audio is on my poetry slam facebook page.

and then God sings i love you i love you i love you

This is a story of the great interruption,
When God tightened up his bow hair, tuned his strings,
and took his place with the second violins to play in his own eternal symphony.
This is the night when God slipped itself into a single cell that doubled, quadrupled, quintupled into a fleshy, embryonic cluster that soon was to form God’s son.
God’s self.
God’s image in our image in God’s image again.

And we are terrified.
And as our skin stretches and our bellies swell, God is bursting from our pores into the world, into our blood, into our time.
When we press our ears against the womb, we hear the heartbeat of God.
God, the beaming mother, with bruised breasts and sore hips, this insecure newly wed—
with a sloppy, mucous PUUUUSH has birthed himself into our wet and trembling hands.

This strange child,
this red and squinting face, with piercing cries and violent kicks, these grasping hands—
the tiny back and chubby legs that curl against our breast,
that fill this warm, safe silence as we sleep through a bitter and black night,
with the straw scratching at our ankles and sticking in our hair—
this strange child beats with 5 billions hearts
and breathes with 10 billions lungs
and walks in our countless tired footsteps, he is living
our hopes for a spark of divine connection.
he is living our lives, exhaling our disappointments, dancing in our weddings and bat mitzvahs.

And we come.
as shepherds and kings, professors and janitors, the unimpressive, the dazzling, we all come.
we come because we are terrified at the depth of space, afraid of the Cold Nothing.
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the lord my soul to keep
and if I die before I wake
I pray the lord my soul to take.

We spend our nights idly fantasizing, quick falling asleep, so that we never, no, never consider
that we are always just one moment away from the final Dreamless sleep.
the great no more. the quiet seduction of oblivion.
We were terrified of our loneliness.

until now. in this misfit family huddled on the street corner, we dare to imagine God is looking out at us from beneath his baby blanket with his dark, round eyes.
We hope, we must hope, that God has wrapped himself in our great and ragged skin blanket and that it fits him perfectly,
that he fits us perfectly.

Yes, tonight God has burst forth from our bellies and sung to us from the skies, he has cried and kicked against us, he has torn our wombs and filled them, he sings
I love you, I love you, I love you.