I’m still waiting for a couple of things I heard many times as a child – well one actually. The first was that the sun always shines on Easter, which of course is true, given enough altitude. Just ask the guys on the International Space Station. The other is that there are miracles on Christmas. Of course, it’s a cynical quest. A miracle has to be something that can’t happen but does happen, and to my way of thinking, if it happens, it can’t be a miracle. Most people, though, are satisfied with much less in their miracles: a water stain on a wall, a burn pattern on a grilled cheese sandwich, someone who was sick got better despite some doctor’s prognosis. As Christmas approaches, we search for these justifications for our idiocy.
I don’t know if someone somewhere doesn’t have a vast database of disasters plotted against the calendar, but I would be willing to bet that the odds are about the same on Christmas as any day of the year for floods, landslides, earthquakes, fires, famines, and pestilences. It may be a holiday for most Americans, but not for Death. Taking a quick break from supervising my holiday house guests today, I see that the news is still full of grief and horror and sadness and misery and death as has the world been down all the thousands of generations, but I’m sure that someone will ferret out a miracle from the endless stories of the ferret eating the baby’s toes or the infant run through the airport X-ray machine. People will be blown to bits today, people will starve and die in agony in gutters. Life with its concomitant horrors will go on as it always has and without interruption.
Still, we will have our miracles to clutch at in this cold and uncaring universe, to give a sense of meaning to lives that mean anything only to us as we sink into the inevitable grief and sorrow and suffering and an eternity of oblivion as the universe stretches out into an infinite and meaningless immensity.
Happy Holidays.
(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)
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