Pardon, The Interruption

Hi!  Pardon the interruption.  I'm sure you're busy celebrating.  Me too.  'Tis the season, after all. 

Pardon the interruption.  But you see, yesterday I was out in the neighborhood, wading through the holiday hustle, when I came across a man--a real human--an in-the-flesh human being--in a dumpster.  The Silver Bells were ringing as the shoppers rushed home with their treasures--no one seemed to notice as this real, flesh and blood human being stood, foraging, in a garbage dumpster--no cradle for his bed. 

Pardon the interruption, but something tells me that's what Christmas really is--an interruption--a disruption--a break-in.  Not merely an opportunity to rush home with our treasures, to glow with nostalgia, to bask in the familiar and over indulge, Christmas is a wake-up call to a repeating story: that the Divine is entering every day...maybe this time not in Royal David's City. 

Maybe wherever there is no room.

Pardon, the interruption.

(c) Fiechter, 2015

What Are You Waiting For?

Just three weeks ago our neighbor died.  It was sudden, though not entirely unexpected, and our lives without him are sorely diminished.  We miss him.  And in the aftermath of his passing we are all discovering how unprepared he was--how unprepared we were.  But why?

"The days are surely coming." 

They are here.  Look around!  Listen!  The signs are everywhere: the clarion gunfire, the whining siren, the grievous aftermath, the shocking rhetoric we'd hoped had died with the tyrants of the last century--complete with goose-stepping lemmings fanning the flames of fear--and our own neighbors spewing hatred.

How is it that we have never learned?

'Tis the season of waiting--waiting and longing--for celebrations yet to come, for shortening days to lengthen again, for the promised El Niño.  But that baby is already born, you see, because you are here.  And the world is waiting with bated breath--

What are you waiting for?

(c) Fiechter, 2015

May your celebrations be filled with joy and peace and purpose.  In the year to come let us all find ways to speak the truth and stand against the darkness and fear that dwell within.  You can change the world--it is already better because you are here.

Then How They Loved Him

So let me see if I've got this right-- 

He's rejected from his social group because he has what others perceive to be a disability.  He's ridiculed for being different and banned from participating in community activities.  But then, and only because of an unexpected change in circumstances, what they had once seen as a disability suddenly becomes beneficial for them.  Where he had previously been rejected he is now celebrated.  Those who once mocked and rejected him now "love" him and proclaim that from now on he will be celebrated in perpetuity.

And this is supposed to be a GOOD thing?  Seriously?

The other day I was singing along to the song when, rather suddenly, a light bulb came on over my head.  You might even say, "It glowed"  We do a lot of celebrating for the wrong reasons.  We celebrate narrowly defined 'beauty' and 'ability' and do a lot of rejecting of those who are even only slightly different from the norm, the mainstream.  We reject and we bully and we intimidate--and then we proclaim ourselves to be the victims.  We insist on assimilation--and only when those we reject can somehow prove themselves to be useful do we then proclaim our acceptance and 'love.'

Heck, we even sing about it.

This Christmas I'm going to try something new--I hope you will too!  Rather than accepting the norm as good and right, I'm going to question it.  Maybe the things we've been celebrating shouldn't be celebrated after all.  Maybe the people we've been rejecting should be included--and not only because they are useful to us, but because they are as good and wonderful as you and me and everyone else.

Who knows?  Maybe if we do, someday people will celebrate US for remembering that "love does not insist on its own way." 

Then we'll go down in history.

(c) Fiechter, 2015.  If you enjoy, please share!  If you want to reprint, please ask!  

Happiest of holidays to all...(and to all, a good night!)