December Funeral

We went to a funeral yesterday, leaving home at 7 a.m. for the 11 o’clock service, driving out of town as the wintry sun gleamed on a road slick with frost. It was a memorial for a man we’d known most of his life. He’d been, in the cruel shorthand of family, a bit of a black sheep, a relative we saw infrequently, whose lapses of character were well known to us. During the service, we learned that we didn’t know everything about him.

In later life he’d grown into a beloved husband and a truly dedicated grandfather, picking up grandkids after school and taking them to their various activities. He’d been in the bleachers when they played sports. He was the one they called if they forgot a book or their lunch money. I wish I’d had a grandparent around like that when our kids were in school. This was a family we didn’t know he had, a family that goes crazy over Christmas, with all the trimmings. Perhaps he was a bit of a Santa Claus to those kids and to their friends, who sat in Hawaiian shirts at the front of the funeral chapel, in recognition of his love for travel in warm places.

It occurred to me later that his had been a story about redemption. He had done things out of self-centeredness over the years and that’s what I’d always remembered about him, forgetting all the things I do out of selfishness myself, all the times when I can’t be bothered to make an extra effort for somebody else. Later in life, he met the right woman, and his life began to change. Her children and grandchildren became his own, and he found his path to meaning and redemption through them.

In a way, all of our stories about Christmas are about redemption. Someone has been left, literally out in the cold, and pressing a nose to the window of a happy home, is noticed, often by a little child, and drawn into the holiday warmth. This archetypal story must go back a long ways in human history, to a time when our ancestors gathered for survival around a fire, and those outside that circle faced greater perils than darkness.

We got back to town yesterday about 3:30 p.m, close to twilight at this time of year, happy that we’d managed to return to our warm, lighted home before the hour when darkness and deer begin to creep across the roadways. The nights are long in December, and we fear getting left alone in the dark, alone in our self-centeredness. Sometimes it is an unexpected gift of pain that forces us to look past ourselves and reach out to others, a moment which lies at the heart of all religion. It is then, in the lovely old words of the song, that we leave our mournful exile here and understand that it is Emmanuel, God with Us, who has come to us once more. It is thus that each of us experiences our own redemption.