Well, a holly jolly Christmas to you. I have to arise and go remove poop from the bum of my dog and then, well, that’s going to be the kind of day that it is. Cleaning the whole house, shaving said dog, buying all the presents, and then collapsing at Shepherd’s Bowl for a little lite catechesis of neighborhood children who know all about Santa and not about anything else.
Which is kind of where I am. Only it’s not just any Santa, it’s Liam Neeson playing Santa–He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad….and that’s where it ends. That’s what today is going to feel like. Running mad to get away from the long gaze of someone malevolent who knows everything.
So grateful that God and Santa, however culturally conflated they might be, are not actually the same. Certainly God does know everything–even though we wrongly attribute that characteristic to Santa–he knows when we are sleeping and not sleeping, when we are de-pooping the dog and when we are running around town like a crazed ignorant postmodern consumer…wait, that’s not a simile, that just Is. He knows when we’ve been bad. And he certainly knows the Day of our deaths, all of them. But he’s not sitting up in his sleigh careening around the sky trying to figure out where to land so that he can give us a bunch of stuff we don’t need but really want anyway. Rather, he has so concerned himself with our troubles that he came As A Baby, which is honestly the worst way to arrive into the human condition–talk about control issues, babies have to control their environments without the aid and comfort of power, strength, dignity, or language, they have to just get what they can get and trust to a mother’s mercy–so that he wouldn’t just see us from on high, exalted and lifted up, but would really know when we are sleeping what it’s like to really be sleeping.
Santa is so appealing for the one, like me, who longs for human fairness, who wants to be able to say that The Bad get no presents, they only get coal. And the Good get sparkly packages and eggnog. That’s the way it is. If you’re bad, you die. If you’re good, you live. I’m with Job, rounding up chapter 30 or whatever, counting out the measure of his goodness, how he never did anything that bad. It’s Not Fair. All the cancer and war is Not Fair.
Really, thank Goodness that God doesn’t fall tempted to that way of being. Thank Goodness fairness is not his consideration at all. Whereas in Santa’s world everyone ends up being good and getting a treat, in God’s world everyone has to face the horrific reality that they aren’t good enough to be God, aren’t good enough to live, and have no strength, no dignity, no control, and often times no good language to affect the eternal outcome of their souls. We are Babies. We cannot make anything happen. And yet God, coming in weakness, took our frailty and evil on himself and dealt it a devastating blow. So that now, shockingly, we do get treats, including not having to die forever, but also the grace of eggnog and a stocking. I keep mentioning eggnog but I really mean Bailey’s Irish Cream.
What I’m trying to say is that I accept the Justice of having to de-poop the dog right now. That is as it should be. But I’m super grateful for the grace of not having to die forever, and that at the end of this blisteringly long day, I’m going to get to collapse back with a little thimbleful of something nice.
Ok, I’ve procrastinated long enough. Where are my gloves and my stomach of iron.
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