Saturday, December 20, 1997

Christmas a light of light shining in darkness and death

By MICHAEL O'CONNOR / Abilene Reporter-News

I have been immersed in the details of death for the last eight months.

As a former pastor, I am well acquainted with death, having performed a couple of hundred funerals. And the deaths of family and friends have touched me in the past.

But since the day my mother was diagnosed with an incurable cancer, I have been the one who has been in charge of the details. Because the disease affected her mind, I took over most of the decision making while she still lived, and as executor, I now have to fill out the forms, write the letters, deal with the legal aspects, make more decisions. Always before, someone else was in charge of these things.

Mother's estate is relatively simple, and yet I feel besieged by the paper flow. Just when I think I have no more forms to fill out, a new one arrives in the mail. On the day I am writing this I received a Christmas card from one of my parents' former neighbors, someone I had not even thought about notifying. Another letter to write.

One one recent weekend I decided to forgo sorting through the paperwork and the remnants of Mother's life and play golf with my sons. When we arrived at the course I was struck by the contrast between the greens and the rest of the course. Living up to their names, they were oases of life dotting an otherwise dead landscape. I needed the encouragement of that sight.

Scholars have concluded we probably celebrate Christmas at the wrong time of the year. The evidence suggests that Mary and Joseph's trek took place in the spring, not the harsh winter of current holiday mythology. But I wouldn't campaign to change the time because the holiday, with its lights and evergreen decorations, is an oasis of life and light in a winter season marked by dead landscape and lengthy darkness. We need the encouragement of those sights.

Usually I come home from work after everyone's gone to bed and most of the lights in the house have been turned off. During the Christmas season, I often turn on the tree lights and sit in an otherwise dark living room looking at the lights, especially this year. They remind me that Christ's birth was seen as the fulfillment of the Old Testament scripture that the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.

They remind me that in the midst of death, God has offered us life. That Emmanuel has come, God truly with us. That Jesus -- whose name is a variant of Jehoshuah, God saves -- came to deliver us from death. That at a time in history when a ruler decided to make life an inconvenience and a matter of details, angels promised peace and hope because a child was born in a manger in Bethlehem.

Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? ... Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through Christ our Lord.

Michael O'Connor is Online Editor for the Abilene Reporter-News and is an ordained United Methodist minister. He can be reached by e-mail at oconnorm@abinews.com.