Resonance of Things Past

In Search of a Lost Christmastime

More than half a century ago, in the suburbs east of Manhattan, a former nun and a former soldier, united in a marriage of inconvenience, settled in a large old house that always struck their first-born child as haunted – not in any sinister way, but instead full of wonder and magical possibility: secret rooms aching to be discovered, stories yearning to be told.

“There aren’t really any new stories,” the former nun would caution her child when he asked that she lull him to sleep with another jewel from her bottomless inventory of memories and fables. “Only the same tales told in a new way. That’s how stories live and grow, even if the people telling them don’t,” she added, with a note in her voice that he would identify only decades later as quiet desperation.

A case in point of how stories grow: The one night of the year the child was allowed to stay up late was Christmas Eve, when the extended clan would converge at Midnight Mass. Then, arriving home, he would be confronted by a torrent of brightly wrapped packages piled beneath the tree they had all decorated together a few nights earlier. But this was of only secondary interest, because presiding over this abundance was the man himself in a red and white suit, who hoisted the boy onto his lap, and began pulling even more gifts out of a green velvet bag.

As the child sat on Santa Claus’s knee in the living room, he looked down at the hand wrapped around his waist and recognized the ring he had seen countless times on the finger of his mother’s uncle, who had been with them at mass, but (the boy now realized) had quietly left before the rest of the family. Suddenly, the voice quizzing him about naughty and nice sounded very familiar. The boy knew it was the same ring, because it was engraved with what his mother had previously explained was the Latin word for “truth,” which seemed an odd choice for a man who was impersonating somebody else. So the child began to wonder if the stories he had been told about Santa Claus weren’t a tad fanciful. He didn’t imagine they were lies, exactly – just a familiar tale told in a new way.

The former nun had always believed in too much, and spent the second half of her life trying to be less credulous. The former soldier had always believed in too little, and was looking for something worthy of credence. Two lost souls wandering in opposite directions, thus they diverged – their sole remaining link, the child.

His father would quote to him the words of an Indian philosopher that, “every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.”

His mother would speculate that the hidden meaning of Christmas was the search for a child somewhere in the world who was good enough, innocent enough, to redeem everybody else. The boy would realize eventually that he couldn’t save even her, let alone the whole world.

She read to him the words written centuries earlier by the founder of the order to which she dreamt (forlornly) of consecrating her son: “Perform the acts of faith, and faith will come.” But decades of rote repetition notwithstanding, he was still waiting for the Epiphany when she left this world.

In the aftermath of her departure, the father would advise, “maybe this should be your faith: believe that God’s power to uplift, inspire, and redeem humanity is so great that He can accomplish these things even if He doesn’t exist.”

An inheritance of puzzles and contradictions. Another case in point of how stories grow.

And now, a lifetime later, comes the news that the child of your child is waiting to be born. This strikes you as yet more evidence that God has not yet despaired of us. So perhaps, you muse, we owe Him that much in return. You find yourself thinking ahead to next Christmas, and wondering where you will get a red suit with white trim. And you remind yourself to take off your ring.