Joy to the world…

I've been doing more baking lately - the captivity of ice storms and the push of cookie exchanges has seen to that. It's such a busy, chaotic, and even painful time of year - for lots of people, not just clergy - and there's something relaxing about putting ingredients together and waiting…waiting for them to bake, smelling wonderful smells in the interim.

I grew up baking Christmas cookies with my mom. We used the same recipe every year - a recipe she'd cut out of the Little Rock newspaper when I was very little - a cutout cookie recipe for lemon-honey cookies. Every year - the same wonderful dough that we'd mix and eat before putting it into the fridge to chill overnight. One year, we forgot to make the dough ahead of time, and we figured out we could chill the dough in the freezer for a while instead.

We'd flour ourselves up, pull out the yellow rolling pin, and get to rolling and cutting. We had plastic cookie cutters that had some detail to them - detail we never worried about too much. We had aluminum cookie cutters in very simple shapes - we gravitated more to these the older we both got. We'd eat more dough. We'd bake the cookies and let them cool and decorate them. And then for a while, anyway, we'd have this delicious pile of lemon-honey cookies that tasted the same every year.

After I moved out of my mom's house, baking these together got more complicated. Between my travel schedule and Mom's work schedule around Christmas (she was clergy, too), sometimes she'd mix up the dough and put it in the fridge, and there it would sit, awaiting my arrival.

Mom would do other baking, too. She'd put on the local classical music station that played lovely choral, organ, and orchestra pieces she adored, and she'd move around the kitchen, quietly pulling things from the pantry and putting things into the mixing bowl. The house would begin to smell fabulous, and at this busy, chaotic, sometimes even painful time of year, she'd find some peace making goodies for those she loved (and herself).

Today, I had some time and began making a batch of chocolate cookies for a cookie exchange. I began with some annoyance - it's a busy, chaotic, and sometimes painful time, remember? To bake cookies felt frivolous. And so I began slowly - I put on my own classical Christmas music, began pulling together my own ingredients, quietly moving in and out of my pantry. I put things together into bowls, tasting less cookie dough than ever before in my life. And slowly, I felt the knots unwinding.

Not lemon-honey…but still smelling great!

I also slowly became aware of an old grief re-emerging.

Even after eight years, this is the one time of year that I can scarcely believe that Mom is gone. At this time of year, her loss sits with me more heavily than any other time of year. She can't really be gone, can she?

And the grief comes back, surprising me with its force, sneaking up behind me like a thug while I'm putting towels into the washer. It crams its fist into my stomach until I am doubled over, crying. And all I'm doing is baking cookies and getting a load of towels into the washer, for goodness' sake!

And I begin to hear the words of the songs and they become more poignant than ever…

"O come, O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here…rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!"

Sometimes, I really want grab the joy and cast it away, into the outer darkness. Sometimes, the mourning in exile is so much more appealing.

And yet, the joy of God is a relentless thing. It comes to us, too, when we least expect it. It comes in the rising of a beautiful moon, or in the neighbors turning on their Christmas lights just as the darkness threatens to overtake us all.

Light, light, and more light.

Sometimes, joy is quiet. It moves around, putting things together with peace, until we realize that we are still OK, in both our grief and our joy. Until we realize again that Christ was born to make all things new, both our grief and our joy.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come…let heaven and nature sing!