Monday Meditation

the post-christmas Christmas

African American mystic, theologian, and pastor Howard Thurman (1900–1981) challenges us with two tasks during the Christmas season—to reconcile with people and to offer a gift of grace to someone else:

This is the post-season of Christmas. For many people, in many places, it is a time of great pressure and activity, a time when nerves are tense, and when a great deal of anxiety hovers over the common life. And this is just the reversal of what the meaning of Christmas. I would like to suggest, then, that for those of you who care deeply about the meaning of your own lives and the significance of moments of high celebration, that you would do two things during this [ongoing post-season.]

One, that you will seek reconciliation with any person or persons with whom you have, at the moment, a ruptured or unhappy relationship. During the year that is rapidly coming to a close, you have perhaps had many experiences with many kinds of people, those with whom you live, those with whom you work, or those with whom you play, and in the course of these goings-on there have been times when the relationships heightened and were thrown out of joint, and a desert and a sea developed between you and someone else. And you were so busy with your own responsibilities, and perhaps so full of hostility yourselves, that there was no time to give . . . the grace of reconciliation. So will you think about such a person, find a way by which you can restore a lost harmony, so that your Christmas gift to yourselves will be peace between you and someone else.

The second is just as simple. Will you with your imagination, conjure up into your minds a gift of grace that you might give to someone for whom you have no obligation, someone whose need is not so great that if you don’t respond to it during this season you will feel guilty—but someone upon whom you might confer a private blessing. It may be just to pick up the telephone and call someone about whom you know something and with this knowledge as a background you say a word of reassurance, of comfort, of delight, of satisfaction—so that you will feel that out of the fullness of your own hearts, you have conferred upon some unsuspecting human being a gentle grace that makes the season a good and whole and hale and happy time.

Blessings to you all -