Sunday Morning Meds--Perfect in Beauty

“From Zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth.” Psalm 50:2 

We were three blocks, max, from Main Street, far too close in December because the mini-mall downtown pipes Christmas musak all over the parking lot and consequently all over the surrounding neighborhoods. We hear it whether we want to or not. Fortunately, windows are shut down tight or “White Christmas” would find its way inside, like those pesky Asian beetles that just now are dying, thanks to the cold.

I could stand outside in beautiful first snow and hear far more than I wanted to know about Mama and Santa Claus.

I love Christmas music. In my life, I must have been part of a thousand gatherings were “Joy to the World” brought the assembled to their feet. I never tire of it. “Lo, How a Rose e’er Blooming” is as gorgeous as it is haunting, and that last line of the refrain of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” is enough to conjure up all the very best images of all my Christmases past. My wife and I rarely play anything on the old music center in the living room. But a week before Christmas, Handel’s Messiah is on most all the time.

I’m no Scrooge, is what I’m saying, but I found the mall’s constant blaring of seasonal music—most of it secular—horribly annoying.

Christmas itself is so familiar, so intimate, that it seems almost like a buddy from whom we expect so much that we can’t help but somehow be letdown. Christmas is so close to us that a whole lot of us have a love/hate thing with the whole season. Yuletide brings out the best in us—and the worst. Ask any crisis center. Suicides jump in the middle of all that caroling.

It ain’t perfect, and everybody knows it. But that having been said and despite the Wal-Mart excesses of Black Friday, the whole season is an immense blessing for all of us—no matter what our faith.

I’m still, always, happy for the season. I love the golden glow our huge wreath casts nightly over the snow down the alley. I love the hand-carved nativity scene that comes out of nowhere and sits on our magazine table. I love the tree decorations, little tokens of where we’ve been throughout our married life. I love buying gifts for people, lots of them—little things, red licorice for my wife. I love the story. I love the love he’s brought—Jesus Christ that is. At Christmas, we’re all kids.

One of every winter’s greatest disappointment is Christmas being over.

I’m not sure I can recapture what it is that the psalmist sees when he says what he does in this verse because in that writer’s mind, God almighty actually lived in the temple. I don’t have any pictures for what he meant by “shining forth” from Zion.

The closest I can come is Christmas because what happens throughout the world—the whole world, not just the Christian world—at Christmas is a blessing. For a moment, even through the muzak, God’s perfect beauty shines forth in sometimes very imperfect ways; but what it brings is, well, joy to the world.