A Season of Waiting

For Christmas in 1987, my Aunt Joyce and Uncle Ron gave me Cynthia Rylant’s Children of Christmas: Stories for the Season. It’s a book of six stories that are brutally heart-wrenching. You are living alone on a Christmas tree farm, keeping watch for the tree that didn’t get picked. You are a little girl at a diner with your father, when a cat creeps in, and you, your dad, the waitress, and another young man are subtly marked and maybe changed forever. You are a grandson and your grandpa, who’s lost the love of his life, is spending Christmas at your home. You are a young girl, walking the streets on Christmas Eve night wishing for toys and chocolates and family. You are a young boy waiting and hoping for a legend. You are a homeless woman who is searching for something, but doesn’t remember what it is. You just know you’re searching.

I want to tell you that since that 1987 Christmas when I was newly 10, I clutched Rylant’s collection to me under the covers, returning to, and growing up with these stories. The truth is, I wasn’t a reader. I loved stories and storytelling, but by 10 I knew reading was for the smart people.

So Children of Christmas stayed on the shelf in my bedroom. It traveled with me to Calvin and I referenced it when I needed to finish a reading assignment in one of my education classes. It made its way to South Bend, Indiana, where it settled in a corner of my first classroom, tucked into a bookshelf next to a couple of oversized chairs with fluffy pillows that were hand-me downs from my Aunt Lucy, and a coffee table that Jesse’s Grandma no longer needed. Still though, it remained unread.

One day during that first year of teaching, two fifth grade girls, who now are grown women with careers and families of their own, but back then were 10, had just finished A Wrinkle in Time, asked me what they should read next. It was a lucky moment and an awkward moment too, because I did not know what to suggest, but it was their question that opened up and pushed me into the world of children’s and young adult literature. I did not know the answer to their question, but not knowing wasn’t the matter. What mattered was whether I wanted to find out.

And I did. 

It turned out there were an infinite amount of answers to the question, “What should I read next?” Walk Two Moons, Holes, Out of the Dust, The Bronze Bow. Hatchet and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and there’s this new series called Harry Potter and word is the third one comes out this summer.

I had the pleasure of teaching these girls and their classmates for two and a half years, and it was this class of 12 (it was a dream class for many reasons), that taught me that it is the questions – not the answers – we’re searching for, and that as long as we had a story, we could handle just about anything (maybe even math).

Once, after reading and marveling over the perfection that is Cynthia Rylant’s “Shells,” (a better last sentence has or never will be written than the one in “Shells”), my students and I all sighed: “We want to write like that.” We’d read and probably re-read Children of Christmas by then, and what I find strange is the fact that her very sad stories made us want to write. And not just write, but write like her. That is, we wanted to break our readers’ hearts. 

What in the world were my aunt and uncle thinking giving me this book? What was I thinking teaching these stories to kids on the cusp of adolescence?

I don’t think we read Rylant’s stories, or anything for that matter to say, “Me too,” so much as to find ourselves in the boundless mystery of the human experience. To be moved by a story that has seemingly nothing to do with us is to have received the harrowing grace of empathy, and so it is with Advent Season. We wait – perhaps with trepidation, but expectantly, too – to hear again and anew, the most brutally heart wrenching of all stories. 

This Advent, may we find ourselves in the boundless mystery of the human experience. May we receive the harrowing grace of empathy. 

Because both are waiting.

This is part of an Advent Workshop that I will be leading at my church beginning this Sunday, and going until December 18. I’ll lead participants through reading, writing, and art activities, and there might even be cookies. If you’re local, stop by!