fa la
Now that it’s happening and I’m standing here holding a microphone to my loud mouth and singing raucously, I never realized that “Deck the Halls” had so many verses, it keeps going on and on. Jeepers.
Last evening our church youth group had a it’s not a sing-a-long, there’s another word for it. Not charades. Your name is called and you are summoned up front and told to choose a song and sing it to the music. I told them Father Tom isn’t here tonight but was called up regardless. Anyway, it doesn’t matter to me, because anyone who has made a fool of himself Sundays in the pulpit for nearly forty years can’t possibly be bashful about being handed a microphone in the parish hall and told to sing. I chose “Deck the Halls” because my favorite line in the song, “Carroll the ancient Yuletide troll,” is about me. Anymore, my range is about three notes, five if I start an octave lower, but I started too high and couldn’t reach all the FA LA LA LA LA, LA LA LA LAs without screeching and straining. These are middle schoolers, and by the time they started screaming “Father Tom, Father Tom,” all the boys had escaped outside, leaving only the girls to sing behind me. They did well though.
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Seldom to never is there a connection between yesterday’s blog and today’s and tomorrow’s; rather, blogposts are like sermons: as I step out of the pulpit and head back to my clergy chair I pull a lever in my brain and whatever I said during my unconscious time in the pulpit drops into the outer darkness; so it’s useless to ask me to explain something I said, I’ve moved on.
But yesterday for reasons that were not at all personal but purely pastoral as priest, confessor, and sometime spiritual advisor, I started out to reflect briefly on the effects of suicide. This holiday season is a time of year when many folks have nothing joyful to enjoy or look forward to, but only the anguish of looking back on Christmases and friends and loved ones and relationships and places and times gone forever and irretrievably and tormenting the mind. For many, the memories are too painful and the depression unbearable, and it’s a Time and Season when suicides skyrocket tragically, breaking even more hearts. Many years ago, I think I’ve recalled this here before, a parishioner came to me in deep depression about a collapsing relationship, this particular situation immeasurably worsened by his own alcoholism, and confessed to me that he was so down that he was contemplating ending his own life. His marriage was broken, but he had a son whom he doted on.
We discussed statistics that a parent who commits suicide communicates to his children, regardless of their age, that suicide is an acceptable way out of life’s problems, and that children of a parent who commits suicide not only lifelong suffer from what the parent did to them, and never stop pondering what they did to cause it and how they might have prevented it, and why the parent didn't love them enough to want to share life with them regardless of the cost and his pain; but moreover that children of a suicide parent have a higher probability of killing themselves in their own future. I told him flat out that if he killed himself he would be eternally guilty of the murder of his own son whom he adored.
There are broken hearts this holiday season, and more hearts will be broken, and half of the people we know will be deeply grieving as everyone around them shouts “Merry Christmas!” and “Happy Holidays!!” As priest and pastor, my prayer is that everyone who is trying to hold back tears and choke down sobs while the rest of us celebrate, will have the courage and sense to hang in there and make it through hour by hour, day by day, until everyday life returns to some semblance of the day-by-dayness that it really is.
God’s peace.
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For fans who monitor my breakfasts: thirteen large blackberries, eight jumbo shrimp in remoulade, sizzling-toasted strips of French baguette dipped in olive oil.
For fans who monitor my breakfasts: thirteen large blackberries, eight jumbo shrimp in remoulade, sizzling-toasted strips of French baguette dipped in olive oil.