Canter Bridge

2007 has been an exhausting, occasionally degrading year.

This Christmas morning, following upon the heels of one of my middle-sized life’s sweetest worship experiences last evening as a guest at Indianapolis’ East 91st Street Christian Church, breathes comfortably in the pleasant bosom of family and God’s tenderness.

But oh, what a year!

From my morning’s easy chair, waiting for Christmas Day’s sun to rise, I cannot bear to think of another target aimed at, let alone hit. I am stripped bare by expectations and the drivenness imposed upon me by my peers and boiling up from within as from a poisoned spring.

My soul is worn to bits by expectations and schedules and flights and the anxiety that stalks them like a jealous owner.

Life is too short to be lived in this 2007-ish way. Things that matter were kicked off the path while hot pursuit of lesser things called itself mandatory and unquestioned.

Circumstances forced me to peer into the abyss of my own shallow and craven soul as perhaps never before. For the first time, I have felt nausea edge close to synonymity with life as I have chosen to live it.

Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum
A new born King to see, pa rum pum pum pum

I couldn’t sing last evening. My heart was in my throat, tears overrunning my eyes. The news of a King’s birth seemed suddenly like Everything. Music alerted our souls, visual art summoned our hearts to the bursting point. An anachronistic Cross focused our lives on love for which there are only partial words.

Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pum pum pum
To lay before the King, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

Is there room for a little drummer boy, too big, middle-aged, and scarred for such child-like imagery, yet eerily like him in that I feel worthy only to accompany, to offer a tiny bit of percussion without which the music could passably, in fact quite happily, go on?

So to honor Him, pa rum pum pum pum,
When we come.

Who can do this? Christmas tales of a Child King in a manger can hardly hold off the deeper, theological force of a Sovereign King who needs nothing, whose dwells in impenetrable light, whose honor needs no polishing by stained hands and limp arms like mine?

Little Baby, pa rum pum pum pum
I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum
I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum
That’s fit to give the King, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

We live in our poverty. I seem in a year like 2007 to lie down and writhe about in mine.

I have no gift to bring!

Shall I play for you, pa rum pum pum pum,

On my drum … ?

Is this grace? Is this love? What is this welcoming, forgiving, embracing, inviting surge that seems to come from a place so real that we can speak of it only in spatial terms, that seems to come from heaven?

Mary nodded, pa rum pum pum pum
The ox and lamb kept time, pa rum pum pum pum
I played my drum for Him, pa rum pum pum pum
I played my best for Him, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum

Joy. Deep, transcendent, overcoming, love. The kind that might make 2008 and the rest of life so very unlike 2007.

Then He smiled at me …

pa rum pum pum pum