I used to Love Christmas Eve
Nobody in their right mind would want to be here.
So I came to a nightmare that isn’t mine, because I know my faith exists here. I needed to find meaning again, to capture Christmas in its most stripped-down, naked, and vulnerable human state. As Jesus was, as his cold Mother and his scared Father were.
I don’t want to be here. I want to be with the people I love. It’s madness. I am alone, I am afraid, yet I trust in a God I’ve boasted my entire life about believing in … really? Yes.
I needed to force myself away from the cozy fire and warm cookies and into that same cold - where nobody knows my name, where I don’t understand what anyone is saying. I used to love Christmas Eve; it used to be the highlight of my year. But it left me, I lost it all. To me, it’s my own nightmare, my war.
Nobody in their right mind would want to be here.
Another missile alert…
Where I am typing this to you from, it’s a place where children are hunted, men are tortured, and fire falls from the sky. But it’s also a place where salvation, in a glorious infancy of the most fragile state, vulnerable and alone and hunted also - is born to save each frostbitten killer coming off the front, every refugee babusia with only her bag in hand, those grieving children looking for their Daddy, and a lonely prisoner of this sick war. His family tonight, assumes he’s dead.
Yesterday, Fr. Ihor and his family took in this stranger. Nobody in his family knows me. None of them can speak my language. But the love I’ve been shown in the last day is something I simply can’t put into words. I’ve cried at the faces of lost children, stood in silence for lost men. I’ve also ignored bomb alerts because we were singing a damn good song, enjoying some kick ass coffee!
Like I said in another article, war cures impostors.
To matter in this nightmare, to be the welcomed stranger, to be loved only because of the child born on this night ... that is Christmas. For me, again.