So wrote Thomas Merton, of his first Christmas in a Trappist abbey in Kentucky,
Christmas, since childhood, has often been the most social season of my year. My family during childhood was a fairly self-contained unit -- not unfriendly to outsiders, but not outgoing. Christmas was one time when others gathered with us -- distant relatives, old friends of my parents, people we saw only rarely. As an adult, living alone with no relatives left living here in the Northwest Corner, Christmas has been the one holiday that has always found me surrounded by company -- either with relatives visiting me, or, more often, my traveling out of town and joining their own family celebrations.
Childhood traditions passed on to the present, and new traditions adopted from in-law families: each year I was happily surrounded by, encompassed in, family traditions -- by the traditions and by the people who carried them forward.
This year, Covid-19 is raging at its highest intensity yet, and all my family is conscientiously quarantining. My brother's household has just five members; my sister's, three.
And if you disregard two elegant, highly intelligent cats, I will celebrate the season alone.
But "celebrating" itself is curtailed. No Christmas shopping -- shopping in decorated stores, that is, as opposed to "buying" on the internet. No ballet performance of the Nutcracker. No theatrical performance of Dickens's Christmas Carol. No chorus of young people singing the "Service of Lessons and Carols" in a church or concert hall.
Not even Christmas church services -- the churches have all been closed.
So, I might as well be a Trappist monk like Brother Merton. I will be alone, alone with my thoughts and contemplations. Christmas carols on the radio. Maybe an evening laughing at Ralphie and his BB gun in A Christmas Story. An online Zoom performance of the "Lessons and Carols" by the Northwest Boychoir, each boy singing from his home. St. Joseph Church's streamed Christmas Eve Mass -- celebrated before a camera, rather than a congregation.
And another of those frozen turkey dinners on Christmas day. Perhaps two turkey dinners -- my Thanksgiving dinner seemed a little too light.
Maybe the solitude and the relative silence will be good for me, as it was for Thomas Merton, as it was for the Desert Fathers, as it is for Buddhist monks.
This month's Jesuit publication, America, contains an article discussing the benefits of solitude -- solitude not as a necessary reaction to the pandemic, or as the loneliness of a person in a nursing home, but as a chosen vocation. As one example, a middle-aged writer and professor, raised as a Catholic, influenced as was Merton by Buddhism, and now working out his own way of life, describes his typical day:
I rise early, feed (and talk to) the wild birds, light a candle at my altar to the ancestors, sit in meditation, walk, eat breakfast and write. With luck I remember to blow out the candle. In the evenings I reach out to other people, to friends and strangers; I collect leftover bread from a local bakery and deliver it to a food pantry. On Saturdays I sit with the Buddhists; on Sundays I attend Episcopal services. Rendered so succinctly, it sounds like a pretty good life.
As the article concludes: "Indeed it does."
My days are far less structured, and will be less structured at Christmas. But I hope to make the most of my first solitary Christmas, to learn something from it, to enjoy it for what it is, to appreciate more fully what we're celebrating.
And, of course, to look forward to more chaotic, less solitary Christmases in future years.
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