Moving into the New Year

By Kathleen Ann Brown 

The 9:30 service on New Year’s morning was comfortably crowded.  The church was far from full, but far from empty.  The warmth we prayed in was more than a welcome respite from the cold wind outdoors.  I felt it also as a rare but sweet physical awareness of my unity with all who had come to worship.  The Body of Christ dressed in knitted scarves and heavy coats with gloves peeking out of their pockets. 

We sang the same carols we’d sung on Christmas Day, but this week the accompaniment was different.  Instead of grand chords from the organ, we sang to the simple strumming of a guitar.

The nativity scene looked different too.  In the little wooden stable, surrounded by tall, fresh fir trees, Mary still gazed on the sleeping Child.  But the scene looked less dramatic than it had the week before.  Perhaps because the electric atmosphere of Christmas had passed, or maybe because we live in a town where fir trees and log cabins abound, the scene, trees and all, looked like it had always been there, three steps away from the pews, just across from the pulpit.  Not as though it had been unpacked from a crate, but like it was right there among us every day.  

Toward the end of the service, as we stood to pray before leaving, the quiet notes of the old Greensleeves melody drifted out over the pews.
 
“What Child is this who, laid to rest, on Mary’s lap is sleeping?”  We sang a lullaby to the Babe born to save us.  Would that we all could have served as Mary did!

As we began the second verse, I realized I was swaying to the gentle three-quarter time of the song.  I looked around and saw others doing the same.  Other women, that is.  The red-haired mother with her arm over her son’s shoulder.  The matron in grey and pearls.  The smiling lady with the wrinkled face who hands out the hymnals every week.  Singing the old story, feeling the tiny weight snuggled against us, knowing the cold wind that penetrated the thin swaddling clothes, we swayed gently back and forth.  We rocked Him.

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It’s something we women do.  We feel, and then we move.  I do it often when I hear a baby cry in church.  I find myself rocking and then I see other women rocking with me, from an instinct to sooth, to calm.

We feel and then we move to meet the need for more wine at a wedding feast or a baby’s cry, or a neighbor’s pain.  We move to meet the ravages of storms and wars and poverty.  We feel, then we move.  We act to fix or help or just walk alongside with laughter or tears.

We’re not taught that.  Our Father made His daughters that way, I believe.  He made us with tender hearts, easily moved, and He made us ready to respond with service.  He gave us room in our hearts to treasure and ponder many things and He gave us arms strong for our tasks. 

When the carol was over, we prayed and the church began to empty.  I saw the women who had rocked with me, now animated, smiling, walking toward the doors.  In sisterhood, I knew we carried the Baby and the song and sweet communion from the pews out into the churchyard, with its towering fir trees swaying in the wind.  We carried Christmas out into the everyday of the New Year.

Happy 2009, my sisters!

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