Passive Architect

I am preparing to get married in June. My now fiance proposed to me last June atop of Mount St. Helen in Washington State. After a five hour climb, sliding down ash every few steps for the last mile, to look into the face of a volcano, a half cauldron with a blown out side, still steaming, he got down on his knee when my mouth was full of bread, trail mix and water, and proposed with a ruby ring.

At Christmas Time each of us begins to reflect on relationships we hold with our families, friends, coworkers and others who we communicate with by chance of encounter. The day of Christmas and those leading up to it hold expectations, surprises, the joy of traveling and making an effort to visit. During the preparation time for Christmas a lot of us spend more time outside of the home and spend time at home making cards, baking cookies and cakes. It is busier because we have learned to think of everyone in the pretense of defining them as they might relate to a gift we can present to them and that is sometimes a tough nut to crack.

My fiance and I have had the Christmas gift conversation many times and are in the middle of trying to figure out how to be an example of the one gift Christmas. This year we exchanged our wedding bands as our gift to one another. That gift, symbolizing our continuity, our circle of life, family and love means so much to me because I can concentrate on my wedding band. There is not another gift that could compete or want to. I’d like to be an example of what Christmas is, not how much it is. Christmas is a time for giving, for sharing, for expressing, for remembering, for celebrating the relationships we have on earth as they join with the meaning of Jesus. What about exchanging the time spent debating gifts with time spent making them? This provides a creative focus for the maker and allows the time spent creating something to open our minds to the reason we celebrate.

In preparation to be married my fiance and I are meeting with a young priest to prepare for our unity. We are the first couple he will be marrying and in our discussions we have talked about being one body, one for one another, and selfless giving. We have discussed faith in God, faith in one another, trust, love and longevity. Something that has come out of our meeting has been my fiance’s description of how he knew me in the beginning of our friendship. We were debating the ways in which we were Christians and what it meant to be a good person when I realized how much of an outward impression a happy and giving person could make on others as they may try to imitate good deeds. I think with an attitude based on giving and not wanting, we receive more than we asked for when we realize the few and perfect things that are in our presence.

The young priest gave us a few things to take home. He gave us the prompted discussions that I remember with gladness, the way that the person I am to marry describes and thinks of me. It was a good reevaluation moment for each of us to see the perfection at which we will join ourselves, the gift of giving ourselves to one another, making each other better in this combination of our two pasts and future. Thoughts of life with a priest at this special time for the world of all prayerful people reminds my fiance and I of the reasons Christians celebrate Jesus’s birth as well as the celebration of preparation for his time to come again. I had forgotten that since attending religion class.

So, perhaps Christmas is not the time to profess or push the differences in ways of thought between giving, gifts, the amount spent, the time taken, but to be thankful that together we come to celebrate the gifts that are apart of each of us in grace, and look forward to the second coming of Christ together at the end of each year. With many things are in the mix now: gifts, marriage preparation, families, tradition; it’s a time for making things, remembering one another and the reasons we give. Time to be a Christmas example.

I have thought a lot about the word ‘enchanted’ lately. I helped begin (ready?) The Environmental Schrader Center of Oglebay’s first environmental book club and we have been meeting with a new book every month since last January 2009. We are now reading ‘A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature by James Gibson.

I have read the first two parts of the three-part book and am looking forward to reading the third section which is titled ‘Hope Renewed.’

In a one-sentence description the book is about awakening the reader to review their life, the times they have lived, been in awe, awakened by beauty and thankfulness. Giving such accounts from astronauts watching the earthrise from behind the moon, or ‘looking back on the earth, an image of self-reflection or an out-of-body experience.’
The book has made me compare my own times of enchantment, sleeping by the ocean, lulled to sleep by the ocean waves, the trance of nature held out to me by the forest, the rest of thought abandoning me completely, the fluid movement of tuned sound within the leaves, branches and bird calls. The time above Portland in the Rose Gardens, free to wanderers, the roses sweet smelling like bath soap and cleanliness. Crossing the Ohio River on foot, over the suspension bridge, exhilarating as the current below me swept away.
Chapters of ‘..the Greening of Religion’ and ‘The Right-Wing War…’ bring up churned feelings of holy land versus our belief of religious values. I think the argument is fundamentally a literal interpretation of the bible, that the earth is for human domain and that the only sacred thing to be considered is God. But, what about respect in what God made? I do not think of nature as an idol, but as a way of reminding myself of the reverence, holiness and comfort that faith can give someone. In the solitude of nature I feel my relationship to a greater world shall not impede on another’s life, and so my commitment to nature and the preservation of it serves as the basic understanding of the famous Golden Rule ‘Do unto others as you will have them do unto you .’