Happy St. Stephen's Day

We went to the Christmas Eve service. My mother was visiting, and it was important to me to go find a local one and go with her. We all went to a little old Episcopal church near here, founded in 1856 (that’s truly venerable for these parts), small and wooden and peak-roofed and decorated with Greek Orthodox artwork. It was a little old place with a little old choir made up of little old people and full of celebrants who may or may not have been regulars, very small town stuff. We three men tried to sing bass when the hymnal provided it and just the melody otherwise. My guys, who aren’t church-goers anymore either and were baptized Presbyterian anyway, found the experience sort of new and interesting if not strange. Somehow I got the giggles. Really not supposed to get the giggles in church, especially when you’re old and mature like me, and I got in trouble with my wife for it. But what the hell, it’s Christmas, it’s a joyous time! Too joyous to recite the congregation’s part of the Eucharist in such dour and dreadful tones, but that’s how Episcopalians do it. All my kid had to do was add the tiniest bit of inflection to his voice and I was off giggling again. And then we went up for Communion, and I tried to give instruction but you know how hard that can be when it’s something you learned as a child and just do. So I knelt there with the wafer a little bit and the priest got to my son first, and he didn’t know what to do and didn’t pop that wafer into his mouth soon enough, so it got grabbed and dipped in the wine and he didn’t get to drink from the cup and was all disappointed afterwards and wanted to go back around but I didn’t let him.

Everyone has beliefs and the beliefs of thoughtful people are true for them and due full respect. I don’t tell my sons what to believe, I only tell them what I believe. It doesn’t happen to include a God at this time but my outlook on the universe is sort of mechanistic. Other viewpoints are equally valid, so long as they are arrived at honestly. My kids’ sort of disdain for religion is due to their callow youthfulness, I think, and will mellow with age. Who knows, they may become believers, as they find ways to fill the spaces they discover within themselves. Whatever truly works is good. Meanwhile I suppose I’m a hypocrite for going through the motions at a church service. But at Christmastime I enjoy it. The reasons are buried within my psyche and do not really require a lot of analysis. My boys got exposure to a part of their own culture, both at the family level and in a broader sense. All the observations they had the opportunity to make are theirs to use as they see fit.

In other news, the kid that made me laugh has become a big opera buff. Even put a few classic operas on his Christmas list (and got ‘em). The other one is developing a healthy taste for jazz and for classical music, and insists I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People now that Christmas is over with. It’s his Bible. He’s sixteen. Kids these days.

Now it’s St. Stephen’s Day (“Bright the stones which bruise thee gleam, sprinkled with thy life-blood's stream”), or Boxing Day in some parts, or, around here, Kid With A Retail Job Has To Work Nine Hours Day while the rest of us kick around wads of wrapping paper and eat leftovers.