The Day After

Christmas is over for another year. If not the season, at least the day has come and gone. I trust it brought memories with it that will become part of the Christmas story in your house. My memory will be staying up until after midnight with my adult grandchildren finishing a jigsaw puzzle we had started when they were home for Thanksgiving. ‘Why?’ you ask? So we can start a new 1000 piece one that was received as a Christmas gift yesterday .... of a Christmas scene!

Today is called Boxing Day. Whatever the origin of the name, whether it came from the upper classes giving boxes of food to their tenants or the modern day practice of people boxing up Christmas gifts to return them to the shops, it is now a widely accepted as the name for today. As I look around our apartment this morning it is obvious that I will be spending a good chunk of the day finding places for things that weren’t here just 24 hours ago, as well as putting away dishes etc that made an appearance for the festivities yesterday. Why is it that getting ready for something is always more pleasurable than tidying up afterwards? Is it because the anticipation of what is possible is missing? Whatevertjhe reason I will be settling into a new reality that wasn’t here just 24 hours ago, but is now here to stay.

Then I realized that this is just one more chance to see a parallel, a connection, between ‘real’ life as we experience it day by day, and the life of the spirit: two paths that are often seen as separate with little or no crossover. We seem to adapt fairly painlessly into the new realties that come with life events like Christmas or even more cataclysmic ones like a move, or a new job, making whatever changes are needed in our day-to-day routine.

However when it comes to changes in our spiritual perspective we don’t seem to feel the need to change our current spiritual reality. Indeed we feel it is somehow ‘wrong’ to even consider doing so. We can change our understanding of that reality but at the same time we feel should be able to continue doing and saying the same things as before. And we try really hard to go down that road! Unfortunately unless we find a home for that change where we are, the end result is often a feeling of not belonging and then finally of no longer being able to pretend that we do.

Some of us are fortunate enough and brave enough to go out searching and to find a new home that can nurture our spirit. But unlike seamlessly incorporating the new gifts from Christmas into our homes, these new gifts can’t be put in a box and stored forgotten in the back of a cupboard should they prove troublesome.

So go my musings this Boxing Day morning….

Happy Christmas!

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