Tuesday, December 24, 2002 3:18 PM
Family Christmas Party

Last year, I pretty much walked out of this Christmas gathering and into a hospital. I spent three days prodded with a stainless array of needle and plastic tubing filling my body with a modern miracle of biological soup. Parked planted and potted I sat in cold hallways with equally forlorn souls opposite me gazing at the floor or longingly out a window. Ill health like a ruthless final examination starts you to thinking. I have spent the year thinking.

I realized that what got me to this state of abominable bad health was a lifelong series of bad decision. I began to dwell with microscopic intensity not only on my physical bad decision, but those of the intellect and those of the spirit. It turned out that at every branch in my life’s path I had made grossly immature judgments and acted in equal proportion with bad faith. What a mess! Don’t worry I won’t list in front of you the egregious list of monumental blunders that I found in my life. Trust me it was a number that rivaled all the sand in all the beaches in all the world, and possibly Mars as well.

I spent dark nights of the soul searching, awake, sweating in the bed. I counted up all the bodies and finally could sleep fitfully on a mattress of gripes and sorrows and plights and hurts and sores and sickness and weaknesses and faults and failings and defects and flaws and shortcomings.

This year I feel like I have been slogging through all that same troubled sand just to get here. At every juncture something has intervened to keep me from fully appreciating the holiday spirit that I have projected on the full silver screen of my fantasy. I feel like a series of sharp stinging electric jolts keep me away from my true desires and hobbled to the “real” world. I shake my head after one year of considering, and wonder if an eternity of thinking will improve me. Changes, large and small, positive and negative, come with a series of corrections in the dark on storm chased seas.

When you begin writing a story, the first idea to develop is the main character’s “fatal flaw”. Without that flaw there will be no engine to drive the story forward. My story is driven by my flaws. So is yours! Those flaws are more responsible for our growth and personality than are our strengths, our talents, our gifts. Isn’t that what they are called? Those shining parts of us? Gifts? Like gifts they are acquired with ease and enjoyed with delight.
It used to make me crazy that gifted people could learn faster, sing sweeter, jump higher, look better, relate more easily than I can. I guess it still does bother me. That bother is one of my flaws. I cry. I rail. I gnash my teeth. I’m really getting the hang of this suffering.

But when I peer subatomically at all the problems that I had been gleefully dwelling upon with the intensity of a Dramatic Tragedy I find that they are merely shrines that I had carefully and lovingly erected on the path. When I open the creaking doors, there is nothing inside. The contents long ago had been transformed. They had been resurrected. They had been reborn, propelled, for better and for worse, into some part of my psyche that became manifest in my personality. They are some of the fuel that feeds the engine that drives me.

One day a friend and I wrote on yellow lined paper tablets lists of all the twisted awful things that we knew somehow interfered with our lives our work our selves. We then took the list, placed it into an empty trash can. Carried it down to the Mon River. Then we set it afire. It blazed in the twilight. Gray dark smoke roiled out of the container. When it remained as only charred ashes, we then kicked the hot can and emptied it into the River. As our worries, our fears, memories of ill wrought events, bad ideas, bad smells, worthless longings, our shower of flaws hit the river, a massive wave kicked a hiss of water back at us onto the shore. It flowed over our shoes and seeped the purified and transformed residue back into us.

I think that we should enjoy, praise and showcase our gifts. They are also a part of our precious selves. But it is time tonight to celebrate our flaws. Here is the challenge. Here is where we limit ourselves. Here is where we embarrass ourselves. Here is where we can dwell in groundless stupidity. Here is where we can truly cause evil to happen to ourselves and to others. Here is where we kill ourselves. And here is where we can be seen in all human splendor.

We find our true worth in the struggle, in the muck of decision that drives us forward in despair, in doubt, and with anxiety. Often we don’t measure up. We dwell lovingly with images that have long ago been raised and transformed from our hollow empty monuments. But it is here, in this slippery, confused ground of being that we can also be delivered to hope and to glory. And as we struggle on this muddied indeterminate field we can turn on nights like these to our friends and family, greater and close, past and present and get a shining smile of affirmation. Merry Christmas to you all!