Somewhere back home again
she picks up the dish towel,
crushes it against her mouth.
-Karen Updike
And there you are, in the final days before the special holiday, doing your best to prepare for hours when nothing should be called for but rest, knowing you won’t get much, wishing that people would stop asking, "Are you ready for Christmas?" – the question buzzing up your spine like a trapped bee.
You want to take a dish towel and crush it against your mouth. Anything to hold back the flood that waits behind your eyes – the one you know no one wants to see…
There is the man you care for who knows this Christmas is his last.
There is the boy in your shelter who can’t go home. There is the girl
on the ventilator who is trying to smile. And there is you. Can you
find a way to care for yourself?
As you travel the bridge between work & home & work & home what private thoughts loop the pathways of your heart? When my sister-in-law returned home from a writer’s conference, she experienced that odd sense of crossing the bridge from one world to another. And she wrote this:
It takes time to travel
between the world she left
and the world she returns to
where words mean only what they say
and things really are what they seem.
Somewhere back home again
she picks up the dish towel,
crushes it against her mouth.
Each holiday, especially Christmas, contains two ceremonies: The one we experience with others – the words of thanks for presents received, the "I-hope-you-like-it" anxiety around presents given – and the ceremony within – our private Christmas, the one that holds all our memories of Christmases past, of joys and disappointments, of cheerfulness and dismay.
Hope runs high at Christmas. So does grief.
In your private Christmas, I wish you both. Christ was not born to wipe away all our tears but to be present for us when we shed them.
What I don’t wish for you is indifference – that gray land that lacks all color. The private moments when the dish towel is crushed against the mouth are heartbreaking. They also tell us we still have a heart open enough to break, spill out its tears, make way for joy.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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