Painting by Eliza Marie
Believe me, every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything. I don’t know how to explain it to you, but I feel it is so, painfully even. And how is it we went on living, […] and not knowing?
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Frankly, I was startled to face a reality other than a rose-colored, cheery Christmas. Strict quarantine in an apartment far from the glamour of holidays at home called for a celebration of different nature—a melancholy pity party. On Christmas Eve, I prepared to endure a dark and lonely night as my spirit slowly sank with the sun crawling through our blinds. In an effort to buoy my morale, I set out to replicate one of my family’s Christmas traditions: reading the Christmas story by candlelight. My companion and I surprise video-called our closest Hoosier friend, John, in hopes that he would join us. He answered, but it hurt more than my own loneliness to hear that he was spending Christmas Eve in his apartment playing Candy Crush.
I had casually reviewed the New Testament Christmas accounts since childhood, but humbling circumstances and a godsent friend recast the familiar narrative. It was an unconventional read by Richael standards. Our honored guest was clamped to a tripod and unpredictable glitching butchered the story’s continuity. Graceful recitations aside, a sudden animation vitalized the nativity figures I had long memorialized in cold porcelain. For the first time, I saw the star of Bethlehem in two mission-approved electric candles and a dimly glowing phone screen. I heard the newborn Christ child cry out for succor as John spent another evening alone. I felt the wrenching pain and transcendent beauty of a birth—the birth of charity.
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John was a retired veteran in his mid-sixties. He worked long hours every day at a factory and was struggling to stay afloat amidst heavy financial and personal burdens. In so many ways, our stories were different. But John was admirably vulnerable, and as we met weekly to listen and share scripture, he slowly opened his soul to me. There I found myself. And you. He told me how he longed for a safe home, a family, greater faith, and personal reform. How he yearned for forgiveness, peace, and love. Despite the languor of daily survival, his earnest hope was shockingly vibrant and inspiring. He had an unparalleled conviction to endure and improve. I love him dearly.
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The next week, John called and thanked us for inviting him to share in the Christmas Eve tradition. It had been a desperately lonely day, and before our call, he felt that his only escape was suicide. He gratefully related that our expressions of God’s love provided him enough courage to preserve his life. As I absorbed the impact of our simple service, in awe of its mutually salvific effects, I felt no sense of condescending pity or ego-stroking heroism (as I regrettably have in relationships where I was less empathetically involved). I have often confused pity and duty for charity. But this was a distinct and ethereal revelation—one that can only be captured in Moroni's inspired, apophatic phrase, “if I had it not, I was nothing.”
I called my mom and wept. In sorrow yes, but also in solemn meekness that a single encounter with divine love caused my discipleship to undergo radical, indispensable redefinition. It was not just that I had almost lost a dear friend, but that I had almost lost myself. John’s soul was mine needing hope and change and love. I do not express these sentiments as an attempt to minimize the complex realities of others into my own tidy philosophies; rather, I share them to convey an awakening to a corporeality grander than my own—that of being, as Paul tells the Corinthians, “the body of Christ.” There was no turning away; I could no longer take Christ’s holy sacrament, wear His name on my chest, consecrate my life to Him, or wholly love Him without acknowledging the many names He has “engrave[d] upon the palms of his hands.”
With this enduring, piercing reminder, may we aspire to more than a patchy Frankenstein body of Christ where joints and limbs are loosely knit together, perhaps performing clerical necessities, but without the quickening force of charity. In every respect but physical, John and I, and all of us, are to become an organic unit—psychologically and emotionally connected just as all tissues, nerves, and cells listen and respond to one another instinctively.
So by all means, study Moroni 7 and set personal charity goals, but know too that the strait and narrow is not single file and charity is not a means to an end.
I’ll always miss you. You have truly helped me more than you know and I'm very glad I got to meet you. Please be safe and God be with you an [sic] I pray you stay on course with our Father in Heaven. Love you an [sic] will miss you take care of yourself.
- Brother John
It’s more mutual than you know John.
Beautiful and moving - thank you for sharing this.