‘This Beautiful Moon’: A Few Thoughts On Christmas Presence

This Christmas was a little different than usual. My mom died earlier this year, and this was our first holiday season without her. I’m sure it’ll get easier in the years to come, but, for now at least, I’ll just say that it’s been a really tough time. The absence of a loved one, always a kind of tribulation, is something we often feel even more keenly at times like Christmas, these periods that are so full of memories and traditions, and when the presence of family means so much.

My mom really enjoyed holiday planning, and even as us kids started to grow up, move out, and start new holiday traditions of our own, she still loved to be involved in arranging the details for our special family meal and Christmas gathering. She always helped figure out who could bring what dishes and how we could best arrange everything around everyone’s busy schedules.

That kind of knack for planning is something you don’t always appreciate at the time, but we definitely noticed it this Christmas. We came through all right, all things considered, but we definitely missed her help making sure everything ran smoothly. It was one more way among many that her absence continues to have a profound impact on all our lives. The house seemed a little emptier, and the kitchen at my parents’ place didn’t seem quite so warm and cozy as it somehow always did when she was there sharing the holidays with us.

In addition to planning our holiday gatherings, another thing my mom was pretty great at was knowing what everyone wanted for Christmas. In the days and weeks leading up to the holiday, whenever I needed a last-minute gift idea for my dad, my sisters, or others in our growing extended family, I could count on my mom to have an ear to the ground and a great idea in mind for a gift.

This year, although we still exchanged gifts, things were a little simpler. The gifts were still thoughtful, still personalized, but the exchange of presents seemed less elaborate than it sometimes has in previous years. I think everyone recognized that this year was different. We’re still figuring out, both individually and collectively, what it’s going to be like living without her here as an active part of our day-to-day lives. But one theme that came up over and over again in discussing the upcoming holidays with my sisters and my dad was that the most important thing – the thing everyone really wanted this year especially – was just for all of us to be together, to share some time, to share together in a meal or two, to share a few holiday experiences, and maybe make a few new memories to carry forward with us into the years to come.

Sometimes in life, it takes a loss of some sort, a death, or some other kind of tragedy to make us see more clearly what’s really important.

We spend so much of our lives establishing an identity for ourselves, often built up around what we’ve accomplished and what we feel we have to show for it. We spend a lot of energy and time working hard to acquire what we think will make us happy, or what we think will bring happiness to the people we love and care about. But all of that can be gone in an instant, and what will we have left? At times like this, you come to realize, as never before, that the most important things in life aren’t things at all. It sounds so simple, but living it – I mean really living it – is another matter altogether. We all have to ask ourselves, at some point, where our treasure really lies.

It’s had me thinking about this short tale from “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.”

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.

Ryokan returned and caught him. “You may have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”

The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.

Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

It’s not easy being content with what you have. It’s not easy being satisfied with less, when “More! More! More!” is the rallying cry of those all around you. It’s not always easy learning to appreciate the simple things in life, or those things – like “this beautiful moon” – that money can never buy. We’re trained and conditioned by our culture to believe that having more is better – that having more of the stuff we want will make us happier, and that having the means to acquire whatever we desire will free us from all sense of want, and keep our fears and insecurities safely at bay.

We’re frequently taught, by our society and by the messages and marketing all around us, that life is a zero-sum game, one where there are clear winners and losers – and we all know which we’d rather be. But this way of thinking, as often as not, leads to all the madness we see every night on the evening news or read about each morning in the paper. It makes us desperate to succeed, to win at all costs, and sets us against each other in fear and mistrust and hatred.

Sometimes life really is a zero-sum game. Sometimes one team wins and one team loses, or one person gets the job while all the other applicants keep searching, or one venture’s success means the failure of another. I know it’s true, and I don’t mean to diminish this real, if difficult, aspect of the world we live in.

But it doesn’t always have to be this way. Some of life’s greatest pleasures, and its greatest treasures, are things that are not actually diminished by being shared – laughter, human warmth and compassion, the beauty of a sunrise or a work of art, or just the simple sight of the moon rising in the evening over a mountain peak.

It’s been said before that the best present is presence, and I guess that was brought home for me this Christmas in new ways. My mom’s absence – and her death – was such a big part of this year’s holiday season, and it made me really grateful for the chance to gather together with the rest of our family, to spend some time together and enjoy some of those blessings that only grow and expand by being shared. It also made me want to keep learning and practicing the art of being present to life as it unfolds – moment by moment – so that, as the days and the seasons and the years roll by, I don’t spend them distracted always by the past and the future, by all my own personal wants and needs, by all my private fears and hopes and anxieties.

To be honest with you, I’m too much like the thief in the story, always grasping, always needing something more to help me feel satisfied, happy, or fulfilled. Too often, blinded by cynicism, I’m confused by grace – and even by simple human goodness – when and where it does appear. But, if it’s possible, I’d like to be more like the baby born in Bethlehem whose coming we’ve been celebrating this week, more like the god who would become like us in order to meet us face to face.

I’d also like to be more like the Zen master Ryokan, happy with or without his few possessions, content to sit naked and just enjoy this beautiful day, this beautiful night, this beautiful moon – and the light shining down from it on each and every one of us.