CHRISTMAS MUSIC

in November...

"Music washes away from the soul

the dust of everyday life."

Christmas music sweeps through

our little home leaving beauty in its wake.

The house is chalk full of Christmas, but it is the songs of the season which truly delight, which guild the decked halls leaving a tingling to all it touched, a sighing in our hearts.  

"It was when I was happiest that I longed the most...

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing

to find the place where all the beauty came from."

C.S. Lewis

Perhaps this desire to make our home shine with Christmas pretties and to fill it with the songs of the season is part of this longing.  It is not ever accomplished, is never enough, but is just a little scraping, a hint, a foreshadowing of where true beauty makes its abode.

Then there's the truth:

"You cnnot have everything.

Where would you put it?"

So true of our miniture world.  Yesterday I walked through one of my favorite stores to just breathe in, to be immersed in Christmas delight.  But, I put nothing in my cart.  I need nothing, yet I love to wander admist the lovelies.  The soul is bottomless when it craves beauty.

John Wesley's perception of the finest goals our hearts can reach is found in his "A Plain Account of Christian Perfection."

"'Desire not to live but to praise His name; let all your thoughts, words, and works tend to His glory.'  'Let our soul be filled with so entire a love to Him, that you may love nothing but for His sake.'  'Have a pure intention of heart, a steadfast regard to His glory in all your actions.'  'For then, and not till then, is that mind in us, which was also in Christ Jesus, when in every motion of our heart, in every word of our tongue, in every work of our hands, we pursue nothing but in relation to Him, and in subordination to His pleasure;' when we too neither think, nor speak, nor act, to fulfill 'our own will, but the will of Hin that sent us;' when, 'whether we eat or drink, or whatever we do,' we do it all 'to the glory of God.'"

Beauty is a deep unscratchable itch of the soul, which perhaps is stronger in some than others, yet is there at His pleasure.  I think perhaps it turns God's smile to twitch in a loving manner at our attempts to reach it.  We can be like a bear rubbing, scatching against an aspen with its back turned away from the beauty, unable to see the shiver of its quaking golden leaves.  Beauty can be wild and hard to tame.  Beauty can be easily missed, illusive.  It can be simple as a sunbeam scattering dancing dust motes in its wake.   It can be it the hopping, flittering sparrows making a quick feast of birdseed.   It is all part of His glory of which we have only faint glimmerings in the here and now.  Yet we keep peeking, keep reaching to touch His robe.  Our hands, our eyes, our ears search for His divine beauty which left His footprint in our world to follow.  As Wesley said, "A pure intention of heart, a steadfast regard to His glory," is a good way to frame our longings.