Christmas and the whole holiday season stretching back into my teens has not always been exactly my favorite time of the year.  This is neither the time nor the place to go into all the reasons for this.  I would say this has something to do with the fact that I am not religious, and spiritual only through a lifetime of struggle to rise above the militant atheism of my youth.   I can remember one particular moment when this affliction born of a teen’s anger toward God began to finally melt.

I was in community college in one of my first literature courses.  The professor had as one of the assigned novels Barrabas by Par Lagarkvist.  The novel itself followed Barrabas, after being released by the crowd instead of Jesus.  Here is a plot summary from wiki:

Jesus is crucified on Mount Golgotha. To the side of the crowd stands Barabbas. Being a violent man, a brigand and a rebel, he cannot muster much respect for the resignation of the man who died in his place. He is skeptical about the holiness of Jesus too. Yet, he is also fascinated by the sacrifice and he seeks out the different followers of Jesus trying to understand, but finds that their exalted views of Jesus do not match his down to earth observation of the man. More importantly, since Barabbas had not ever been the recipient of love (the cornerstone of the Christian faith), he finds that he is unable to understand love and hence Barabbas is unable to understand the Christian faith. Barabbas says that he "Wants to believe," but for Barabbas, understanding is a prerequisite for belief, so he is unable.

After many trials and tribulations he ends up in Rome where he mistakes the Great Fire of Rome as the start of the new Kingdom of Heaven and enthusiastically helps spread the conflagration. Consequently, he is arrested and crucified along with other Christians as a martyr for a faith he does not understand.

But it was as much about the author.  I still remember the professor standing in front of the class and talking about how Lagerkvist called himself an atheist who was always in search of God.  Long story short, my relationship to religion, to the religious, to those struggling to find their faith and to those who have lost it, changed quite a bit in that short time we read and discussed that novel (some times literature and a liberal arts education does what we expect them to do).

So…to the extent that this time of the year is a moment for reflection by those of faiths (or lack thereof), I offer this:

St. Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St. Kevin and the blackbird.

The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside

His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff

As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands

And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked

Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked

Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand

Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks

Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,

Imagine being St. Kevin.  Which is he?

Self-forgotten or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?

Are his fingers sleeping?  Does he still feel his knees?

Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?

Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,

‘To labor and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely

For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird

And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

      --- Seamus Heaney