What the whole country is experiencing in these last days before Christmas has the same feel as what New Orleanians felt just before Christmas 15 years ago, less than four months after Hurricane Katrina flooded 80% of the Crescent City. There is a sense, just barely, of having survived the worst and the initial aftermath and then, finally, seeing a light in the distance.
This story starts, as most of my fondest Christmas stories start, at Trinity Episcopal School in New Orleans. Its annual Festival of Lessons and Carols service after the last day of December classes was always a thing of both warmth and of a sort of wobbly splendor that can only come when elementary schoolchildren are delivering most of the music and readings. My memories of it were so fond that I drove the two hours from Mobile, Alabama, 27 years after I graduated from Trinity just to see how the school pulled things together amid the post-Katrina squalor.
With so many homes in disrepair and so few businesses yet operating, the city had seen a mass diaspora of citizens to wherever they could find refuge: Baton Rouge, Houston, Atlanta, Florida, or wherever friends or relatives with spare living quarters could be found. School attendance was at perhaps half capacity even three months later, and some families had been split, with fathers roughing it in New Orleans, trying to keep businesses afloat, while wives and youngsters relocated to Memphis or Nashville or Dallas. Still, the Lessons and Carols service was such a beloved tradition that Trinity, short-staffed and only half-attended, went ahead with it anyway.
Of course, the service, with the children singing and bells ringing and a haunting rendition of “Silent Night” as the lights dimmed, was a joyful, tear-inducing marvel. But what I remember most was in the Parish Hall afterward, where alums and parents and children all mingled with lemonade and cookies at hand to see families that literally had just reunited that afternoon for the first time in months. Indeed, one friend of mine had arrived late to the service itself and had not wanted to disturb people to make his way to where his family sat, so it was only at the gathering afterward that he first rejoined his wife and children.
The sense, the joy-infused, faith-nurtured sense of both survival and renewal was palpable and stunningly fulfilling.
Well, that’s sort of the sense that is beginning to emerge for us nationwide in these past few days as newscasts show people getting vaccine shots and Congress finally passing another coronavirus relief package. There’s a feeling that while we’re still a long way from being “back to normal,” at least we’ve turned a corner, put the worst behind us, and seen a glimmer of light.
And speaking of things glimmering and shimmering, the so-called Christmas star conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on Monday really was wondrous. Most news articles were quick to note that many people saw it as a sign of “rebirth,” “renewal,” or even “the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.” While some of us don’t put much stock in astrology, even we are delighted at the timing of it all, with a mystical sense that it does somehow augur good things after a year of so much despair.
Which leads me back to Trinity, because it calls to mind one of the guitar hymns we sang at just one or two of those festivals of Lessons and Carols, way back when I went to school there in the 1970s. The song was called “Every Star Shall Sing a Carol,” and it invited “every star and every planet, every creature high and low [to] come and praise the king of heaven by whatever name you know.”
The solstice has passed. The days, once again, are lengthening. Hope is returning. Indeed, perhaps hope is the name we need to know this year. Hope for a better year to come. Hope for better politics, better personal relationships, and, of course, hope for better health. For Christians, our savior is our hope.
At Trinity, at each year’s Lessons and Carols service, the students took up an offering, and the student council would have voted to choose three or four charities to which the proceeds would go. Every single year, for decades, one of those charities was an orphanage in Pusan, Korea, (the backstory to that is a long one) called the Village of Good Hope, and almost every year, another of the recipients was a New Orleans charity called Hope House. Hope abroad and hope at home. Hope for the world and joy to the world, for good-willed people of all faiths, hurricanes or pandemics notwithstanding.
Bright, starlit carols of hope and joy.
