LESSONS AND CAROLS

Sunday, 9:00 AM.  17 degrees F, wind variable, currently W, light. The humidity is 71% and the barometer stands at 30.17 in. The eastern horizon is festooned with black clouds with silver linings, but the rest of the sky is clear.  The channel shines silver in the risen sun, and the still-clean snow sparkles brightly.
        We are pleased that our little Christ Episcopal Church will be open for Lessons and Carols at four PM this afternoon.  We only  have a handful of winter parishioners and thus only occasional services other than during the summer months.  But we have enough interest within the community at large that we will have sufficient readers and singers.  The little 19th Century  Carpenter Gothic church is very pretty in the winter, the precipitous roof and steeple adorned with snow and the interior awash in candle light.  It all will certainly bring back memories of my own childhood Christmases, reciting lessons and singing carols at Woodlawn Lutheran Church in West Allis, Wisconsin, and of our own children doing the same at the  historic St. Stevens Episcopal Church in Armonk, New York, all the participants fantastically dressed as angels and shepherds and turbaned wise men . 
        Unfortunately we will not have our grandchildren with us, nor will there, I believe,  be any children reciting or singing with us today, and that does not seem right to me, since Christmas is all about children, and about all of us being childlike in our innocence and hope for the future. 
        Let’s face it, the world seems an even darker and more foreboding place this year than last, and hope is in short supply.  But as the fourth lesson, which I am assigned to read proclaims, “…the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. "

        I will recite my lesson with hope, and fervently seek to believe.