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When angels take flight, our hearts weep...

12/22/2014

by Gwendolyn M Plano

Yesterday an angel took flight. I knew Kathryn C. Treat only through her writing, but I wept at my loss. She was a new friend, a fellow writer in the Rave Reviews Book Club, a person who had walked the back roads of life. She had struggled for years with severe allergies and had helped me understand my own, but it was a hemorrhagic stroke that finally set her free.

It seems many weep this Christmas: those of us who have lost friends or family, those of us with notable health challenges, those of us who struggle to make ends meet. The brightly lit trees, the gifts mounting high, the frantic last-minute-shopping, the Christmas carols in our churches and stores—all have opened our hearts and heightened our vulnerability. And, in the midst of it all, we remember the baby born in a stable so many years ago.

It can seem like God has walked away when our hearts break. But then, we notice—the cardinals in the trees, the sunset over the lake, a child’s delight in the playground; and, we are reminded that we are not alone. When held captive by beauty, we need to pause and listen carefully—for the angels dance in our reveries. They may have taken flight, but their journey has brought them closer--to you and me.

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Tragedy and the Christmas Story

12/11/2014

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by Gwendolyn Plano

“Tis the season to be jolly...” We give more easily, laugh more freely, and we remember times past. The candy from our favorite aunt, the doll with golden hair, the smell of cinnamon in the kitchen—our childhood years are suddenly present again, perhaps even more so this year.

Instead of “visions of sugar-plums” dancing in our heads, many of us have chilling footage of domestic violence in an elevator, gruesome images of the beheading of innocents, reports of sexual abuse by a once-loved actor, and unrelenting riots in our streets. Daily, we are accosted by threats real and imagined.

Where is the Christmas we knew as children? Did it exist?

Last night I watched the NBC special on the movie Unbroken. Tom Brokaw interviewed producer/director Angelina Jolle about the story of Louis Zamperini’s life. His 97 years spanned achievements and failures, adventures and imprisonment, anger and forgiveness. A fighter to the end, Zamperini relayed, “People tell me, you’re such an optimist. Am I an optimist? An optimist says the glass is half full. A pessimist says the glass is half empty. A survivalist is practical. He says, Call it what you want, but just fill the glass. I believe in filling the glass.”

As I listened to this icon of resilience, I thought of my father now 96 years old. Like Zamperini, he was a fighter. Growing up in an itinerant family during the depression, he learned how to survive. “You kids have it lucky,” he’d remind us. “We were dirt-poor when I was your age; the dust took everything from us.”

I don’t know that I ever thought of myself as lucky, but I did grow up with a strong dose of determination. Dad did not allow his meager education or his loss of an arm or his mastectomy for breast cancer to slow him down. “When you are confronted with a problem, figure out what you can do to make things better,” he said. “You may not be able to solve the problem, but doing something is better than doing nothing at all.”

When I set aside the “sugar plums” that want to dance through my head, a different Christmas story from my childhood unfolds. I remember how mom helped us create a crèche out of an old cardboard box. I remember picking up bits of straw from the pigs’ pen to put in the crèche. I remember making garlands of paper scraps for a little tree dad had brought home. I see the poverty that I did not recognize as a child.

I knew nothing of the outside world when I was a child. I did not know about the Korean War, the Hydrogen Bomb, or Rosa Park’s courageous refusal to give up her seat on a bus. No one mentioned the killer tornadoes in Texas, Michigan, Massachusetts, or the hurricanes that killed hundreds on the East Coast. And I did not know about the 92 children who died in a horrific fire in Chicago’s Our Lady of Angels school. I only knew of the Christ child who was born in a manger.

Was life simpler when I was a child? Or, was I just unaware of the tragedy around me?

Dad in white, with his siblings.

Gwen holding the baby, with some of her siblings.

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