The Thin Times

When Love Finds a Way at Christmas

Growing up, on the great holy days of the Church, our family would visit the graves of our loved ones. Faith and family taught us that we were going out of love and respect to say a prayer, to lay a holly wreath on the memorial stones of those who had gone before us. We knew, of course, that their souls were already held in the loving embrace of the God who had called them home, and we trusted that one day we would see them again.

These visits, on Good Friday, Easter, and Christmas were known in our Irish Catholic tradition as the thin times. Christmas, especially, was understood as a moment when the veil between the physical world and the spiritual world becomes especially permeable, when heaven and earth seem to draw closer to one another.

My sister and our spouses have continued this practice. Yesterday she shared with me her visit to our family plot at St. Matthew’s Cemetery, where our parents, our older sister, our grandparents, my aunt, and my first cousin, who lived only one day are all interred. I remembered the many times I stood at that sacred place as the ground was opened and we prayed the Church’s final prayers for those who had gone before us, each one marked with the sign of faith.

I now live at some distance from where my family is buried. Each year my family returns to the place where we grew up to celebrate the holidays with my sister and the next generations of our family. My husband and I make our own twice-yearly pilgrimage during one of these thin times, stopping to say a prayer and to tell a story or two, stories that still bring a smile or, sometimes, a tear.

Yesterday, my sister Eileen made the visit. As she was leaving the cemetery, her phone, unbidden began to play the Christmas song “Silver Bells.” Of course, she called me immediately so we could savor the moment together, and she sent me a photograph of the gravestone.

There are, of course, many rational explanations for why her phone might have done this. But for us, the moment opened a doorway into memory. Silver Bells had been one of our mother’s favorite secular Christmas songs. And my father who had no formal musical training but one of the most melodic singing voices I ever knew would sing it to her whenever it came on the radio.

In that moment, I was reminded of the comfort our traditions can hold for us, of the meaning of the thin times, and of the quiet truth that love never dies. I found myself appreciating once again the permeability of those thin moments, and how love, patient, faithful, and enduring always finds a way

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