I can’t gift-wrap this, but it’s the closest thing to a Christmas
treasure I have to share. Decades ago, I published it twice in
different magazines.
Eric Sevareid
was a gifted writer who spent most of his life as a radio and TV
journalist working with Edward R. Murrow during World War II as part of
“a band of brothers” and later at CBS-TV in its glory days. He was a hero and a role model to me.
Herewith, excerpts from Sevareid’s essay:
"Christmas offers us peace in one hand but in the other it carries a
sword. The peace it offers is the love we felt in childhood and may
still feel again if we have lived our lives as we were instructed in our
early days. The sword is our conscience, glittering as sharply as the
icicles on the Christmas tree.
"Christmas is an anticipation for the children; it is memory for most
adults. It fastens the grip of truth upon us and will not let us go.
Implacably it demands of us that we regard our work and what we have
made of our lives, our country and our world.
"By the glow of the soft lights, by the sound of child voices in song,
piercing us with an almost unendurable purity, we are obliged to
remember that our first and only commandment was to love, and we have
not truly obeyed; that men were so commanded not to improve them, but to
save them from themselves, and we have not truly understood.
"Of course, we say as the moment of truth approaches, 'Christmas is
really for the children.' Suffer the little children to take this burden
from us.
"Perhaps, were we to know the realities of our own deepest motivations,
we would conclude that this is why we have made of the Christmas
occasion an immensely complicated business. It is the sheer busyness of
Christmas, not so much its commercialization, that has changed its forms
and rituals. Perhaps we have lost not only the art of simplicity but
the desire for it as well. But not, I think, in our deepest beings. And
as long as we know in our hearts what Christmas ought to be, then
Christmas is.
"The sophisticated may belittle the almost assembly-line transaction of
the printed Christmas cards that swamp our parlors in piles and windows.
It is impersonal, yes, as compared with the old-fashioned family trek
down the street for greetings at the door. But each little square or
rectangular printed card is a signal of human recognition, a reassurance
that we live in part, at least, of their consciousness, however small a
part, and so are not alone...
"We cannot live, in our families, in our nations or in the world, if we
cannot open our hearts. I do not know how this compressed, elbowing and
suspicious world is to go on in peace if this cannot be done. I see no
ultimate security in any 'balance of power' or 'balance of terror'
peace. We know instinctively that in the end only a peace through a
balance of kindness will preserve us...
"There are a few words I read every time the Christmas season comes
around...[perhaps] written by Fra Giovanni in the year 1513...which
sometimes I think of as the most perfect passage in our language...
"'There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much
that, while I cannot give you, you can take. No heaven can come to us
unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven. No peace lies in
the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take peace. The
gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within reach, is joy.
Take joy. And so, at this Christmastime, I greet you with the prayer
that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee
away.'"
From Sevareid, long gone now, and me, wishes to all for a day of heaven, peace and joy.
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