It was maybe 1949, and I was bundled in the backseat of my parent’s Ford on a freezing cold crystal clear Christmas Eve as we drove the four or five miles from our farm to St. Mary’s Catholic Church. St. Mary’s was a simple country church sitting among farms along a gravel road. Like other country churches it did not seem alone or out-of-place; it was simply a part of a rural landscape surrounded by farms of people we knew.
Any car trip was exciting for a country kid like me raised miles from the big town of Jefferson. Being out at night, especially Christmas Eve, on dark country roads, hearing my parents talking in the front seat while I gazed into the endless night sky and bright white winter stars, I knew without knowing that the world and its unfathomable endlessness were within reach of my life.
On this night I was hoping I would see others I knew at church and maybe Santa’s sleigh in the sky. We did not yet have a TV, so all that I hoped for and dreamed of was fueled by books, radio shows and what I had learned, heard and seen from my family and neighbors in our small farming community , it was all I knew, and it was enough. My expectations and excitement were boundless.
My memories of Christmas Eve mass are faint except for my emotional memories which were, looking back, probably foundational in so many ways. A small country church, filled with people I recognized and knew, who also believed this was a special night and who as so many ancients before them, went out into the cold to be together in faith and worship. It was warm, secure and filled with the scents and colors of Christmas; it was special to be there among others. The kneelers were of plain wood and quickly dug into my knees, and as my mother recalls, I did not sit still a second during the service and was asleep within minutes of reaching the car for the 10-minute drive to our farmhouse. I would like to think I was dreaming far into the universe but more likely I was dreaming of Christmas morning presents and Christmas day with my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
This happy, intense hour of my life, which seemed so normal at the time, was of course only a part of what this rural Iowa community sent me into the world with. It was years before I understood that I was happiest and most fulfilled when living and working within a close community, usually a neighborhood in a large city or a small town adjacent to a city. The richness and security of knowing one’s neighbors is immeasurable; it is being a part of a community on many levels whether through a church or volunteer work or gym workouts, conversations at the a.m. bus stop or city tree planting days.
I know that for me this knowledge began with the memory of that Christmas Eve. And when I remember to remember, it is an assurance that the wonders of the universe(s) and its possibilities surround us forever, wherever we are and whatever our circumstances. And sometimes we are lucky enough to recall these flashes in time.
For me, it was going to midnight mass at St. Mary’s Church, near Cooper, Iowa.
~Becky Coyne White, Pittsburgh, PA, 12/21/2013
