Flix Flickering / Christmas Day 9

We’ve been giving these "twelve days of Christmas" gifts, many of them family support and service opportunities, like making fresh bread every couple weeks for Marin and the family, or like the chore of wrangling movies for weekend nights, or making supper while Marin's at work so we can invite friends over for nice evenings now that our house is big enough.

So, yesterday, New Years Day, after we took a family walk in the dawning winter light down in Craemer’s Field, Marin and Teo took off for a New Years dinner at a friend’s, and I took some Papa time.

The plan was to finish reading up on Unitarian worship. There’s a book just published, Worship that Works, written by a couple of pastors who took a sabbatical and visited some thrity-five congregations known for vital worship, half Unitarian, half not. What they discovered, is that when worship (and the communities it nurtures) is working, it changes lives.

But I got sidetracked into one of those twelve-day gifts. I sidled into Netflix, one of the aspects of the gift of "spiritually literate" movies I gave Marin. It’s always fun to "shop" for experiences. Though it did remind me of a paragraph I read in a Salon.com movie critic’s look back on the year, which probably describes what I was up to:

"(We talked about) Netflix queues not just as lists of titles but as dream outlines of the people we'd like to be -- you, or I, might be a person who watched "Masculine Feminine" three times before returning it; who had every intention of getting through "Hiroshima Mon Amour" but ultimately sent it off in the pouch, unwatched; who is glad to have seen "The Passion of Joan of Arc" but also relieved at the prospect of never having to watch it again. Through movies, we collect bits of ourselves, and sometimes we reject parts of ourselves, too."

It was like being a kid in a candy shop. I can’t navigate my local Blockbuster, but I can find cool fun challenging films online, using Spirituality and Practice "best movies of (year)" on one screen and Netflix on the other.

But with a baby coming, I keep thinking that the real challenge, the "dream outline of the person I’d like to be," has to do with more deeply experiencing grace and hope in the context of a growing, evolving family.