I’m guessing it was probably a Tuesday night. In January. That’s when we had basketball games — Tuesdays and Fridays. I don’t think it was a Friday because I was in a hurry to get home. It was a Tuesday. I still had homework. I was a junior in high school, on the varsity basketball team. Don’t be impressed. We only had 49 students in my graduating class and I wasn’t a starter. I usually got to play a little when one of the starters needed a breather or was in foul trouble. I honestly don’t remember a single thing about the game. I only remember that it was cold outside, really cold. The streets outside our high school were snow-packed, and I was anxious to get home. I didn’t have my own car; when I drove, I drove my dad’s car, a rear engine, rear drive Renault. Four door, 1100 cc engine, and a four speed stick shift.

I had parked on the street directly in front of the high school. Must have gotten there early. That was prime parking space. To get home, I proceeded along the street in front of the high school for about a block and then had to make a left turn down a side street towards Main, which would be my most direct route home.

So, I made that left turn. I don’t remember that I was going too fast, though I could have been. The car began to go in a direction that I didn’t want it to, and I couldn’t change it. I was skidding towards a parked car; I put on the brakes and I kept sliding.  I was going slow enough that when I hit the rear passenger door on the driver’s side of the parked car, it wasn’t a huge deal. I broke the turn signal on my car and put a dent in the 4-door Chevy Nova that was parked in my path.

Much worse is that the car belonged to Eddie Stafford. And that there were people around who saw that I had skidded around the corner and put a dent in Eddie Stafford’s car.

I was a junior. Eddie Stafford was a senior. I was a bench warmer on the basketball team. Eddie Stafford was the starting center, the star of the team, almost every game the high scorer and the high rebounder on our team. If we won games, it was usually because Eddie Stafford had a good game. He was not tall and lanky. He was solid. Like the Statue of Liberty. Rock solid. He was the center on the football team. He was a state qualifier in the discus. And he had a reputation that you didn’t cross him. He would make you pay for it.

So, now what do I do? I wanted so bad to just back up and keep moving. Go home as if it never happened. The thing is, I knew that others had seen me ding his car. And I figured that he would see the dent, and it would be only a matter of time before he would come looking for me asking about the dent in his car. If there was a high school mafia, Eddie Stafford was The Godfather.

Maybe I could drive. Just drive and keep driving. Never come back. Call my parents from someplace in Montana and tell them I had joined the circus. Or something.

I parked my car and headed back into school to look for Eddie Stafford, hoping somehow that I would not find him and that at least the word would get out that I had been looking for him. I was scared. Barely able to control bodily functions. Walked through the entry hallway still populated by stragglers from the game. Headed toward the locker room, and there he was. Hanging out by the doorway to the gym, smiling, doing the chit-chat thing with fans congratulating him for a good game.

Because I didn’t know how to do this, I did it the only way I could think of.  Walked up to him and said, “Hey, Eddie, something I need to talk to you about.”

“Ok. Shoot,” he said, turning his focus from the small talk around him.

“You know your car?” I said. “Parked right across the street from school?  That’s yours, right? Greenish Nova?”

“Yeah, that’s mine. What about it?”

“Well. I kinda bumped into it. I was going around the corner and slid. I almost stopped. But I hit the back door on the driver’s side. Put a little dent in the door.  I’m sorry.”

I was happy there were people around. I mean, how hard could he hit me with all these people around?

“On the door? Don’t worry about it. There were probably three dents there already. See you tomorrow.” He turned back to his adoring fans. I walked down the hallway, out the door and drove home.

And to think that I almost drove to Montana for that.

Lahiri Jhumpa’s novel, The Lowland, is a brilliant work of masterful storytelling.

The story finds its impetus in the political turmoil of India in the 1960’s, but it’s not a political novel. The story is underpinned by the structures of Indian society and culture, but it’s not a novel about India. The story goes back and forth between India and the U.S., but it’s not a novel about the immigrant experience.

The novel opens with two brothers in their childhood. Not only are they brothers, they are best friends playing and going to school in a middle class neighborhood on the wrong side of Calcutta. Udayan is the younger brother, impetuous and daring, Subhash, the older, more cautious brother. After the first few years of college, their paths diverge; Udayan becomes involved in Maoist revolutionary underground activities: Subhash goes to the US to complete his graduate work.

The decisions and consequences that each of the brothers makes early in the story reverberate throughout the story, and as it turns out, throughout Subhash’s life and the life of the next generation.

At it’s heart, it’s a story about the consequences of our decisions and the impact they have on those around us. We make decisions, sometimes in the mistaken belief that they are our decisions and that they will have, at worst, minimal impact on those around us. But they often — no usually — reverberate in places and ways that we could never have imagined, in ways both good and bad. Like it or not, we leave legacies for the people around us, and we are the recipients of the legacies of others. We often have no control over the decisions made by those we love, but we end up having to bear the consequences of their decisions. Some of us become completely immobilized by the forces over which we have no control. Others of us manage to forge a life anyway, even in the midst of the pain and tragedy that constitute the chapters of our own lives.

I. While some critics have called the novel over-reaching and that it fails to deliver on the promise of the epic story laid out in the early chapters. I don’t agree. There’s a reason why it was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Lahiri writes in a sparse style, yet somehow manages to be elegant within her economy of words. The tale is masterfully constructed and beautifully told; I found it to be honest, yet hopeful. It’s one of the best novels I’ve read in the past year.

If there’s anyone out there who has one more space in their brain for a post-Christmas Christmas reflection (after all it is still Christmas according to the Christian calendar — the 9th day of Christmas, if I’m counting correctly), I offer the following.  Can we put the War on Christmas to bed?  And never, ever bring back it back?

For one thing, as far as I know, no one declared a War on Christmas. What’s funny and irritating to me is that the language about a perceived War on Christmas comes from those who supposedly are speaking on behalf of Christianity. They apparently perceive an intentional movement to purge any religious connections from the larger cultural observance of Christmas. I view it as an evolving cultural shift that has less to do with trying to smack down Christianity and more to do with an increasingly diverse and globally influenced culture.  I haven’t seen any evidence of a large concerted and diabolical effort to sanitize the celebration. It has seemed more like an awareness that not everyone accepts the religious aspects of Christmas and for it not to be forced on those who hold different beliefs.

Here’s a tiny aside (rant): brothers and sisters who claim to speak for Christianity, can we just let go of the militaristic imagery? Why does every conflict or tension or disagreement have to take on the language of war. For almost my entire life, the U.S. has been in a state of perpetual war. We seem to have gotten comfortable with it. We now use militaristic language for anything we struggle against: the war on drugs, the war on cancer, the war on poverty (which in my mind has turned into a war on the poor). Frankly, I just think it’s the wrong language and the wrong imagery. Words matter. They form our thoughts and actions.

But that’s not the point I want to make. If you’re worried that the removal of manger scenes from public places and the greeting “Happy Holidays” replacing the supposedly more religious greeting, “Merry Christmas,” are going to ruin Christmas, then I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. Those things aren’t central to the celebration on Christmas in the church. Even though I am a committed Christian, I don’t consider it appropriate that government buildings and spaces display religious scenes, especially as our society becomes religiously more diverse. I don’t see the removal of religious imagery from public places as a threat. If there is a separation of church and state, it seems to me that it applies here.

If we (the church) want to spread the meaning of the season — the profound truth that God has come to make dwelling with us in the Baby of Bethlehem — then we’re not helping ourselves by wagging our fingers at the larger society and insisting that they believe like us or make room for religious references they don’t believe in. Nothing about that approach is consistent with the core of what we believe.

Besides, there’s a far greater threat to the meaning of Christmas that comes just as much from inside the church as from the larger culture. The far more insidious disintegrator of Christmas is the rampant consumerism that has grown up around the festival. The voices that are angry at the loss of “Merry Christmas” as a seasonal greeting seem to have no problem with how the holy season preceding the holy day has become a spending bacchanalia.

Don’t get me wrong. Consumerism isn’t a seasonal malady. It’s not just at Christmas that we spend money we don’t have for things we don’t need. We do that all year long. But the cultural expectation has become so great at this time of the year, that few people stop to give it a thought. What are we doing buying all this stuff?

I am complicit. I have my own issues. A few years ago, I preached a sermon revealing that I had something like 35 dress shirts in my closet. No one needs 35 dress shirts. I love the outdoors. When I’m not thinking about it, buying outdoor things seems to scratch some itch about being an outdoors person. Sierra Trading Post is my crack.

There is a restless yearning. There is a grasping for that one thing (or many things) that well satiate our thirst. That seems to be the fate of broken humanity. Being a person of faith doesn’t insulate from the yearning. But the biblical faith points us to God as the object of that yearning. And the Christian faith tells us that contentment is to be found in knowing God in Christ. Instead, we mostly join with the larger culture in seeking our satisfaction in buying things, even if we can justify it by saying that we’re buying things for others.

Rather, I think we should take a different approach. Feed the poor. Shelter the homeless. Work for peace. Show a little respect and empathy for those who have honest convictions different than ours and try to understand their point of view. When asked, tell what Christmas means in our own lives. And demonstrate by our buying habits that we have a greater love for God and for God’s world than for the things that can be bought at the mall.