The Season of the Stars

PCC member Lanny Parks wrote this reflection today ... and with her permission I post it here.

      Today was the day we had planned to select our tree and hang the greens in our front hall. My vision was to then wrap the greens with strings of gold and silver stars; however, as I worked with them, the wires tangled and the stars fell off onto the dining room table and the chairs and the stairs under the greens until I realized that the vision I had was not going to come into being - at least not this year. 

So I got the broom and the dustpan and began sweeping up the fallen pine needles and the disconnected stars so I could throw them away. But as I looked at the dustpan full of debris, I could not help but think about the tragedy of yesterday, and I also realized that no one can simply discard fallen stars. They need to be gathered together and allowed to shine even though they are not where I had intended them to be, even though they were never going to produce the vision I had planned for them.

I carefully picked through the pile of my ‘ashes’, picked out all the stars, and scattered them on the wreath on the table in the front hall. As the sunlight caught them, they shone as brightly as I had hoped they would sparkle on my stairway, and they will continue to gleam when the candle in the wreath is lighted. 

This is the only way I can meaningfully manage to process the tragedy of yesterday and its painful aftermath. All of those fallen stars - whether they fell in Connecticut or Afghanistan or Iraq or Chicago or Colorado or Wisconsin - need to be salvaged, their light allowed to shine in some way that will show us the way through our darkness and make tomorrow brighter than ever, because this is the season of the stars and that is what stars do.