A Christmas Miracle?

I don’t want to brag, but I am a bit of a Christmas miracle, right in your midst!

Every year I hope it won’t happen. I eat right (mostly). I exercise (usually). I try to keep the stress of the season and the calendar at bay every year. And this year, I really thought I’d done it. With the latest variant making its path through the systems of the island, we decided to do a fully online Christmas Pageant. I was relaxed, packed, and ready to go on leave. I would do one of the most joyous services of the year—the No-Rehearsal Christmas Pageant—and then for the first time in three years, not be sick.

See, for the past two years, I was either sick at the pageant or became very sick right after the pageant, but I felt great and ready to go this year. My friend came over to take me to the airport, and then in about an hour or so, I went from mostly fine (a little upset stomach likely from a hastily blended blueberry and banana smoothie) to being violently and distressingly ill. Was it the months-old Korean chili paste I added to my fried rice? Was it a blueberry past its time? Was it a flu? Whatever it was, it won.

I called the reservations desk for the airline and said that I was ill and I didn’t think I should get on a plane. The agent responded with the kind of exasperation only two years of near constant disarray and confusion can forge: “PLEASE DON’T!” I heeded her advice and lay low. Ritz crackers and green tea saw me through the next few days until I could be tested for COVID, and I was negative. My symptoms actually were much worse than many of my friends who’d had COVID, so I had a strange envy.

A friend told me once that in her faith and culture, if you do something three years in a row, it becomes a tradition. Being ill on the same calendar day three years in a row has made me wonder whether my body is observing its own set of rituals. Is my body going out on the town and wearing down its immune system without me? Is it up to something I don’t know about? I don’t say this to brag, but I have not taken a single sick day while serving here at First Unitarian. Every illness I’ve had has come during a vacation or study leave.

Perhaps my psyche has absorbed the Puritan work ethic to such a degree that I can’t bring myself to take a sick day. Perhaps my body has a calendar it keeps that I’m going to have to get used to. Perhaps there really is more going on in our bodies than our minds can ever fully know. But whatever traditions your body is carrying out without you, I hope they bring you good health and good cheer in this new year. And if they don’t, from one miracle to another, I feel your pain.

In good health to you all,

Rev. T. J.