news | Monday December 23, 2019

Our Spiritual Lives: A Christmas-y tale from M.A.C. Farrant

We’re happy to be sharing another Christmas-y tale from M.A.C. Farrant this almost-Christmas! Talon’s offices will be closed from the afternoon of December 24th, reopening the morning of January 2nd. Happy holidays, everyone!

We’ve seen stains on tea towels that look like Jesus Christ’s face so we know he exists. And we know that dried seaweed can save the Douglas fir from extinction so we hang dried seaweed from the tree’s branches.

And the story about the woman estranged from the banking industry is true. She lost all her money to fiscal fraud and now her days are long and cold. So we pray to the banking industry not to do the same thing to us.

But some people don’t pray at all, believing the practice to be old-fashioned. My friend Warren is like that. He says he’d rather trust the presence of hamburgers in his life to render it benign. He told me this at a party.

Most people, though, believe that the greatest prayer we will ever say for ourselves and our children is that none of us falls from the sky or falls into a grave too soon.

Children, of course, pray to shells brought back from the beach for unexpected joy to visit. A woman I know named Andrea Sumner does this, too. She arranges shells along with rocks, feathers, and pieces of dried kelp in a circle on her living-room rug and claims good results.

Then there are people believing there are giants everywhere. And there are. You and I are just not one of them.

And in case you’re wondering about all those composite pictures tacked onto telephone poles in recent weeks? It’s Jesus Christ again. The pictures are meant to show what he’d look like if he were alive today and sixty-nine years old and lost. Like practically everyone we know.

From The World Afloat, 2014