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Honest is a gift fit for Christmas
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By Mary Regina Morrell
©Catholic Online 2004
"The highest compact we can make with our fellow is: Let there be truth between us two forevermore." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Unpacking Christmas decorations can lead a person to song.
Just this year I added a line or two of my own to T'was the Night Before Christmas - "and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse . . .
When what to my wonderous eyes should appear but a piece of cutlery lost from last year, a remote control, the key to the shed and a sock that was now an empty mouse bed." Yuck! You just never know what you are going to find in the bottom of those overstuffed boxes, but one thing is for sure, there will always be an abundance of memories.
For the most part packed away memories are nice to recall, some funny - like the macaroni studded picture frame refrigerator magnet -- some wistful, some sad, but all part of who we have become.
This year, my unpacking uncovered a memento I hadn't seen in years. The memory it brought back was painful and I cried.
I recalled, many years ago as a teenager, I had lied to my mother. It wasn't the first time. It seemed to be becoming a pattern - a little lie here, a little lie there, bending the truth, twisting the story - all done to save myself from the consequences of my decisions.
I had become so adept at it that sometimes I couldn't remember what was actually true or not true anymore. Though I attended a school where most of my friends were Jewish, I had never learned a little piece of very important Yiddish wisdom, "A half truth is a whole lie."
Most of the time my lies were harmless to others, saving me from detention at school or punishment for breaking curfew. I was one of those who got caught with "my friend's" cigarettes in my pocketbook and said whatever I could think of so as not to miss the Saturday night basketball game!.
But as with all things sinful, my behavior, my decisions and my lies took a serious turn for the worse and one day I found my mother sobbing on her bed. I had heard her say to my father, "How could she do this? She doesn't love me. She couldn't possibly and still do this." I had hurt her deeply. I could no longer deny it, ignore it or run away from it.
My deceitfulness, my breech of trust, was the cause of someone else's pain, someone I loved more than anyone in the world and it made me sick.
It was then that I grew up, just a little more, and resolved that my lying would end. Christmas was near and so in an effort to let my mother know I did love her I bought her a little book of poems about mothers, how special they were, how generous and loving.
In my immaturity I thought it was enough. But I never gave her what she really needed - the truth.
Now, it's too late, and that truth often brings tears to my eyes.
Those times came and went. Luckily for me I got caught in most of my lies and learned the hard way, and the best way, that while honesty may be painful at times, it is the only way to live a Christian life.
Shakespeare wrote that no legacy is so rich as honesty, and I learned from experience that the greatest poverty is deceit.
Now that I have learned the lesson, the biggest challenge remains -- remembering it.
______________________
Mary Regina Morrell is the author of Angels in High Top Sneakers from Loyola Press.
Contact
Diocese of Metuchen
http://www.diometuchen.org
NJ, US
Mary Regina Morrell - Associate Director, 732 562.1990
mmorrell@aol.com
Keywords
honesty, gift, Christmas
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