The Weary Road

"And you, beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing.
And rest beside the weary road
To hear the angels sing."

This sentimental old Christmas carol always seemed so sappy to me until I learned that it was written by a Massachusetts minister in protest of slavery. After learning that, it became my favorite Christmas song; you can see traces of outrage in all the lyrics, poetic cries against the injustice of human bondage.

(It's said that there are more slaves in the world today than there were when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, many of them foreign women hidden in dingy trailers at ordinary truckstops...where caring people buy their gas then zoom off to their destinations, all unawares. Alas, although The Allegheny Journal is mostly about "escape," human trafficking is beyond the scope of our homespun journalism. )

This Christmas Eve, I find myself thinking about the power of metaphors. One cool thing about Christmas is that it's a time when people expect metaphors and parables. I've hated Santa from the time I was five, and I noticed that his liar's beard was made of cottonballs. But other Christmas metaphors / parables have their power: You don't have to believe in "The Whos" for the Grinch's story to get its point across. You don't have to believe in ghosts for Scrooge's story to speak to you. And you don't have to believe in angels and miracles for the Nativity story to touch your soul. In fact, stories are really the most powerful medium for speaking to the soul, whether they're literal fact or simple parable. Even the best literal stories work themselves into parables at some point, becoming a strange mixture of fact and fantasy, taking on a more than literal meaning.

Christmas is a time to tell ourselves stories. Pick good ones. We'll get back to some serious backwoods discoveries next week. For a few days, at least, The Journal is going to "rest beside the weary road." Hope you'll do the same.