2 Advent
Rev. Lupton P. Abshire
“Mr. Ives’ Christmas”
Matthew 3:1-12
Emmanuel Church
Merciful God, who didst send thy messengers the prophets to preach repentance and
prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins,
that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer. Amen. In days of old,
God sent prophets to ready the people for impending, divine initiatives. These days, sometimes I
think, God sends novelists to alert us to realms of divine profundity which loom over our lives
unattended to. One such novelist is Oscar Hijuelos.
As part of our Advent observance, a group of us here at Emmanuel is prayerfully reading
and discussing a book by this Pulitzer Prize-winning author entitled Mr. Ives’ Christmas. I
recommend this story to all of you, about one man’s poignant and illuminating journey towards
God as revealed in Jesus Christ, because I think it succeeds tremendously in revealing, in a way
only literature can do, the heart of the Christian experience.
Mr. Ives, we are told, began his life as a “foundling” left on the steps of a Roman
Catholic church in the city of New York on December 22, 1924. Despite being raised by caring
nuns and then a loving parent, a widower named Ives, still there remained for our character a
quiet sadness of the soul.
Hijuelos presents for the reader a wonderfully evocative picture of New York City in the
1950s and 60s, as we follow the melancholic, yet engaging Mr. Ives into adulthood and maturity.
He marries and has two children, a boy and a girl. The son is especially dear to Ives as even
from childhood he shows signs of what can only be called saintliness. Sure enough, when he
becomes a teenager he decides to enter seminary.
Mr. Ives in many ways is an utterly ordinary person. But one day he has an experience
that forever changes his life. It’s December, the Christmas season for most people, and Ives
decides to do a little shopping. So, on his lunch break he heads out of his office building in midtown Manhattan into the holiday hustle and bustle. At the corner of Madison and Forty-First,
however, something strange happens.
“Walking down the street toward the impossibly crowded avenue, and standing shoulder
to shoulder amid a throng of shoppers on the corner, Ives was waiting for the light to change,
when he blinked his eyes and, in a moment of pure clarity that he would always remember,
began to feel euphoric, all the world’s goodness, as it were, spinning around him.
“At the same time, he began to feel certain physical sensations: the sidewalk under him
lifting ever so slightly, and the avenue, dense with holiday traffic, fluttering like an immense
carpet, and growing wider and stretching onward as if it would continue to do so forever, an
ever-expanding river of life. And the skyscrapers that lined Madison Avenue . . . began to
waver, the buildings bowing as if to recognize Ives, bending as if the physical world were a
grand joke. And in those moments he could feel the very life in the concrete below him, the
ground humming . . . .Why, it was as if he could hear molecules grinding, light shifting here and
there, the vibrancy of things and spirit everywhere . . . .
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“Then, not knowing whether to shout from ecstasy or fear, he looked up and saw the sun,
glowing red and many times its normal size, looming over the avenue, a pink and then flaring
yellow corona bursting from it. And then, in all directions the very sky filled with four rushing,
swirling winds, each defined by a different-colored powder like strange Asian spices . . . these
came from four directions, spinning like a great pinwheel over Madison Avenue and Forty-First
Street. Leaning back, nearly falling, Ives was on the verge of running for his life when, just like
that, a great calm returned, the sun receding, the blue sky utterly tranquil. The traffic light
clicked on and the light changed, traffic and commerce resuming as usual.”*
I think “mystical” is the proper word to describe Ives’ experience. In the midst of
ordinary, every-day existence, without warning or preparation, Mr. Ives has a mystical
experience. Hijuelos continues the account. In a state of elation, now at Fifth Avenue and FortyNinth, Ives “. . . saw an old woman struggling down a stairway to a subway station, and so
stopped to help her along. He was whistling and seemed so cheerful that the old woman said,
‘My, you really do enjoy this holiday, don’t you?’ Ives replied, ‘Yes, I do, very much, but you
see ma’am, it’s just not this time of the year; you see, ma’am, I’ve just had the most unusual kind
of experience, though it’s not anything I can really explain, except to say that about half an hour
ago I had a vision of God’s presence in the world. And it still makes me feel joy.’ Then: ‘Well,
good luck to you, ma’am. And Merry Christmas!
“The woman, leaning forward on a cane, moved slowly through the turnstile, but Ives
found he was a little hurt by her expression, which seemed to say that he was a very nice man,
but one who was not playing with a full deck of cards.”
Hijuelos goes on to write that later Mr. Ives’ feeling of elation began to dissipate, and he
was left struggling to make sense of his bizarre experience, and whether or not, and even how, to
tell others about it. And then there is this: he thinks to himself, “If I had a vision, then why did it
not seem Christian?”
In our present age, more and more people, feeling constricted and stifled by a modern
mentality that gives little if any credence to transcendent, spiritual experience or realms of
reality, wish for or are seeking some form of what Hijuelos’ character experienced. They want
confirmation of what all the religious traditions have taught: There is more to life than meets the
ordinary eye. To the degree that people are serious seekers, I’d say—and I include myself—they
want to see more so that they can be more.
But what is it that makes for a distinctly Christian vision of life? And a distinctly
Christian experience of life? This is the question Mr. Ives’ Christmas poetically attempts to
answer.
Years after his mystical experience Ives is waking with his now teenage son. “One
evening, way up on the Upper Westside, near Amsterdam & 112th, having just gotten some pizza
to go, his son asked him: “You ever see anything weird, Pop? Anything mysterious ever happen
to you? Ives would have liked to tell his son how each time he walked along the street on a clear
day he vividly remembered his mystical experience. He wanted to explain how a sensation of
impending glory came over him, and how for a few moments he became aware of a
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God that was like no God he had previously conceived. But when he thought about his son’s
clear-cut, lucid faith . . . he felt humbled and decided to keep his experience to himself.
“‘Well, I’ve had dreams,’ he replied. ‘That’s about it. Sometimes I’ll see an angel or just
dream about floating through the sky.’ ‘Yeah, me too,’ his son said. But you know I’ve had lots
of dreams about seeing Jesus.’ His father nodded. ‘And in the dream,’ the son continued, ‘he
always seems to be waiting for me.’
“Then they were silent. They walked up a stretch of the block, across the way from the
projects, a nerve-racking experience . . . because people were always getting held up, sometimes
stabbed on the street. They had reached Broadway when the son added: ‘You know, sometimes I
think about what it would be like to be dead. All I know is that He will be waiting. It scared me
for a long time, but you know what, Pop? It doesn’t anymore’.” AMEN+
--December 5, 2004
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*Excerpts from Mr. Ives’s Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos. Harper/Collins, 1995.