c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Social scientists speak of unobtrusive measures, that is, spontaneous behavior that reveals the truth as well or better than carefully devised tests and interviews or, God help us, exit polls.

We stand now at the North Pole of the year from which we look down the path we have traveled and choose the way we will enter for the next phase of our journey.

Our pockets and desks overflow with unobtrusive measures of ourselves. Check book stubs and credit card bills, for example, are virtual autobiographies at our fingertips. They provide an irrefutable account of what we bought and where we went.

Each entry asks the same questions: What were you thinking? Why did you buy this? Why did you go there? Judgment Day will not reveal our motives and intentions any better than these unobtrusive measures.

Similar measures exist that allow us in the Christmas season to forgive ourselves and each other for being so chronically human and to renew ourselves for our passage through the coming year.

These are the “markings” that the men and women we mistakenly term “ordinary” make in time that manifest what is eternal in them.

They include the hearts carved in trees that speak of love that remains fresh through generations of every kind of weather. These symbols may be stretched and altered by the strains of growth and the smiting of sun and storms but they endure, as true love does the batterings it may at times receive in even the closest relationships.

Ancient trees survive the storms because of their deep roots and may be the best symbols of our abiding love for each other. They bear the entwined hearts of many generations, surviving the defacement of vandals and the chainsaws of foresters, as unobtrusive measures of our deepest longings and truest selves. Do not miss these trees for the forest of distractions around us.

We can’t search for these unobtrusive measures. They present themselves to us as they did to me in Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral. This great old limestone church is filled with great symbols from the stained glass windows to the ceremonial headgear of its dead Cardinals hanging high above the main altar.

The best measures are far less spectacular. These include the markings on the pews left by generations of parishioners. Even varnished over, they stand out, unintentional engravings made by the shifting and kneeling of a million ordinary men and women over the decades.

While some small initials may have been scratched by restless children, most of these irregular lines and spheroids have been embossed accidentally. Some of these were made by umbrellas, others by dropped objects, or the unintentional swipe of a ring as someone reached for a wallet. Tiny phone numbers or names tell us where the longing hearts of lovers lay as they engraved them with a fingernail, a key, or a pencil stub during a long sermon.

The gold in King Tut’s tomb cannot rival for richness this maze of human signals that speak so poignantly of people who have assembled there in joy and in sorrow or just with their ordinary problems that fit the liturgical season of Ordinary Time. Most of these measures, like those on our own hearts, come from everyday wear. These are sacraments of the ordinary, signs of life, just the right present for each of us to open on Christmas Day.

MO/JL RNS END

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)