BY DAVID S. BLANCHARD, CONSULTING MINISTER, UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF UTICA, NY
The best story I ever heard about gift-giving has nothing to do with Christmas, and everything to do with Christmas. It’s about an African boy who wanted to give a gift to his teacher who was going home to England. The child had no money and his options were few. The day before the teacher was to leave, the child brought her a huge seashell. The teacher asked the boy where he could have found such a shell. He told her there was only one spot where such extraordinary shells could be found, and when he named the place, a certain bay many miles away, the teacher was speechless.
“Why...why, it’s gorgeous...wonderful, but you shouldn’t have gone all that way to get a gift for me.” His eyes brightening, the boy answered, “Long walk part of gift.”
“Long walk part of gift.” Most of the meaningful gifts we give to each other require some version of that “long walk.” The long walk we sign on for with children, who need our patience, our wisdom, our honesty, and our trust more than we might first have imagined when their lives began. The long walk we share with our spouses, which takes us through uncharted, unexpected territories of sickness and health, richer and poorer, better and worse. The long walk we take with our friends when they are grieving the loss of someone they love, when they are ill, when they are discouraged. The long walk of feeling a sense of unity with those whom prosperity has left behind. The long walk of reconciliation with all that separates us from a deep sense of life’s great purpose and meaning. “Long walk part of gift.”
When Christmas has been tidied up and packed away for another year, the gifts acknowledged, many already forgotten, the New Year stretches in front of us. What will get us through those months, with all that they may hold, will not be the things in the boxes. We must look to the hands of those who bought and wrapped and carried those gifts. With their gifts, they are telling us something too wonderful, perhaps too embarrassing, for words. They are telling us that, for us, they will take the long walk.
So when you open the box and find the chainsaw, the long underwear, the fruitcake, the pot holder, or the seashell from a distant ocean, remember that it’s not just “the thought” that counts. Remember too, “long walk part of gift.”
from How We Are Called: A Meditation Anthology, 2003 Skinner House, available from the UUA bookstore ( or 800-215-9076) or through the CLF Library (or 617-948-6150).
