Christmas Lights in July

Venado Court in San Jose was my childhood Garden of Eden. Even now I can summon its atmosphere with embarrassing ease. Roses and honeysuckle drifted through the air alongside the unmistakable perfume of fabric softener escaping from open laundry rooms. Every front yard looked as though it had been groomed for a magazine cover, with dazzling flowerbeds and lawns so immaculate they bordered on moral instruction. My friends and I wandered this paradise clutching Matchboxes, Hot Wheels, and G.I. Joes as if they were sacred relics. Somewhere nearby, a transistor radio played the Beatles’ “Penny Lane,” giving the neighborhood its own soundtrack.

Then came the summer of 1969.

My friend Billy and I circled the court on our brand-new bicycles. The weather was impossibly beautiful—warm enough for shorts yet accompanied by a gentle drizzle. Rain in July felt less like weather than divine improvisation. The tiny drops landed on our faces with such tenderness that they stirred emotions we were too young to name. We rode through them in a state bordering on ecstasy.

But the drizzle was merely the opening act.

Across a distant field, we saw a flashing blue light.

There could be only one explanation.

Christmas.

Not ordinary Christmas.

Christmas in July.

One of us shouted, “Christmas lights!”

The other echoed it immediately, as though confirming a revelation.

We stared at that flickering blue light with complete conviction. Somewhere beyond the field, impossible things were happening. Surely Christmas pies were cooling on windowsills. Presents were being opened. Eggnog was flowing despite the summer heat. Somewhere, a family had escaped the tyranny of the calendar and was celebrating the most magical day of the year whenever it pleased.

The details scarcely mattered. What mattered was that we believed.

Again and again we shouted, “Christmas lights!” like two ecstatic prophets announcing a miracle no one else had yet noticed.

Looking back, I think Billy and I had fallen under what I call the Christmas Light Effect: the tendency of children to transform an ambiguous sensory stimulus into an overwhelming experience of wonder, allowing imagination to construct a reality far richer than the physical evidence deserves.

Children are gloriously terrible empiricists. They see one flashing light and invent an entire civilization around it.

That memory returned to me while reading Emmanuel Carrère’s account of his conversion through the Gospel of John.

While Emmanuel attended a church reading, Father Xavier came to the familiar story of Peter and the other disciples returning to their fishing boats after Jesus’ death. A stranger appeared on the shore and instructed them to cast their nets on the right side of the boat. The nets came back so heavy with fish that they immediately recognized the stranger.

It was the Lord.

Then Carrère encountered a passage that appeared shortly after, one that struck him with the force of personal revelation.

Jesus tells Peter that when he grows old, he will no longer dress himself. Others will lead him where he would rather not go.

For most readers, the verse slips quietly past.

For Carrère, it exploded.

He heard it saying something altogether different:

“Let yourself go. It is no longer you who leads.”

He experienced what I think of as Vocational Gravity: the force exerted by a calling, an idea, or a divine command that gradually pulls a person away from the life he naturally prefers toward one he never would have chosen for himself.

The attraction is strangely paradoxical.

Surrender promises relief because the burden of self-authorship is lifted. Yet it also demands obedience. The force now directing your life has no obligation to respect your preferences. It will lead you into unfamiliar country, asking you to exchange comfort for transformation.

Remarkably, Carrère realized that this was precisely what he wanted. He wanted to stop navigating by the small compass of his own desires. He wanted to be led somewhere beyond himself, even if the journey required walking directly toward the places he instinctively avoided.

I cannot help wondering whether the Christmas Light Effect and Vocational Gravity are distant cousins.

Perhaps both begin with the same interruption.

Something flashes unexpectedly on the horizon.

To everyone else it is merely another blue light.

To you it is Christmas.

Or God.

Or your vocation.

Or the beginning of a completely different life.

Perhaps religion begins there—not with certainty, but with enchantment. A person catches sight of something that others dismiss as ordinary and cannot look away. Imagination awakens first, faith follows behind, and before long the old map of life no longer seems adequate. Comfort loses its authority. A new destination appears over the horizon.

Most people keep riding.

A few turn their bicycles toward the mysterious blue light. And once they do, they discover that the real miracle was never waiting in the distant field.

It was the willingness to believe there might be something there worth finding.