Praying Advent Through Darkness

Christmas 1.7 - Wrapping It Up

2010-12-28T07:39:00.000-08:00

Advent is over, and the Christmas season moves so fast that it seems almost not to have happened. Although the magi, who had a cold coming of it, still move toward Bethlehem, it's time to close this blog up.

Thank you, if you've joined me here, and especially if you've commented.

I wondered what I had found meaningful two years ago, when it seemed to me completely unacceptable that a joyous season of midwinter light and hopefulness should even exist. It's still as compelling ~ perhaps even moreso:

The figure of the reconciler, of the divine human Jesus Christ, steps into the middle between God and the world, into the center of all that happens. Through this figure the mystery of the world is disclosed, just as in the same figure the mystery of God is revealed.

*****

[B]ehold the incarnate God, the unfathomable mystery of God's love for the world. God loves human beings. God loves the world.

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ecce Homo, in Meditations on the Cross

Christmas 1.6 - Praying Through Darkness

2010-12-28T07:08:00.000-08:00

Worth thinking about, for those of us who seek the light in a time and place of darkness:

“Prayer, understood as the distilled awareness of our entire life before God, is a journey forward, a response to a call from the Father to become perfectly like his Son through the power of the Holy Spirit. But this journey forward can also be seen as a kind of journey backward, in which we seek to gain access to the relationship Adam had with God.

“In prayer we journey forward to our origin. We close our eyes in prayer and open them in the pristine moment of creation. We open our eyes to find God, his hands still smeared with clay, hovering over us, breathing into us his own divine life, smiling to see in us a reflection of himself. We go to our place of prayer confident that in prayer we transcend both place and time.”

James Finley
Merton’s Palace of Nowhere

(HT to dotmagis at Ignatian Spirituality.)

Christmas 1.5 - Ashes to Sand and Water

2010-12-27T14:30:00.000-08:00

Early on Christmas morning, while it was still dark, I set out for the beach, about a ten-minute drive from where we were staying. The other members of my family have exhausted their resources when it comes to dealing with the ashes, and it probably seems odd that I would have decided that a Christmas sunrise on the beach at St. Augustine was a right time and place, but when I flipped open my phone and saw the reading that came up, I felt vindicated.

As I drove through the dawning light and walked along the beach where we all ran and played and sunned and built sandcastles for so many years, I thought about those words:

Behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. ~Luke 2:10-11.

God's son, my son, incarnation, cross, life, death, light overcoming the dark. It seemed to me exactly the right thing to do, to wade into the gentle ocean and scatter ashes as the sun rose.

The next day, I found this poem stashed away in my email, and it seemed appropriate and compelling, given how I had celebrated Christmas:

But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean
we launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our
own fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?

(from "AD" by R.S. Thomas)

(Cross-posted from Metanoia)

Christmas 1.4 - Blue Christmas Service

2010-12-26T05:35:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe that our Blue Christmas service was less than a week ago. It wasn't something I would have been up to in the previous two years, but this year it felt just right ~ to suggest, to help plan, and to lead.

We created a simple service, based upon a liturgy we found online: Isaiah Advent readings alternating with the O Antiphons in the form of the verses of O Come, O Come Emmanuel, with a candle-lighting in which everyone was invited to participate. There were other prayers and readings and music, but I think that people were most moved by the quiet candle-lighting and the haunting verses cantored in a beautiful soprano voice.

Simple though it was, it was also a tremendous amount of work, and as we put it all together, I observed the process from the point of view of a hoping-to-be-called-pastor. I hope as well that someday I will be capable of exercising the kind of leadership that the pastors of my home church have, leadership that calls forth and supports the gifts of so many others in the congregation. Music director as organist, choir member as cantor, chair of worship ministry as co-planner and with another member that committee, designer of beautiful space, several other members as readers ~ and we all worked seamlessly together.

Insofar as the service itself was concerned, I had little sense of it from a participant's standpoint, but the emails that came afterward tell me that it was a great success. One of the readers said that she had been skeptical of a service devoted to sadness, but that afterward she felt freed up to engage in the remainder of the week. I realized that I felt much the same way. Something of a transformation for those of us for whom the Christmas season has been something to endure rather than to celebrate! Many others seemed relieved and even grateful for a place in which all those emotions which are generally deemed unacceptable, especially at this time of year, were articulated aloud.

I opened the service with some very brief remarks about the lunar eclipse that would take place a few hours later, saying that all of us there were like the moon: living in a circle of darkness and yet, whether we could see it or not, surrounded by a rim of light, a light that the darkness does not overcome.

And I think that we were indeed a little circle of insistent light, creative and hopeful in the face of the darkness of loss.

Cross-posted from Metanoia.

Christmas 1.3 - St. Augustine Beach

2010-12-25T12:29:00.000-08:00

Behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord.

Luke 2: 10-11

Christmas 1.2 - The Unvarnished Story

2010-12-24T05:01:00.000-08:00

From my friend Karen, who has also recently lost a son and for whom Christmas also looks different than it did Before:

the beauty

the radiance

the peace

were they there?

Mary

heavy, bulky

child with child,

travelling at term

no padded wagon

just a stubborn pack animal

no backrest

no hot coffee to go

long days

in the cold

in humiliation

to the ancestral home

family friends waiting?

ahh, no room for her.

rejection

discomfort

uncertainty

a dirty stable

fatigue

labor pains

no midwife

no mother to reassure

just an inexperienced man

Joseph

obedient

dutiful

useless arguing with God.

not his plan.

not his child.

not his way.

no friends no family

no proud cigars

the butt of jokes.

really God?

an indifferent town

and

an unpadded stable

failure.

a smelly place

animal droppings

cold hard noisy

no chair no bed

a trough for a bassinet

scratchy straw

poking in blankets

animals snorting

no hot water

no nurses

no hospital corners

no mirrors

no sink

no toothbrush

no lip gloss

a small, wet baby

pushed out the usual way

who helped?

who cut the cord?

who taught Mary to nurse?

who cleaned it up?

strange visitors

shepherds kings angels

gold, frankincense and myrhh

but still

no room service

no diaper service

no rest

scary dreams

warnings

running away in the night

soldiers slashing

babies dying

mothers crying

tragedy.

Her Baby

alive

safe

hope

can you feel it?

surviving

singing

anyway.

in the mess.

rejoice

Immanuel

has come to thee

O mourning Israel

hope.

Christmas 1.1

2010-12-22T15:16:00.000-08:00

And the darkness does not overcome the light.

HT to RevGals for image here.

Advent 5.2 - Silence and Noise as Spiritual Practices

2010-12-22T12:15:00.000-08:00

"The most basic spiritual practice is learning silence. Practicing silence is an act of faith precisely because one cannot know for certain that anything is to be gained from it. It might be a waste of that most precious commodity: time. . . . "

Continue reading here.

Not the final word, though.

A couple of days ago I visited with First Spiritual Director (more on that later), in town for the holidays, and last night went to mass with the Carmelites, which he was celebrating. He preached on Mary and Elizabeth, on God's activity in the midst of activity and noise. (Those women are NOT silent in that particular episode!)

Activity and noise have been hard things for me since Josh died; it's as if my inner shell is made of transparent and flimsy paper, easily battered and crumpled. (My outer shell is apparently as solid as armor.) And so I've been working on silence. I've needed a lot of silence in order to make it through the activity and noise.

It was good to be reminded, in one twelve-hour period, that God is in all things, including both the practice of silence and the practice of noise.

Cross-posted in Metanoia (see sidebar).

Advent 5.1 - Have You Seen a Child?

2010-12-21T03:10:00.000-08:00

I couldn't bear to listen to Amahl and the Night Visitors during the past two Christmases but now, it seems, I can. Amahl is the chldren's operetta about the impoverished and lame shepherd boy and his mother, and their surprising encounter with the magi. I had memorized most of the score as a child, and watched it with my own children year after year as Christmas approached.

In this scene (start at 1.00), Amahl's mother wonders about the child to whom the three kings are bringing such lavish gifts, thinking, as the kings describe the child they seek, that her own beloved boy meets the description.

Amahl script found here:

Melchior:

Have you seen a child the color of wheat... the color of dawn?
His eyes are mild; his hands are those of a king - as king he was born.
Incense, myrrh, and gold we bring to his side; and the eastern star is our guide.

the Mother:

Yes, I know a child the color of wheat.... the color of dawn.
His eyes are mild; his hands are those of a king as king he was born.
But no one will bring him incense or gold... though sick and poor and hungry and cold.
He is my child my son, my darling my own.

Two Kings:

Have you seen a child the color of earth... the color of thorn?
His eyes are sad; his hands are those of the poor as poor he was born.
Incense, myrrh, and gold we bring to his side, and the eastern star is our guide.

the Mother:

Yes, I know a child the color of earth... the color of thorn.
His eyes are sad; his hands are those of the poor, as poor he was born.
But no one will bring him incense or gold... though sick and poor and and hungry and cold.
He is my child, my son, my darling... my own.

Three Kings:

The child we seek holds the seas and the winds on his palm.
The child we seek has the moon and the stars at his feed.
Before him, the eagle is gentle the lion is meek.

All the kings join in a chorus:

Choirs of angels hover over his roof and sing him to sleep.
He's warmed by breath.
He's fed by mother who is both virgin and queen.
Incense, myrrh, and gold we bring to his side, and the eastern star is our guide.

And at the same time, the mother sings about her own son:

The child I know on his palm holds my heart.
The child I know at his feet has my life.
He is my child, my son, my darling, my own...
And his name is Amahl.

Advent 4.7 - How can this be?

2010-12-20T05:31:00.000-08:00

Surprise!

Surprise?

Tonight I'm leading Christmas in a Minor Key, our Blue Christmas service at my home church. It is one of the many surprising twists in my understanding and practice of ministry in the past two years. This wonderful reflection is exactly what I need to get from the beginning to the end of this day. Maybe it will be meaningful to you as well.

HT to Ignatian Spirituality.

Advent 4.6 - The Meaning of Christmas

2010-12-18T20:47:00.001-08:00

Chartres Cathedral Nativity Relief

". . . including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ . . ."

Romans 1:6

Last week someone mentioned to me that he and his partner might visit one of her daughters, the mother of two small children, for Christmas, and then made that remark so often heard this time of year. "The kids are at an age when Christmas is still a big deal."

He meant, of course, the Christmas of Santa and freshly-baked cookies and gifts hidden away and excitement mounting to the point where, as I've described in a couple of posts about my own family, no one really sleeps on Christmas Eve.

I'm entirely in favor of Christmases filled with that kind of laughter and anticipation and freshness. We had a lot of fun around here for many, many years, and perhaps such times will come to us again as grandparents.

But as we approach a third Christmas in which the longing for someone who is not here is a physical ache in my heart, I found myself saddened by the reduction of "Christmas as a big deal" to the kind where little children spin like tops around lighted trees and heavily-laden tables.

Perhaps we know a small bit more about what a big deal it really is when we begin to understand it as the launching of God's great project, that new heaven and new earth in which every tear shall be wiped away.

If we are called to belong to the one born in a small cave in which animals shuffled around in the dark, then Christmas is still a big deal.

Advent 4.5 - The Father Jesus Needed

2010-12-18T16:02:00.001-08:00

In preparing to preach tomorrow, I came across a wonderful piece on Joseph by Homiletics Professor Alyce McKenzie. I'm actually using a small part of it, but what you'll read below is what most caught my attention. (Too edgy, I think, for where I'll be tomorrow.)

<< “Here,” whispered the angel, “is the key that unlocks your dilemma. Believe her unbelievable story. Marry her, and become the father of God’s child. He will need a father to be accepted by others as he grows to manhood. He will need, not just any father, but a father like you, capable of nurturing him, and giving him a name.‘Immanuel -- God with us.’

“He will need a father like you to teach him to take risks like the one you are about to take, for he will be tempted not to take them.

“He will need a father like you to teach him to withstand the disapproval of others, as you will soon have to withstand it.

“He will need a father like you to teach him what to do in situations like this one, when all hope seems lost and only pain remains; to model how to believe the unbelievable good news and to walk ahead in faith.

“If you do not walk the hard road to Bethlehem, who will teach him how to climb the cruel hill to Calvary?”

In this way, I imagine the father of our Lord was born that night. >>

Image found here; artist unknown.

Advent 4.4 - The Shining Face of God

2010-12-17T21:34:00.000-08:00

Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Psalm 80:19

What would that look like, the shining face of God?

So many images come to mind.

Tonight I'm choosing this one ~ not even a very good image on the screen, but wonderful in the memory.

It's one of the rose windows of Chartres Cathedral, illuminated from the outside during one of the summer evening light shows. The lights don't even come on until about 10:00 p.m., because in the summer it doesn't get dark until that late.

And so you find yourself wandering the city at midnight, searching out buildings and lights, and then you head back to your hotel ,and there it is shining under the moon. Eight centuries of God's presence at that spot, and who knows how many before that?

Advent 4.3 - Who Are You Out There?

2010-12-17T08:17:00.000-08:00

As a friend and I put the final touches on the Christmas in a Minor Key service we are leading Monday night, I've been thinking about something someone mentioned in the RevGals blog discussion of Blue Christmas services: how important the preparatory conversations have turned out to be. As we put up signs in coffee shops or make announcements, people tell us about their losses and about why they want to come to such a service.

As far as I can tell, the majority of folks visiting here this year are coming via a search for the Iona Community's Cloth for the Cradle prayer.

But regardless of your reason, I wish you'd leave a brief explanatory comment here. It seems that there are enough folks here to call it a community, but it's a very silent one.

Click "anonymous" if you want. But please do speak up, just this once.

Advent 4.2 - Discernment

2010-12-17T05:44:00.001-08:00

'He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good."

Isaiah 7:15

This is a complicated passage about the restoration of Israel, the place of anticipated peace where the young child shall be able to eat curds and honey.

But what struck me as I read and studied it a few weeks ago, when I was trying to make some preliminary decisions about preaching for this Sunday, was the emphasis on discernment. On the capacity for discernment as a mark of growing maturity.

I have often, in Ignatian and Jesuit contexts, heard spirituality described as being all about discernment. How we choose, what we choose, for how long a choice remains viable.

In times of intense grief, that capacity becomes clouded and broken. How could it be otherwise, when we can't remember anything for longer than five seconds? Was I going to go to the grocery? Did I decide to go back to seminary? I can't remember, I can't choose, I don't know.

It seems to be not only a mark of growing maturity, but also a sign of recovery when we can, indeed, begin to discern next steps with increased clarity.

In the meantime, agere contra ~ another term, to act against, which I learned from Jesuits. They use it as Ignatius did, meaning to act against desolation. To act against all that causes turmoil, disturbance, and agitation. It means go to the grocery whether you feel like it or not; to go back to seminary even when it seems pointless to do so.

It seems to work ~ agere contra ~ it seems to enable the creation of a solid foundation, even in a time of emptiness, that makes it possible to recover, eventually, the capacity for discernment, for spiritual growth and attentiveness.

I suppose the truth of that potential may be realized from the irony that while I have no recollection of my spiritual director talking to me about agere contra in the early months after Josh died, though he tells me that he did, I am now able to suggest it as a way of moving forward through the dark. It seems to have worked well for me, and for every bereaved mother I know, regardless of whether or not we had any conscious sense of what we were doing.

Advent 4.1 - The Harshness of Belief

2010-12-15T05:58:00.000-08:00

"But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.' "

Matthew 1:20

I am preaching this coming Sunday. The lectionary gospel text focuses on Joseph, and so I have been thinking about fatherhood and what it means.

My own father is a good man who has experienced much sorrow in his life: the death of my mother and youngest brother in a car accident when he was 28, the death of his second wife in another sudden accident when he was 38, a difficult divorce much later in life, and the death of his fourth wife from cancer a few years ago. He has a great love of the outdoors and has found much pleasure and solace over his almost-eight decades in the wild and natural places and things of this continent, sharing some of it with us on family canoe trips into the Canadian wilderness.

But he is not a man of Christian faith, and has little understanding of its pull, or of its role in life.

Thus I overheard him say, as I walked through my house in the first days after Josh died, that "at least she has the comfort of her faith."

I shook my head and moved on. I know there are people who find faith comforting in times of hardship, but I have not been one of them.

I have another father, a spiritual father, in the 80-year-old Jesuit who accompanied me through the Ignatian Exercises. He has continued as my confidant, advisor, counselor, teacher, consoler, and friend in the five years since, even after moving to another city. He's an eloquent writer and has a wicked sense of humor, both of which I have needed and upon which I have greatly relied over the past two years.

In one of his e-mails around the second anniversary of Josh's death, he referred to the "harshness of belief" as something with which I have become well acquainted. Indeed.

When I think about Joseph, and Mary, that term comes to mind. The dream and the encounter. The terrifying reality of the angel, and his bewildering message. The resolve needed to follow through with God's project. The circumstances ~ physical, geographical, political, social ~ all of them less than desirable.

We put out charming nativity scenes ~ we have one in this house ~ and sing cheerful songs, but harshness, rather than charm or cheer, is probably a more appropriate term for what Christmas presents.

Comfort, comfort ye my people. There is, as it turns out, a profound comfort hiding within the harshness, but it is not the comfort of platitudes or sentimental reassurances. It is the comfort of Immanuel, God with us, and of the demanding pull toward that presence even when all circumstances seem to indicate that turning away might be the more rational choice.

Advent 3.7 - Mary, Star of the Sea

2010-12-15T05:34:00.000-08:00

Josh spent his 11th grade year in Rennes, France. When we visited him over Christmas, we spent several days in Paris, and one evening we went to a Christmas concert of Gregorian chant at Le Cathedrale de Notre Dame. (Apparently this year's is on December 28, should you be in the vicinity!)

Michelle's post here brings back memories of that evening, with the musical composition having a connection to Notre Dame and with her own memories of first hearing it on a frozen night on this side of the Atlantic.

Two years, or even one year, ago, I could not have imagined that the memory of that frigid evening in Paris, all of us bundled up in an unheated 13th century cathedral, would bring me some measure of peace. But, painful as it is, I am grateful that Josh's short life included such a night of ancient music in a space whose heights were designed to soar to heaven.

Advent 3.6 ~ Mary et al.

2010-12-14T16:50:00.000-08:00

I hope that Vinita Wright is good with me dropping these poems of hers in here. I found them when she first posted them ~ she blogs here ~ and could hardly wait for this week, with its focus on Mary, to get here.

I am much taken, in this difficult season, with expressions of the original dislocation it celebrates.

Gabriel

How much shrinking did you have to do
to get into the house?
How much shine had to be rubbed off
to become visible?
Did you carry the plan like a secret fire in the heart,
because such information could cause
a whole new rebellion up there?
And when the girl said yes, how much
did you ache to grow legs and lungs and
a head of hair, just to know the sensation
of your spirit breaking open?

Mary’s Mom

I’d like to know if you noticed anything different
about your daughter. On a particular day, did she seem pale
or out of breath? Was she weepy? Did you have to tell her things twice?
When the truth came out, did you agonize about why
she hadn’t come to you? Did you tell her father, or did she?
And—be honest, now—when you, being the mother, being a woman,
understood the situation, didn’t you enjoy some moments
of sheer satisfaction? Didn’t you say to God, one eyebrow arched,
“You couldn’t have picked a better one”?

Advent 3.5 - Tanner's Annunciation

2010-12-14T06:24:00.000-08:00

It would not be Advent without this painting, would it?

I tried to "borrow" a friend's close-up, but it refused to permit itself to be lifted. Perhaps you can see it here.

Two years ago, I had this to say:

This might be my favorite painting in the world. All over the internet this time of year, it remains fresh to me. In the past I've liked it because, frankly, Mary looks a lot like I did as a very young woman, and her puzzled expression confirms the likeness.

This year, I've noticed other things. The messy bed. The worn surroundings.

The uncompromising light.

Is that what we pray for, when we are so bruised and fragile that the flames of the advent candles threaten to engulf us in sorrow?

A birth that can lead only to Good Friday, because it is only there that we can be sure that God knows us?

Uncompromising, indeed.

And a year ago, this:

Last year it was that uncompromising pillar of light that drew me in.

This year, it's the rumpled and perplexed young woman. I'm not young anymore, but I am most certainly rumpled and perplexed.

And this year?

As evidence of our profound capacity to project ourselves into what we observe, when I looked at this painting online yesterday I no longer saw messiness or perplexity or the worn surroundings. My eye was drawn straight to her face (which was why I was excited about my friend's enlargement of that detail). I saw, in that youthful expression, a directness and calm as she looked into the face of her future that could only reflect the peace of acceptance of all that it would bring.

I'm not there yet but, just as I always try to "preach ahead" of myself, so now I try to "live ahead" of myself.

Perhaps if you stare long enough into a light that uncompromising, some of it rubs off on you.

Advent 3.4 - Magnificat

2010-12-13T05:42:00.001-08:00

And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Luke 1:46-55

Last week our pastor reminded us that this is "one of the most politically subversive and dangerous songs in the Scriptures." If your own life has taken you far from department store Christmases, it's good to be reminded that Advent portends something 0f extravagant wildness.

I am at a loss as to why none of the art selected for the incredible musical piece below , sung by the St. Paul's Cathedral Choir, reflects the Magnificat's setting in the Gospel of Luke, in which Mary's words burst forth as she visits her cousin Elizabeth. A great deal of the power of the words comes from their being spoken in the unexpected context of the conversation between these two women, Elizabeth pregnant with John the Baptist and Mary with Jesus. So at the top of this post I've added an image of the Visitation Window from the church where I did my field education last year.

Advent 3.3 - Sermon Fragment

2010-12-12T18:55:00.001-08:00

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them."

Matthew 11:2-5

This is part of the sermon I preached this morning. It was written for a church in transition. But, of course, it was also written for a certain preacher who needed to hear for herself what she had to say.

We tend to run through this list of things Jesus is doing, without giving much thought to the details. We’ve heard the basics so many times. But let’s take a few moments today to pull that list apart, to unpack it and to ask ourselves: What does each set of miracles or signs really entail? To what do they invite us, as individuals? As a church?

The blind receive their sight, says Jesus. Perhaps he is talking not only about literal, physical blindness. What blinds us? What false values, what worn-out suppositions, what past experiences and hurts prevent us from seeing anew? What would it be like to see things differently? Is there something which you’ve always seen and understood in one way that might benefit from another look? Is there something to which you’ve never paid attention that’s calling you to move in for a close-up view?

The lame walk, Jesus tells John. Again, let’s go beyond the literal. What hobbles us? Where do brambles and fallen trees block our path to some place we’ve not been before? Where have we built fences which we now need to take down? Walking involves a complex set of physical interactions which most of us are able to take for granted most of the time: a sense of balance, the co-ordination of muscles and tendons and bones, some strength, some flexibility. If any one of those things gets out of whack, we’re slowed way down, perhaps even stopped altogether. What do we need to tend to in order to be healed of lameness?

The lepers are cleansed. One of the biggest challenges of leprosy in the ancient world was the isolation it imposed upon people. In today’s world, too. True enough, we are unlikely to encounter people suffering from leprosy in our daily lives in northern Ohio. But do we encounter others who have become invisible to us? Have we excluded others in some ways? Of whom we are fearful? And do our resistance and fears in turn isolate us? How might we begin to understand others as people cleansed by God’s love? How might we look for Jesus among the ill and the infirm?

Jesus says that the deaf hear. Hmm, what have we missed lately? When have we failed to listen? Then holidays are prime time for what we might call “failure to hear.” We all have expectations for how events should unfold, expectations that sometimes render us completely deaf to new circumstances and new needs. And even in the most ordinary of times and situations, study after study tells us that listening is a skill we fail to practice. Let’s be honest: How many times are we “listening” – by which we mean waiting for a chance to jump in to tell our own story or to voice our own opinion? What if we decided that learning to listen well might be one of the best ways by which we could show the presence of Christ to others?

The dead are raised, proclaims Jesus. Now, that’s a tough one. In literal terms, who does Jesus raise during his human walk among us? A very few people. But perhaps we need to look at the phrase more expansively. What in us has been deadened, flattened? Where have we become incapable of response, of love? What in us needs to open up, flower into new creativity, be raised anew? Within ourselves? In our personal relationships and friendships? At work? In church? Where is Jesus working to bring forth new life and inviting us to participate in what he wants to accomplish?

The poor have good news brought to them. Are we among the poor? You’ve got this turned around you may be saying to me by now. We are Christ’s church. We need to bring good news to the poor, in the form of both warm blankets for these bitter nights and the warm message of salvation. All true. But let’s humble ourselves a little bit and think: where are we impoverished? Where are we limited? Where is good news being brought to us in ways that will enrich us – not in terms of material wealth, but in ways that will enable us better to show Christ’s love to a broken world?

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann tells us that our God is not a God of scarcity, but a God of abundance. Abundance! Walter Brueggemann tells us that because it’s true, because it’s reflected in these very words of Jesus. Whether as individuals or as a church, we are not called to be fearful or unwilling. We are not called to be people of limitation, impoverished by past disappointments, hesitantly creeping along well known paths.

We are called to be people of vision. We are called to walk forward in confidence. We are called to break down the walls of resistance that isolate us from one another. We are called to hear something new. We are called to new ideas, new approaches, new hope, new life. We are called to the riches of the Kingdom of God.

Advent 3.2 - Patience and Fearlessness

2010-12-12T10:49:00.000-08:00

"Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord."

James 5:7

When I read this text, I thought, Patience? Seriously, Patience?

We have no choice, not if we are in a time of loss.

And then I thought about how, in the first months after a death, we are impatient because we are afraid. Because everything is affected and most of it falls apart. Finances. Legal concerns. Property. Not to mention your concerns for all the other members of your family ~ especially if the death has been from suicide, which you fear others will now see as an option.

You name it; there's a problem.

A couple of nights ago I went to a Survivors of Suicide meeting, primarily to hand out flyers for our Blue Christmas service. But there were two sets of family members there, representing an elderly woman and a young man, each lost to suicide in October. "And you just can't believe it," offered one person. "It isn't enough that you're grieving such a terrible death. Within a matter of days you're hit with all of these other difficulties!"

And so I've been thinking about this text, and about how real patience requires fearlessness.

I'm not sure where I first encountered this song, but we heard it this past January at a funeral mass for another young person, a high school freshman who had died very suddenly. My husband had coached her soccer team for five years, so he had watched her grow from an eight-year-old girl into a lovely young woman.

And now, I have several friends who are mothers of children who have died in the past two or three years. We are all working on patience and courage. Not because we want to, but because we have no choice.

And I play this one very frequently for myself, and send it to my friends.

Advent 3.1 - Desert in Bloom

2010-12-11T18:59:00.000-08:00

"The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing."

Isaiah 35:1

I'm not sure I can even count how many people I know who have lost loved ones in the past week. I am working on this myself, and I've had 25 months to get used to Christmas without. Thinking of all those families and remembering the first one, I recall only relentless, unadulterated anguish.

A couple of months ago, I made an eight-day silent retreat. Late on the last night, my director for that week showed me a passage that he has marked in his own Bible with the words "Gutsy faith" and said they were for me, too. I've written the same words in the margin next to the passage in mine. You can look it up. Habakkuk 3:17-19.

Sharon Maia Wilson Painting Here

Advent 2.7 - Let in Your Child Tonight

2010-12-08T03:03:00.000-08:00

I think this might be the best set of Advent meditations I've found this year, thanks to A Concord Pastor. First, commentary by Drew Christiansen, S.J:

And second, the poem itself is on the Concord Pastor site linked above.

For those of us struggling through Advent, challenged at every turn by the juxtaposition of our own sorrow against the light we try to await in hope, this is a tremendous poem for the transition from Week 2 to Week 3.

Advent 2.6 - The Road Beckons

2010-12-07T03:00:00.000-08:00

I'm going to visit family for a couple of days, so I'm posting ahead.

Here are two wonderful meditations ~ words and visual ~ from Jan Richardson.

Advent 2.5 - Handel Version

2010-12-06T03:58:00.000-08:00

Advent 2.4 - Unease

2010-12-05T14:37:00.001-08:00

This is another repeat from six years ago. Who knows? Maybe it will speak to you. As for me, I see stark changes. We no longer go to Chicago for Thanksgiving. We no longer host elaborate Christmas dinners. Today, instead, I made an announcement at church about our "Blue Christmas" service scheduled for December 20, an announcement in which I tried, in the couple of minutes I had, to balance the personal and the universal. And after the service a young man made his way to me, introduced himself and his family, and told me about two immediate family deaths from suicide in his youth.

The part about the low always being lifted high? Let us hope, and let us pray.

**********

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"
Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

Matthew 3:1-12

There is no way to get around it; this material always sounds a jarring note prior to the Advent we like to experience, the one where we sing carols and anticipate angels and shepherds and wise men from afar. Sheep and cattle and camels, too -- no scowling tigers or lunging bears. We like to limit our Advent discord to family squabbles over fake versus real, pine versus spruce, steady versus twinkling. No vipers and burning chaff for us, thank you very much.

But there it is, right at the beginning of the Gospel, and what are we supposed to do with it?
I always wondered about John the Baptist. I mean, he sounds quite ill. Who would listen to a man wandering around in animal clothing, crunchy locusts and honey dripping from his hands as he shouted his unique mixture of invective and ecstatic proclamation?

Years ago, I used to work downtown, and a large lady with a tamborine made frequent lunchtime sojourns up and down the block in front of a major department store, shouting the good news of salvation to all the passers-by, who studiously looked the other way. A gentleman in a suit often roamed the same block, preaching fire and brimstone at the top of his lungs. One day he walked right up to me, pointed his finger in my face, and intoned in a deep bass voice worthy of James Earl Jones, "God sees all of your secret sins!"

That was not good news to me.

I spent this past Thanksgiving week-end in Chicago with my family, and we went to see the Christmas displays at Marshall Field's. Sure enough, the Chicago version of John the Baptist inhabited the corner in front of one of the Snow White display windows. This one was a young man, earnestly insisting into a bullhorn that the oblivious shoppers needed to hear the words of the Gospel and ensure their salvation. Most of the crowd, of course, ignored him or, if forced by the crowd in his direction, turned politely away.

John is extreme, for sure, and his harsh words interject, at minimum, a sense of unease into our holiday festivities. But Christmas is an uneasy holiday. There is such a gaping disconnect between the meaning of Christmas and the endless round of shopping, decorating and partying that we try not to notice it. But there is John, to remind us.

I'm not, by nature, much of a shopper, so I think it's wise for me to refrain from criticizing people who are. I can think of few less appealing ways of spending my Thanksgiving holiday week-end than racing through stores. But we did have fun inspecting the elaborate Marshall Field's window displays and checking out the giant tree inside. In years past, we've taken kids to see Santa, attended Nutcracker and Christmas Carol productions , and made a family tradition of one big night of downtown shopping. We host a huge dinner on Christmas Day, and a couple of years we've taken elaborate trips. We could by no means be mistaken for clones of John the Baptist.

But that unease is always there. Christmas, after all, is really about Easter. And before Easter comes the ministry of Jesus, with its passionate focus on the poor and distressed. And after Easter comes Pentecost, the baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire of which John speaks, which we are supposed to use to bring Christ into the world. There's just nothing in there about maxing out credit cards to buy stacks of plastic kitchens and toy weapons.

One of my favorite Christmas songs, which I've heard only at the church I now attend, is entitled "And Every Stone Shall Cry." You can read the lyrics and listen to a portion of it here. Its haunting melody reminds us that

Yet He shall be forsaken
And yielded up to die
The sky shall groan and darken
And every stone shall cry

but also that

But now as at the
low is lifted high
The stars will bend their voices
And every stone shall cry*

That song, I think, reflects on what we are meant to hear in the story of John the Baptist each Advent. The outrage is there, of course -- outrage over a world which persists in focusing on the glitz and the tensions of holiday preparation rather than the incarnate presence of God, and which finds expression in a concluding prediction of angry judgment. But so is the disappointment, at our sad inability to recognize that, in the economy of the Bible, the low is always lifted high.

Advent 2.3 - Hope and Music

2010-12-05T02:57:00.000-08:00

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."

Romans 15:13

On a dark (in more ways than one) winter day, I received a card from a friend. He had placed one word on the card. I suppose he thought that with my vast knowledge of Hebrew I would get it immediately, but I had to ask for help.

I put the card on the door to the room where I stayed a few nights a week at seminary. At that time, hope was not in my vocabulary in either language. But it was in my friend's, and it must have been in others', for I stayed put.

There are times when we need others to do the hoping for us. If you are reading this, then I am hoping for you. My own capacity for hope is erratic, but perhaps we all fill in the gaps for one another. If your gap is huge, that's ok. There are people who know that, and it seems that the Holy Spirit works through them to lift that heavy word up for you.

Advent 2.2 - Refreshing Rain

2010-12-04T18:32:00.000-08:00

Hummingbird in Spring Rain ~ Mark Thalman Photo

"May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth."

Psalm 72:6

It's a prayer for a king, but we might hope that it would apply to any of us.

For more than a year after our son died, a friend from church sent a card to us every few weeks. She wasn't a deacon, someone charged with such a ministry, and while she's a friend, she's not someone I see often. She simply knows that grief has no timetable, and that one of the best salves is knowing that others remember.

I thought of her today when I was pondering this verse and wondering when I have experienced care that felt like a gentle rain, mingling both sadness and nurture.

And I was reminded to make a list of people who might appreciate a card this season, a card with a note to let them know that I remember them during a time of sadness.

Advent 2.1 - Knowledge

2010-12-03T01:04:00.000-08:00

"[T] he earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea."

Isaiah 11:9b

I have loved the sea all of my life, and I have always been intrigued by what its waters cover and what they don't. It never ceases to amaze me, when I walk the edge of the ocean at low tide, to realize that in six hours the water will be eight feet deep at the very point on which I stand. Which means that right there, where tiny crabs scuttle across the sand at dinnertime, large fish ~ perhaps even sharks ~ will be swimming at midnight.

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" asks the poet T.S. Eliot in Gerontion, a poem in which an old man contemplates what he sees in the aftermath of World War I.

The more sorrow I absorb, the more knowledge I seem to acquire. Is it knowledge of the Lord that we have stumbled upon, those of us who have landed in what one of my friends describes as territory no one wants to traverse?

Perhaps it is. Because, while Eliot voices despair over the prospect of no forgiveness in the aftermath of the knowledge of the horrors of war, Isaiah raises the hope of a world in which there is no more hurt and destruction as a consequence of knowledge of the Lord. And those of us who have found ourselves in this place devoid of our beloved children have surely found a community of quiet kindness and gentleness among each other.

If we could cover the earth with what we have learned, if we could fill the sea to its high-tide depths with the gifts we have been given and invited to share ~ gifts of sadness, of forgiveness, of resiliency, of solidarity with one another ~ they would bear a resemblance to Isaiah's vision. These gifts are, I think, hints of knowledge of God.

Advent 1.7 - Music

2010-12-02T01:06:00.000-08:00

Advent 1.6 - Risking for Others

2010-12-01T01:03:00.000-08:00

This is from Part 3 of the RevGals Advent Retreat (see sidebar for a beautiful reflection by LutheranChik), a reflection on Joseph and his response to Mary's pregnancy:

. . . whatever Joseph's thoughts and fears...in the end he, like Mary, accepted the angel's challenge to not be afraid. Like Mary, Joseph said "yes" to God. And Joseph said "yes" to Mary in a way that models what it means to be a person for others, someone whose love is willing to take risks on behalf of the lives of other human beings.

And this is for those for whom the church year is beginning and the secular year is coming to a close in a context of terrible sadness and grief:

We can try to be someone for others.

I know of at least two women who have lost/are losing beloved partners this season, leaving them to raise young daughters alone. My father, who has been widowed three times, has told me that it was actually easier when he was younger and had small children to care for than when he was much older and the children and their families were dispersed and caring for themselves. I have the feeling that his definition of "easier" is quite broad and may indicate more about the vagaries of memory than it does about what his reality was, but nevertheless, there it is: trying to be a person for others.

Last year someone told me that it meant a great deal to her to see me in worship leadership during the holidays, knowing that I was experiencing them as she was. I relate that not to pretend that I am some kind of person that I am not, but only to indicate that sometimes in just barely showing up we are people for others, whether we know it or not.

It doesn't sound particularly risky, I suppose, to be the dad who gets up and scrambles eggs every morning after his wife has died, or the leader who opens a Bible at a lectern in a safe and warm church after her child has died. It doesn't sound risky unless you have been there, filled with fear for all of your loved ones and anxiety about the next minute, hour, and day.

For all who are there now: the angel doesn't tell Joseph that it will be easy. The angel tells him that he is called to be a person for others. As are we all.

Advent 1.5 - Blogging

2010-11-30T01:03:00.000-08:00

Just as I was thinking that, while I need to do some Advent writing and processing for myself, I might as well switch this blog over to private, a few hardy commenters showed up. So, I guess I'll try to keep going, and also let you know that I have a plan:

I'm trying to give some thought to the Advent Sunday lectionary texts, one at a time. If you don't know what those are: many Christian churches establish readings for each Sunday (each day, actually) over the course of a three-year cycle. Preachers who rely on that cycle of texts will be able thereby to guide their congregations through a large and representative chunk of the Bible via their Sunday sermons over the course of three years. The daily readings include a passage from the Hebrew Bible, from a Psalm, from a gospel passage, and from another Greek Bible text. The three year cycle enables a year to be devoted to each of the three synoptic (look it up!) gospels; readings from the Gospel of John appear around Easter. Since the liturgical year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, a new lectionary year has also just begun -- with Matthew as the gospel focus.

I'm also trying to be attentive to other Advent contemplations, and so on the days when I'm not ruminating about Scripture, I plan to highlight some other bloggers or websites. Today, I'm delighted to refer you to my friend Michelle's first Advent post over at Quantum Theology.

Finally, I'm writing from my own perspective. We are in Year Three of life without our son. I remember little of the last two Advent seasons, although I seem to have written quite a bit. If you have found your way here, you are probably experiencing some holiday difficulties of your own. What I write may seem too upbeat and hopeful if you are in a time of despair and hopelessness; it may be too raw and painful if you have moved on. I know, because you honor me with comments and emails, that those reading this are in every kind of place with every imaginable and complex kind of loss. I wish I could do justice to each and every person and situation, but the best I have to offer is the authenticity of my own experience, and my Advent hope that it will encourage you to delve into your own.

For now, you might wander over to Michelle's. She's writing about Alfred Delp, S.J. this year ~ someone whose courage and faith, honed as a prisoner of the Nazis, we can trust in our own times of challenge and anguish.

Advent 1.4 - Keep Awake!

2010-11-29T02:42:00.000-08:00

I wrote this reflection for the first Sunday in Advent six years ago. Some things have changed. The child applying to college has died, and as a result I have come to understand that some of us live in tension for long periods of time indeed. I am now profoundly alert to the Gospel message, but in a context far different from any one I could have imagined six years ago. Still, I think it holds up well, and so I offer it again.

**********

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

Matthew 24:36-44

A couple of years ago, when our son was waiting to hear from college admission committees, he and I were in what might understatedly have been referred to as an attentive posture of being. We could have been more accurately described as about to explode from the volatile combination of apprehension and hopefulness. We were on constant red-alert for e-mail and snail mail, attentive to the slightest alteration in the letter carrier's schedule. And when the news finally arrived, most of it good, we had waited so long and so hard that it was actually something of a let-down.

You can't live in a state of such tense alertness for long, at least not at my age, without doing some serious damage to your heart. Of course, there are far worse situations: a hospital room where a child lies in critical condition, the front lines of a war, the smell of smoke and the crackle of flames in the middle of the night. At such times, our sensory perception goes into high gear and the little things that we would not otherwise notice become etched into our very long-term memory.

Fortunately, most of us are not required to live in such tension for long periods of time. In fact, most of the time, we are barely aware of our surroundings. How many times have you driven dozens of miles down the interstate without really knowing it? Could you tell me what you had for lunch yesterday? You know your paid your bills last month, but do you have any clear recollection of having done so? No, most of the time we are on automatic pilot, just doing what we need to do more or less when we need to do it.

It has been posited that it is precisely that automatic-pilot approach to life that will leave some of us in the breach. Today's Gospel passage has become the foundation for the Left Behind novels. In that series of a dozen or more bestsellers, the end of the world as we know it begins with the disappearance of the "saved," in the course of an ordinary day and right before the eyes of friends and family. The premise, also based on the Book of Revelation, is that those who have been "saved" in this life will, on the Day of Rapture, be called to God's side in the blink of an eye, while the rest of the sorry human population will be left to its dread fate in the ensuing conflict between the battling forces of the Christ and the the anti-Christ.

They aren't pretty books. The explicitly depicted violence is revolting, but no more so than the articulated vision of a god of violence and judgment who is out to render the universe into two opposing camps. Is that really what God means to do? Does God want us to be attentive only to the consequences of our actions in the context of an ultimate judgment between good and evil? The parallel to the Biblical flood story might seem to indicate that such is the case. Certainly the fear of a final catastrophic judgment seems endemic to human nature, as evidenced by those flood stories told by virtually every ancient culture.

However, I don't think that today's passage is placed here at the beginning of Advent, completely out of context, to remind us of the potential for disaster, or even to be attentive to the possibility of an event of gargantuan proportions, like a hurricane or tidal wave. I think it's here to remind us to be attentive to the possibility that a colossal shift in the cosmos might be hidden in the smallest and most ordinary of events: the birth of a child in a cave on the outskirts of a small town.

"Keep awake," Jesus says, years later, to his followers. "Keep awake, " we are reminded, a month before Christmas. Keep awake for what?

I will be the first to admit that I do not "keep awake" for the Gospel message, for the good news that the world, and the part each of us plays in it, has been transformed. Mostly, I do my regular stuff. I check my e-mail and I prepare my lessons. I wash the kitchen floor and clean out the litter box. I teach my classes and go to meetings, at the school where I teach and at the church where I worship. I nag my children about their responsibilities. I do the laundry and ignore the vacuuming. Occasionally I remember to give thanks, for a crisp and blue-skied morning, for a child who has navigated a rocky passage, for a student who makes a leap of achievement. Sometimes I remember to pray ahead of time; for instance, before I open my opinionated mouth. (Not usually.) But mostly I am not awake or aware to the power or even the love of Christ in my life.

Sometimes. The truth about my walking has far less to do with my middle-aged quest for fitness than with my need for such awareness, which I tend to experience, if at all, when I am moving on my feet through God's created world. I walk largely as an exercise in attentiveness. There have been many occasions when I have paused as I have circled the small lake to which I often walk, noting a migrating bird or a startling shimmer of light across water, and been aware that the passing cars are missing something important. One afternoon I crouched behind the full-grown reeds of late summer, observing three green heron siblings learning to fly. Baby down feathers still stuck out here and there from their increasingly adult plumage, and as they hopped awkwardly from branch to branch, I worried like a mother heron that they were all about to fall in. Cars sped behind me and bicylists zipped down the nearby path. I was the only human witness to that first flying lesson.

Even that level of attentiveness is hard to maintain. Most of the time, we fancy ourselves too busy for the daily mindfulness to which both Buddhism and Christrianity call us. John Kabat Zinn entitles one of his books Wherever You Go, There You Are -- a point worth noting. Most of us are usually too busy with where we think we are going to attend to where we actually are.
Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister says that "The role of religion is to bring us to an awareness of life. The role of religion is to transform the world, to come to see the world as God sees the world and to bring it as close to the vision of God as we possibly can. Why? Scripture is very clear. What God changes, God changes through us."

Part of the good news is that we are now reminded, as the earth swings on its annual orbit, to "Keep awake." We have another opportunity, every year in the longest and darkest days of winter, to wake up and pay attention.

Advent 1.3 - Armor

2010-11-28T02:14:00.000-08:00

"Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light."

Romans 13:12

For me, a 21st century American woman, Paul's references to armor are a bit bizarre. They are a little more meaningful than the numerous Biblical references to bread must be to folks whose carbohydrate intake revolves around rice, but not much. The images that generally come to mind for me are paintings of Joan of Arc, not someone with whom I feel a great affinity, and memories of the Art Museum's Armor court, always a favorite for kids.

Musing about this topic, I googled the word armor. The wikipedia definition begins as follows: "protective covering used to prevent damage from being inflicted." I suppose that that could be refined to "prevent more damage."

When Paul talks about armor, he always sounds so, well . . . energetic. Like someone preparing for a great battle, convinced of the superiority and ultimate triumph of the One he follows.

I imagine putting on armour a bit differently. I imagine an exhausted and beaten warrior, looking at the heavy and battered chunks of metal strewn across her table and bed, and hoisting the first piece with a sigh.

Perhaps it's time, during this season of preparation, to imagine the scene a bit differently. Perhaps it's time to put aside the mental images of metal, mail, and bronze, and imagine armor of light.

Light ~ Does it weigh anything? Is it impervious to damage? I know nothing about the physics or properties of light, but I have a friend or two who perhaps will weigh in.

I honestly have no idea how to visualize armor of light. Perhaps because it is delivered in the form of vulnerability and poverty, arriving in a cramped cave far from home. Perhaps because I have not yet grasped how that kind of armor is the only real defense against the darkness. Perhaps because I have never really absorbed an understanding of the full weight and density of the light of Advent.

Advent 1.2 - The House of the Lord

2010-11-26T17:26:00.000-08:00

"I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go to the house of the Lord."

~Psalm 122:1

It can be challenging at best, impossible at worst, to return to one's house of worship when times are dark.

The Psalmist is referring to Jerusalem, God's holy city, God's mountaintop city crowned by God's temple. We Christians tend to read ~ and sing ~ the same line in reference to our churches. Those for whom church is not a part of their lives ~ perhaps the same music and words apply to the Redwood Forest, or the Matterhorn? I can think of a place in Glacier National Park in which I have backpacked and camped that seems to me to be the house of the Lord:

In any case, for some of us these are precisely where we want to go in times of darkness, and for others, the memories associated with previous experience, or the cheerful presence glowing throughout, moves them out of reach, at least for a season of life.

Some of us, sometimes, need to find fresh alternatives.

From my present vantage point, I would say that we should not give up. I found, in the darkest times two Advent seasons ago, that there were churches other than my own, and places in this wide and beautiful world other than those well known to me, to which I could repair for something resembling sustenance. Churches more hushed than mine, congregations where no one knew me. Beaches and hilltops which I had never before approached.

And now I find that I can return to my own church, and to places in nature that have been important to our family. I find that, not having rushed or pushed myself, I am glad to do so.

How are you doing, with the places in which God was once most present to you?

Image: Josh Gerritsen photo here.

Advent 1.1 - Walking in the Light

2010-11-26T05:27:00.000-08:00

"O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!"

~ Isaiah 2:5

If Advent is a season of darkness ~ of turmoil, of confusion, of sadness ~ it's difficult to hear it begin with these words. When burrowing under the covers and hiding out until the spring equinox seems like a plan, everything about this exhortation seems counterintuitive:

Community (House) ~ We are called to be together, not to isolate ourselves.

History and Inheritance (Jacob) ~ We are called to remember who we are, not to wish that we weren't.

Invitation (Come) ~ We are sought after, despite our feelings to the contrary.

Imperative (Let us) ~ We are called together to gather, do, respond, look forward, and not to curl up into a ball in the darkness.

Move (Walk) ~ We are called to put on foot in front of the other, not to remain rooted in sadness or fear.

Life (The light of the Lord) ~ We are invited into God's re-creating presence, into what God has been doing since the first day.

The Lord said, Let there be light.

Harris Gulko Painting

Is one part more difficult than the others? Does it all seem quite impossible? Some years, yes.

Perhaps that's why the first day of Advent begins with these words, so that we can begin to practice the impossible in preparation for the seeming impossibility of what we are waiting for.

God in the Darkness

2010-11-22T08:54:00.000-08:00

Moses’ vision of God began with light (Exod. 19.18); afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud (Exod. 20.21). But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness (Exod. 24.15-18).

— Gregory of Nyssa,
Commentary on the Song of Songs,
quoted in An Anthology of Christian Mysticism

edited by Harvey D. Egan

(HT to Carl McColman over at Anamchara: The Website of Unknowing)

Last week it fell to me to draft a short article for the local community newspaper about our church's planned Blue Christmas service. (We are actually calling it Christmas in a Minor Key after the liturgy we are using, with permission of its creator, found here.) As my initial draft made the rounds of various others with an interest in the service and its publicity, one person questioned one of my phrases, to the effect of "honoring both the darkness and the light," as theologically suspect.

I wasn't going to get into a lengthy discussion about the theology of darkness over a two-paragraph publicity story. And besides, she had a point: many readers of the story might give it a glance and take it the wrong way. And she has back-up. I John 1:5-6 says that "God is light and in God there is no darkness at all. ⁶If we say that we have fellowship with God while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true . . .".

That one does give me pause.

On the other hand, most of us are aware of the phrase "the dark night of the soul," although we have little understanding of its meaning. It's become a commonplace in our culture to use that phrase when we are talking about depression, or about a sense of confusion and bewilderment and lost-ness. In the parlance of the mystics, however, it has a very specific meaning. I don't make any pretense of grasping it, but St. John of the Cross, the 16th century mystic who wrote The Dark Night of the Soul, understood it to mean a time during which one feels the desolation of abandonment by God as God strips away all that one has relied upon ~ until only God is left.

Perhaps someday I will spend some time on how God is implicated in the images of darkness in Scripture and tradition. I am, not surprisingly, very much interested in that topic after my own experiences since my son's death, which was one of God's seemingly complete disappearance. I think mine has been a not-unusual experience of grief after the loss of a child to suicide, which leaves a particularly intense form of devastation in its wake, but I also know, because they have told me so, that others often experience a deep sense of God's love and re-assurance after the death of a loved one. In other words, my experience is neither unique nor universal. However, it is something from which people tend to shy away.

And yet, while I was on retreat last month, and pulling books left and right out of the library, I encountered two different references to that darkness in which God is so close that you do not see God there.

God as your skin, perhaps? God completely, but invisibly, enveloping you?

God there, persistently and quietly, when your attention is elsewhere? Or when you are incapable of paying attention to anything?

God must surely be in the darkness with us. How could there be anyplace more essential for God to be?

Pre-Advent, Even Pre-Thanksgiving

2010-11-20T13:02:00.001-08:00

Advent is about paying attention ~ and I see that two years ago I wrote the following:

Paying attention is almost impossible when loss is fresh, when grief has splintered the pieces of your life into a puzzle no longer recognizable.

And yet, it is the task of Advent. Pay attention, even if you have no idea how. Pay attention, even if you don't want to. Pay attention, even if you can't.

And a year ago I quoted Alfred Delp, S.J., writing from Tegel Prison in Berlin in 1944:

Being shaken awake is entirely appropriate to thoughts and experiences of Advent. . . . It is precisely in the severity of this awakening , in the helplessness of coming to consciousness, in the wretchedness of experiencing our limitations that the golden threads running between heaven and earth during this season reach us; the threads that give the world a hint of the abundance to which it is called, the abundance of which it is capable.

How striking it is to me that those posts should have been about attentiveness and awakening, writing just before Advent seasons which seemed impossible to bear. I think it was last year that I wandered into a department store at just about this time, took one look at the lights and displays and profusion of . . . of profusion, and fled, not to enter a retail establishment again until after the New Year.

But that's not the abundance to which we are called to awaken, despite the best efforts of the progeny of Mad Men.

Perhaps this will be the year in which I will finally begin to get glimpse of those golden threads running between heaven and earth. Perhaps they are much more apparent when we are anchored in limitation than when we are capable of embracing profusion.

The past two years, I have felt little beyond numbness through the Advent season. This year, I think I might have a ringside seat for seeing things I've never noticed before.

Advent Silence

2009-12-16T16:44:00.000-08:00

The 14^th century Dominican mystic, John Tauler, explains the gift of Zechariah's silence like this: “God cannot leave things empty; that would be to contradict his own nature and justice. Therefore, you must be silent. Then the Word of this birth can be spoken in you and you will be able to hear him. But be certain of this: if you try to speak then He must be silent. There is no better way of serving the Word than in being silent and listening. So if you come out of yourself completely, God will wholly enter in; to the degree you come out, to that degree will he enter, neither more nor less.”

~ found here

Time for My Favorite Painting

2009-12-15T20:37:00.000-08:00

Henry Ossawa Tanner's Annunciation

Last year it was that uncompromising pillar of light that drew me in.

This year, it's the rumpled and perplexed young woman. I'm not young anymore, but I am most certainly rumpled and perplexed.

John O'Donohue

2009-12-13T10:45:00.000-08:00

I have not, obviously, kept up with this blog at all this year. I've found Advent to be very rough going, much more difficult in an inexplicable kind of way than I had anticipated. I don't feel brave or hopeful or anticipatory at all.

But I read this, here, this morning. Words like courage and plenitude seem as foreign to me as Hebrew and Greek have been over the past two years of study, but I am not completely immune to the prospect of new beginnings and rhythms.

For a New Beginning

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life's desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

~ John O'Donohue ~

Make Straight a Path Throught the Desert

2009-12-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

Today is the day in the church year on which we read about John the Baptist, that seemingly deranged cousin of Jesus, he of the animal skin attire and the crunchy locust meals, out in the desert crying for the path of the Lord to be made straight, for valleys to be filled and mountains leveled.

I have always been mystified by John's obsession with the destruction of some of the most beautiful of our planet's geographical features. Year after year I have listened to this text and wondered: What would you do away with? The Pacific Crest Trail? The valleys in which the lochs of Scotland lie? The Tetons? What kind of a proclamation is this?

This year, I think, I am starting to get it, for the first time ever. I wonder whether I would ever have had a glimpse of what it means had I not been stumbling around in another dimension for the past fifteen months.

I have used so many geographical and geological metaphors to describe this journey, a journey that I would run from as fast as possible if that option were open to me. Relentless tsumani. Insurmountable mountain. Rock-strewn trail. Impenetrable wilderness. And, of course, desert. Endless, dry, empty, lonely desert.

None of them is a road back to the light. None of them is a road to hope.

It seems that they must all be navigated. There is no other sound option; we have to swim, climb, and walk through the terrain of grief, inhospitable as it is, or we will not reach that juncture at which it becomes not merely agonizing but transformative. We don't get to dispense with the wild craziness that makes the aftermath of loss so intolerable; we don't get to pretend that we're all right or that it never happened.

But ~ and this is what I think John the Baptist is talking about ~ we do have to find the way out. We have to reach, with our eyes open, the place where the swells of water become gentler, where the density of the forest begins to recede, where the desert seems to offer something other than parched wasteland.

I don't think God wants us to level the Alps. In fact, Jesus always found God in places like mountaintops, deserts, and valleys ~ the story is quite clear on that point. But what he found there is a transparency of vision that we so often lack. That most of us, I think, lack completely when we are plunged into the darkness that follows the death of a child.

And so the invitation, perhaps, is to go to the places he went but also to see as he did, with clarity and gratitude, rather than with eyes clouded by tears and a mind crumbling under a weight almost too great to bear.

I have, of course, no idea at all what I am talking about. I was moved to write this post by the words of this father, who lost his nine-year-old son to a malignant tumor several years ago, and who I found via my friend and fellow traveler Karen, mother of beautiful Katie. He is much farther along the road to gratitude than I am. But as I skimmed his essay again, I couldn't help but notice how many allusions he makes to things which have appeared in my own thoughts and writings: the suffering of other parents, the Holocaust, the omnipotence or lack thereof of God, the compassion ~ or not ~ of God, what prayer is and isn't. And even the Wizard of Oz.

Oh, for that elusive pair of ruby slippers.

We have to find clarity without them.

And so: Advent.

2009-12-05T05:33:00.000-08:00

Perhaps what we modern people need most is to be genuinely shaken, so that where life is grounded, we would feel its stability; and where life is unstable and uncertain, immoral and unprincipled, we would know that, also, and endure it. Perhaps that is the ultimate answer to the question of why God has sent us into this time . . . we have stood here on the earth with a totally false and inauthentic sense of security. So now, God lets the earth resound . . . to teach us one thing again: how to be moved in spirit.

Alfred Delp, S.J.
Homily for the First Sunday of Advent
Preached in Munich
November 30, 1941

Advent Year Two

2009-12-04T10:08:00.000-08:00

I don't remember much about last year's Advent, other than it being part of a long continuum of awfulness. This year feels transitional, though. As if we aren't somewhere else yet, but we could be.

We're going away again, this time to Islamorada in the Middle Florida Keys, on Christmas Day. I'll be in my internship church on Christmas Eve and then perhaps, go ot a midnight service somewhere . . . and then leave at 3:30 am (!) for the airport. Gregarious Son will fly with me; the Quiet Husband and The Lovely Daughter, who have enough time off, will have already left to drive, and will pick us up at the West Palm Beach airport later Christmas Day.

Such a convoluted effort of avoidance!

Last year, our Christmas Dinner consisted of grilled seafood shish-ka-bobs, just the four of us relaxing on the deck on a warm Key West evening. It was a far cry from the raucous and joyful Christmas Dinners in our home over the previous two decades, in which nine or ten families had gathered every year, but it was for us a quiet experience of healing.

This year ~ I don't know. I find myself poised between wanted to hibernate again and wanting to move back out into the world ~ but differently. I have completely lost interest in the traditional gathering at home, and find that I am thinking much more about the vast brokenness manifest in this world at Christmas.

Maybe we will hang out with the homeless next year. Or maybe I will be doing a chaplain residency at Famous Giant Hospital and be more than willing to sign up for a Christmas shift ~ which could mean spending the day with a Muslim here from Saudi Arabia for heart surgery.

I'm not quite ready for any of that this year. I can tell by how much of Christmas I am avoiding: by how we haven't even talked about whether we want a tree, by how I have been walking out of chapel services and classes where Advent hymns are sung ~ music being the most problematic aspect of the whole season, given its evocative nature. I can tell by how my stomach twists everytime I read another piece of writing about the hopefulness of the season ~ and I wrote one of them myself a couple of days ago, in the form of the Prayer of Confession for Sunday's regular worship service.

So no, I'm not ready yet to accompany anyone else through a difficult Advent season. I'm ready for blue sea and blue sky. But I can imagine, albeit faintly, other possibilities.

Spiral ~ or ~ Nebula? (RevGals Virtual Retreat)

2009-12-04T06:50:00.000-08:00

I would venture that, like most processes which we are so inclined to structure in linear and hierarchical ways, our relationship with God also might be better understood as a spiral.

Elizabeth Kobler-Ross's work on five stages of grief ~ certainly refined today into an understanding of a process more akin to a spiral. Or, as I recently read as the advice given to another suicide survivor by her counselor: a house, a house with many rooms which one visits in no particular order and with no limit set on time of stay or repetitions.

John Newton's idea of our spiritual journey as movement from desire to conflict to contemplation and peace ~ also, I think, better understood as a spiral, or as a houseful of rooms. Walter Bruggemann's century-later understanding of the Psalms as a journey from orientation to dis-orientation to new orientation ~ the same. And Brueggemann sees in the Pslams a framework for understanding the journey of Jesus.

Does Jesus' journey also spiral?

Truthfully, I am not so convinced of the spiral metaphor any longer, or the house metaphor either. I am thinking more in terms of nebulae. I don't actually know a thing about nebulae other than what I've just read in wikipedia, but the photographs I've seen of them must be well-embedded in my brain because: when I think back over the journey of the last 15 months, the image of a nebula is what comes to mind. When I think of God's creation: there it is, in beginning forms. When I imagine Jesus' journey and his effect on us: perhaps a similar pattern. And when I imagine the Holy Spirit: yes, a nebula.

Chaotic swirls of matter, mixing life and death, forming clusters that break apart and reform, perhaps coalescing someday into stars and light.

Advent.

Sorting (RevGals Advent Retreat II)

2009-12-03T10:08:00.000-08:00

I don't think of sorting wheat from chaff in terms of sorting people into groups, those included and those not, those who get it and those who don't, those who are elect and those who are not. But I do think of it as something we can address in our own lives, whether interiorly or in community.

This second reflection reminded me of a couple of things. First, some months ago, one of the Jesuits in my life reminded me of the parable of the sower, and told me that it is about tending my own inner garden as well. He has been gently, and sometimes not so gently, challenging me for months to find alternative pathways through my grief. I am a very slow and laborious gardener. Manure abounds.

Secondly, in my Church and Sacraments class, we spent some time last month talking over what the Ten Commandments mean and how to look at them in light of Scripture and the Reformed Confessions. The pattern which more or less holds is to look at each one expansively, interiorly, and then in a positive sense. So, in very brief, as I wrote with respect to "Do not steal" on my final exam, one might also understand that particular commandment to mean "Do not steal the limelight (an expansion of the original), do not envy someone else her achievements (a reference to interior stealing), give generously wherever you can (a positive take)."

So. Sorting wheat from chaff.

In the grieving process: How might one pursue healthy ways of grieving that give expression to genuine sorrow as opposed to repressive ways that damage one for life, or obsessive ways that trap one in unresolvable quagmires? In community, whatever those communities may be? Alone, in prayer? In giving, something out of nothing?

RevGals Advent Retreat Part II

2009-11-30T09:29:00.000-08:00

Today I'm following the RevGals Advent Retreat, so this is my third post of the day! The second reflection is up; it's a long one, so I'm going to post just the final question, and urge you to go to the original retreat site and to its comments for further reading and contemplation.

""John speaks of wheat and chaff being sorted, and we tend to think of this as an outer process, a division of faithful people from the rest of the world. But perhaps we can apply this to the inner life. As we begin this Advent, can you identify the wheat and the chaff in your life? Are you ready to leave the chaff behind?"

(Posted by Songbird.)

Back later, perhaps with some thoughts on this one.

RevGals Advent Retreat

2009-11-30T05:51:00.000-08:00

This initial post is so beautiful that I'm going to copy it in its entirety here, and try to return to it to write later, perhaps many times through Advent. Go to the initial link for comments and links to what I am sure will be other and very moving posts.

A meditation on the readings for Advent 2C offered by Mompriest:

Entering the Advent journey is an invitation to travel, intentionally, into the wilderness – the dark night of the soul. One hopes that the Church guides this journey offering opportunities to pray, ponder, stirred up, conflicted. John, the desert prophet, proclaims the burning chaff, the background to our Christmas shopping. Advent sings of incongruous images - new birth and end of life, the Alpha and the Omega, of oppression and freedom, of despair and ultimately of hope. The path is uneven and twisted, spiraling in to the depths of our being, certain we are lost. And then, quietly, the Spirit of God calls to us, “Awake, arise, my love, my dear one.” The early morning desert sun illuminates the way - through the valley to Jordan’s bank - our God is near. Awake and hearken, let each heart prepare a place for the Word to break in, a child to come anew, whispering peace into you and me. Come, our long expected One, come.

Within in our darkest night
A starless chill
Shudders
Calling, “Emmanuel
Where
Oh where, are you?”

Within our deepest soul
Astounding one
Voice
Cries in the wilderness
“Prepare
the way of the Lord!”

Within our darkest night
A still small spark
Kindled
Hark! The glad sound calls out
“Sleepers
Awake!” Jerusalem

Rise up and give walk in light
prepare
from darkest night -
Arise!
Our Daystar comes, the night

Dispelled, every valley filled,
every
mountain low, the rough made
smooth
A light, a light bathes bright

Discard the garment, sorrow
afflicted.
Arise! Put on the robe
Adorned
with love and mercy

Questions to ponder:

John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, describes our spiritual journey as a process of moving from desire for God, to conflict with God, to contemplation and peace with God. (Go here for more on this idea.) Many consider this process to be a spiral not linear. Based on these three "states" where are you in your faith journey?

Does the mystery of Advent invite you into deeper reflection on your relationship with God?

First Advent Reading

2009-11-29T05:05:00.000-08:00

"The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”

Jeremiah 33:14-16

The prophet Jeremiah did not have an easy time of it, and I have felt some affinity with him over the past fifteen months. According to Wikipedia*, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that Jeremiah's book is written as if he not only heard as words, but personally felt in his body and emotions, the experience of what he prophesied; that the verse, "Are not all my words as fire, sayeth the LORD, and a hammer that shatters rock" was a clue as to how difficult the overwhelming, personality-shattering experience of being a vehicle for Divine revelation was; and how difficult it was to be able to see, in advance, one's own failure.

And yet here he is, that crusty, anguished, irritable prophet who never seems to cease arguing with God, speaking words of hope and promise.

*Which contains no citation but ~ I like what it says and this is just a blog so ~ I'll go with it.

Almost Advent

2009-11-28T19:05:00.000-08:00

"Being shaken awake is entirely appropriate to thoughts and experiences of Advent. . . . It is precisely in the severity of this awakening , in the helplessness of coming to consciousness, in the wretchedness of experiencing our limitations that the golden threads running between heaven and earth during this season reach us; the threads that give the world a hint of the abundance to which it is called, the abundance of which it is capable."

Alfred Delp, S.J.
Written in Tegel Prison, Berlin
December 1944

Advent ~ Not Quite Yet

2009-11-17T10:24:00.000-08:00

Welcome Back!

This blog is about to get itself back into gear.

I was sort of vaguely wondering what to do about it, pondering a new one called something like Praying Advent through Dark Gray. I was thinking that the world does not seem quite so dark and hopeless this year.

And then I happened to come across another blog (I have no idea whose or where) in which the writer talks about how no matter how bad things are, no matter how despondent we feel, Advent always brightens things up.

Well.

No.

Just the reading of that and I could feel the darkness right there, lurking oppressively just beyond the fire circle that I've been tending all year. And I realized that the upcoming season, with its anticipation and its energy and its busy-ness is going to feel ~ awful. Still.

So. Praying through darkness it will be again. Perhaps more beautiful this year, though.

Back in a couple of weeks.

(Image here.)

End of Advent

2008-12-30T17:36:00.000-08:00

Closed until next season!

Christmas

2008-12-25T06:27:00.000-08:00

The figure of the reconciler, of the divine human Jesus Christ, steps into the middle between God and the world, into the center of all that happens. Through this figure the mystery of the world is disclosed, just as in the same figure the mystery of God is revealed.

*****

[B]ehold the incarnate God, the unfathomable mystery of God's love for the world. God loves human beings. God loves the world.

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ecce Homo, in Meditations on the Cross

Incarnation

2008-12-24T03:17:00.000-08:00

Chartres Cathedral Nativity

Such a loss! Such a keen and tearing pain. Even when I am in a crowded room, there is a loneliness I never knew existed. Comforting God, I have turned to you so many times for solace, and I come again. While the world is bright and sparkling, my heart feels leaden and has an emptiness that cannot be filled.

Lord, how can I enter into this season of joy? In my head I celebrate your birth into this world, but in my everyday life, I am filled with a grief that runs so very deep. You blessed me with a loving relationship and now it is gone from my life. How can I be faithful to that love and the memory of that love and my sorrow in this season of "Rejoice!"??

Tears are so close to the surface all the time and helpful friends who want to "keep me busy" don't seem to really understand that I need to embrace my grief. I am afraid of letting go of the sadness and losing the deep love connection I had.

Instead of entering into the Rejoice of Christmas, I long for the sorrow of Lent. I beg you Lord, show me how the two are connected. I ponder the name Emmanuel and know that it means "God with us." With us. With me in this world, in this sorrow. If I look beyond my pain, I know that you, too, suffered so much in this world. I never understood so clearly before that Emmanuel is what your nativity is really about. You are in my world, in my pain.

Thank you, Lord, for the loved one you blessed my life with. Grant me now in my grief, a peace. Give me a comfort that might not make the tears go away, but that lets me feel your presence as you take up a place deep in my heart, with me.

(Another one from the Creighton Advent Website.)

Prayer as Expectant Attention

2008-12-23T14:47:00.000-08:00

Giotto's Nativity Fresco in Padua, 1305-06

Praying with the Nativity scriptures can help us with a profound support for our everyday lives. The gospels paint us beautiful portraits of how Our God comes to us in the midst of great poverty. The age of Elizabeth, Gabriel's annuniciation to Mary, no room in the inn, enemies out to get the newborn, all surround the central mystery - our God is faithful.

Our God's fidelity is not only not limited by great poverty, it is most apt in places of great poverty. The way the nativity happened then can tell us a great deal about the "style" of our God. And, it can open our eyes and our expectation to the places of great poverty in our lives now. Whenever I ask, "How can this be a place of promise?" or "How can I expect God to be present in this mess?" I am being invited to experience the mystery of the Incarnation in my life.

Eventually, I begin to look for and to really anticipate special intimacy with Jesus in the difficult, challenging, painful, empty, power-less situations of my life. If I desire to find intimacy with God in all things, I'll pay special attention to the povery places of my life.

(This is from the Creighton Advent Website. I hope I am providing credit as desired and appropriate, so that the Nebraskan Jesuits do not feel compelled to come down to Key West and bust me.)

Fragments

2008-12-22T18:41:00.000-08:00

There are, as I have found over time, people who in response to great loss write brilliant and illuminative sermons, offer prayers of deep insight and faith, compose music expressive of our deepest hopes.

Most of us, however, do well to say what we see, to collect those fragments of language and sound and vision that speak to us, to offer up the pieces that reflect an unsure and tortured encounter with the mystery of death.

If we write it down, or speak it out loud, that is something.

Tanner's Annunciation

2008-12-21T05:46:00.001-08:00

Tanner's Annunciation

2008-12-21T05:34:00.000-08:00

This might be my favorite painting in the world. All over the internet this time of year, it remains fresh to me. In the past I've liked it because, frankly, Mary looks a lot like I did as a very young woman, and her puzzled expression confirms the likeness.

This year, I've noticed other things. The messy bed. The worn surroundings.

The uncompromising light.

Is that what we pray for, when we are so bruised and fragile that the flames of the advent candles threaten to engulf us in sorrow?

A birth that can lead only to Good Friday, because it is only there that we can be sure that God knows us?

Uncompromising, indeed.

As Advent Calls Us

2008-12-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

15th century Russian Icon (Here)

This is the loveliest and most compelling Advent piece I've encountered in a long time, maybe ever.

Palestrina

2008-12-18T11:22:00.000-08:00

Dome - Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore

In spite of myself, I am finding small new gifts this season. Steering clear of the usual traditions which as the source of much joy in the past have become intolerable reminders of what we have lost, I bump into other things.

One of the benefits of my immersion into Ignatian spirituality has been the discovery of the music of Palestrina. I didn't know why it kept popping up in various Jesuit contexts, but I finally did a quick search today and learned that his life spanned much of the 16th century (Ignatius lived during the first half of that century) and that he was a major figure in the development of Catholic church music. During the 1560s he held an appointment at Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the five major basilicas of Rome; during the following decade, he lost his brother, two sons, and wife to the plague.

When we visited Rome in 2000, we stayed in the Maria Maggiore neighborhood and spent our evenings eating gelato in the piazza outside the church. These days, my shaky and tentative journey back to life includes connections to the prayer and music of the 16th century. I don't know why I'm so surprised.

From Palestrina's Missa Brevis:

Here.

Eyes As Flame

2008-12-17T06:27:00.000-08:00

Among the many losses associated with this season has been the music that has so moved me for decades. I can't bear to hear it. I cannot bear much of anything associated with Christmas or its traditions ~ and music, of course, heightens all emotional response.

This carol, though ~ I can listen to it sparingly, and primarily for the second phrase in the second line. I cannot countenance the thought that Mary had an ounce of meekness in her, at least not as we know the word. But ~ if this event took place in any way remotely related to the narrative as it comes to us via Luke, then: yes, the angel Gabriel's eyes could have only been wild with fire. If this event and those that followed offer any hope at all to a people completely undone, a group in who I count myself this year, then the invitation could have been offered only by an angel whose eyes were ablaze with light.

Here.

And if you need them to listen along, the lyrics:

The angel Gabriel from Heaven came,
His wings as drifted snow, his eyes as flame;
“All hail,” said he, “thou lowly maiden Mary,
Most highly favored lady,” Gloria!“

For know a blessèd mother thou shalt be,
All generations laud and honor thee,
Thy Son shall be Emmanuel, by seers foretold,
Most highly favored lady,” Gloria!

Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head,
“To me be as it pleaseth God,” she said,
“My soul shall laud and magnify His holy Name.”
Most highly favored lady, Gloria!

Of her, Emmanuel, the Christ, was born
In Bethlehem, all on a Christmas morn,
And Christian folk throughout the world will ever say—
“Most highly favored lady,” Gloria!

Come Be With Me

2008-12-16T20:43:00.000-08:00

Here.

Gratitude

2008-12-13T02:35:00.000-08:00

I would go back, if I could. I would go back to August, when I was worn out from my CPE summer and looking forward to a weeklong silent retreat. I would go back to anticipating my second year of seminary, an exciting internship, and more time at home than I had last year. I would go back to being the mother of three living children ~ irritated at one of them for not making it to his cousin's wedding, sorry that another could not join us in North Carolina, curious about another's new romance. If prayer offered magical solutions, I would pray to go back. That life we had ~ it didn't seem that we were asking so much. No boat, no vacation home, no fancy cars; not even the needed plumbing repairs. Three healthy children and the prospect of their futures to enjoy. That was enough. Everything else could have fallen away and that would still have been way more than enough.

But prayer is not magic. Prayer is God with us, us with God. Prayer is listening and noticing. So we don't get to go back but maybe, in the light trying to break through in December, I can notice some things.

And here is what I have noticed this week. I have, as a consequence of my son's death, received what I think must be some of the most extraordinary missives ever written. Emails, cards, letters -- the form of transmission doesn't matter. The words do. Some are about my son, some about those of us left behind, some about God. There is apparently something about magnitude of loss that drives ordinary people to eloquence.

I literally carry some of this writing around with me. There are moments, many of them, when I think that I will not make it to the next one, and then I read what people have sent me. I read them as prayers, regardless of how they were intended. I look for what God might be saying, in a phrase or a paragraph, and sometimes I see them, small clues to the mystery that binds us together, whether the people who articulated them knew what they were doing or not.

If you have a friend who is longing for someone else this Advent, especially someone who died in the last year or two, sit down this week-end and write a note, or send an email. It might be the most important thing you do this month.

Advent List, Week Two, Year One

2008-12-12T06:02:00.000-08:00

1. patience

2. wilderness

3. calm

4. mountains

5. insight

6. valleys

7. vision

8. road

9. memory

10. desire

Possible Light

2008-12-11T17:44:00.001-08:00

I bought some candles today.

Most people are well into Christmas preparations. Two weeks from today, right?

Most years by now, I would have ordered turkeys, filled the kitchen with the nonperishables, purchased gifts and wrapping paper, started playing Christmas CDs, scouted out tree locations, organized my friends to bring food on Christmas night.

I can't think about it.

Today I received a beautiful note from someone who has tried many times over the past three months to bring some hope into my life.

Gratitude? Is that what I felt? It seems like a foreign country, but one which I might visit again.

So I went out and bought candles.

Miserere Mei, Deus (Psalm 51)

2008-12-10T21:36:00.000-08:00

Here.

These days, it's all about the music.

Give it the full ten minutes -- you are unlikely to regret the time.

(And I can't get this one to embed.)

I'm Just Saying

2008-12-09T21:09:00.000-08:00

I think it would be a good thing if people felt constrained to ask and listen rather than to offer advice or assurance about a situation with respect to which they know nothing.

If you have not balanced on the crumbling edge of a precipice, please don't tell me how to do it.

How Long?

2008-12-08T06:56:00.000-08:00

I found that this past week-end, for the first time since my son died at the beginning of September, I felt a longing for church: for worship in community. The first time I had felt that genuine desire in almost fourteen weeks.

One of my friends tells me that it was six months for her.

Another has gone back every Sunday since the beginning, and sobs through every service.

I've been to my own church a couple of times. There is something both reassuring and excruciating in finding the same patterns and music as before, in hearing familiar texts, in listening haphazardly (the best I can do right now) to a powerful sermon.

This past week-end I decided to go to a Saturday afternoon Mass. Three days back at school earlier in the week had taken their toll, and I knew that morning services were going to be too much to manage. What I didn't take into account was that hundreds of Catholics choose to meet their weekly Mass obligation on Saturday afternoon. And I didn't know that the service had been preceded by a parish service day in which 950 people had fanned out across the city to offer themselves to various organizations. By the time they got to the Mass that preceded a community dinner, they were pretty charged up.

So it was all a little too energetic for me. But the sermon and the music both spoke to me, and it was very good to be in a place where people were praying.

I don't know how long it takes before the fit feels right. Time of day, energy level, lighting, liturgy, community. Like almost everything else that we take for granted, the combination of stimulii feels like an assault when we are fragile and off-balance.

How long? Ever?

Suscipe

2008-12-07T05:44:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, it might be a harder prayer than one could have imagined at the end of The Exercises.

Away

2008-12-06T16:05:00.000-08:00

We've only gone away for Christmas once since we had children and, when we did, this is where we went, because Chicago Son was there.

We have decided to go away again this year, although not quite so far.

"As long as you know that we won't feel any better," said the Lovely Daughter.

I know.

If You Could

2008-12-05T12:41:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about prayer; more specifically, about intercessory prayer.

I was thinking about it as I watched the news last night. Security (or lack thereof) in Mumbai. Cholera in Zimbabwe. Champagne at an art opening, confusingly related to an indictment against UBS. Death and life and chaos, always.

If you could only pray for one thing, I wondered, what would it be?

For the end of death. Love may be stronger than death, but the consequence is a deeper anguish. One does not, however, long for the end of love. One longs for the end of death, for the eradication of that terrible breach that separates us from one another.

The end of death. The promise of Advent.

When Easter comes, my friend's husband will have been dead for a year. Will she feel the tiny flame of that promise flickering to life? Will it burn; will it singe her insides?

Advent hope: Scorched earth.

Advent List, Week One, Year One

2008-12-04T15:05:00.000-08:00

1. extravaganza holiday lighting house yard trees neighborhood friends who do not believe in God

2. eggnog I used to love eggnog

3. Pier I sparkly wrapping paper ornaments dishes

4. packed church trumpet accompaniment O Come O Come Emmanuel

5. Key West guidebook shall we go to a galaxy far far away

6. Tanner Annunciation I see things in it I have never seen before

7. nativity set all those Italian pieces purchased to charm small children stored in the basement can I bear to unpack it

8. doctor's office magazines there are more heart attacks on December 25 than on any other day

9. rain slush sleet snow clouds gray

10. the people who walked in darkness

Iona Community: Cloth for the Cradle

2008-12-03T00:04:00.000-08:00

When the world was dark
and the city was quiet,
you came.

You crept in beside us.
And no one knew.

Only the few who dared to believe
that God might do something different.

Will you do the same this Christmas, Lord?

Will you come into the darkness of tonight's world;
not the friendly darkness
as when sleep rescues us from tiredness,
but the fearful darkness,in which people have stopped believing
that war will end
or that food will come
or that a government will change
or that the Church cares?

Will you come into that darkness
and do something different
to save your people from death and despair?

Will you come into the quietness of this town,
not the friendly quietness
as when lovers hold hands,
but the fearful silence when the phone has not rung
the letter has not come,
the friendly voice no longer speaks,
the doctor's face says it all?

Will you come into that darkness,
and do something different,
not to distract, but to embrace your people?

And will you come into the dark corners
and the quiet places of our lives?

We ask this not because we are guilt-ridden
or want to be,
but because the fullness our lives long for
depends upon us being as open and vulnerable to you
as you were to us,when you came,
wearing no more than diapers,
and trusting human hands
to hold their maker.

Will you come into our lives,
if we open them to you
and do something different?

When the world was dark
and the city was quiet
you came.
You crept in beside us.

Do the same this Christmas, Lord.

Do the same this Christmas.

Amen.

Memories Unspoken

2008-12-02T07:26:00.000-08:00

Within a day of returning home from Thanksgiving with my in-laws, I received two emails from friends offering holiday solace and expressing the hope that our dinner had at least been filled with stories and memories of our son.

No.

Not a word, with one exception: He did come up in the context of a story told by his twin brother.

What was that, that reluctance to name the one person who was foremost in everyone's thoughts? I know that he wasn't forgotten, but the jovial insistence on behaving as if all were as usual only enhanced my feelings of sadness and isolation. In the absence of conversation about the person never absent from my thoughts, I found that I had hardly a word to say.

Such an odd disjunction. My in-laws are the steady family of churchgoers, those with a lifetime of committment to religious community behind them. But it's me, the one with the disjointed history of religious engagement and observance, the one with the family whose narrative defies that of any soap opera, who longs for ritual and articulation.

But it wasn't my home, and so I skipped even my usual toast to Digory Priest, my Mayflower ancestor, knowing that one toast might lead to another, or to an atmosphere of "should we say something?"

The silence made things so much worse. For me, anyway. (I do know that in grief one can only speak for oneself.)

**********

The first draft of this entry turned into something of a rant, targeting the inadequacies of everyone involved. Including, yes, myself. Probably more harmful than helpful. Perhaps instead I should just offer what I would try as a hostess under similar circumstanes. From a practical standpoint, what might have helped?

An advance phone call, I think, asking what might be done to honor the empty place at the table and maybe bring us some comfort. Along with an acceptance of the reality that comfort might be a hollow word. Even better, knowing how many such decisions have to be tackled by the heartbroken immediate family on a daily basis, a phone call offering a plan -- a plan to which we could have acquiesced, or which we could have rejected -- would have been most welcome. A simple acknowledgment of the difficulties of the holiday season, a suggestion for consciously incorporating the new reality into them, a spoken willingness to share the burden. Sometimes words do matter as much as actions do.

We haven't forgotten him. We don't forget him for a second. You can say his name aloud. Please say his name aloud.

The Friendship of the Lord

2008-12-01T14:03:00.000-08:00

God is faithful; by God you were called into the fellowship of God's Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

~ I Corinthians 1:9

(an Advent I reading)

Emily: Do any human beings ever realize life whole they live it? -- every, every minute?

Stage Manager: The saints and poets, maybe.

~Thornton Wilder, Our Town

I wonder whether there is anything which we do not take for granted.

I thought that I was way over on the appreciative side of the spectrum. I considered it one of the gifts of early childlhood loss. My mother and youngest brother, gone in a flash when I was seven. Some twenty-five years later I became a mother who practiced mindfulness long before she heard the term. It could all vanish so quickly; how well I knew that reality. My genuine sense of appreciation for the good gifts of motherhood did not relieve the tedium of years of wipes and dipes, but it did make it possible for me to look and listen, always, for the grin, the gurgle of pleasure, the boast of achievement, the shy smile of success, the blond hair in the sunlight.

But it wasn't enough. We can never be aware of one another, appeciate one another, enough. I could have taken note of every single minute, every single second, and it would not be enough to compensate me now for the loss of my child.

We take this season and the birth of our God into human form for granted, too. Put aside the commercial excesses, extended this year to the horrors of violence in the marketplace. Put aside the trivia and sentimentality. Even when we pay attention, our own daily preoccupations prevent us from comprehending what we are about at this time of year.

Paul could not have sounded the claim that we are called into fellowship with the Son of God unless there is, in fact, a Son of God. A God who shrugged on human form, was carried in human arms, grew into human companionship, died at human hands. A God who as our human friend remains faithful and always with us, even until the end of time. Paul's assertion is astonishing, really, and yet there it is.

Even when we are so lost in sorrow that awareness and appreciation are far, far out of reach.

Even when we cannot know.

Pay Attention

2008-11-30T09:50:00.000-08:00

Pay attention. One of the messages this morning: Pay attention.

It's difficult to pay attention when you are distracted by the fragmentary underpinnings of loss.

The present is ~ well, present. This week-end marks the transition from Thanksgiving to Advent, with people talking and blogging cheerfully and gratefully about family gatherings, about preparing food and decorating for Christmas together. It's just about intolerable. My husband put Christmas lights out front yesterday, and they hurt my eyes.

The past looms large. There are all the things that take months to do in the aftermath of someone's death. When the phone rings, it might be a friend preparing to stop by with soup. But it might instead be a creditor of your beloved, calling with a stern reminder of an unpaid bill owed by someone no longer here to pay it.

The future hangs ominously in the balance. Can you do what you had planned to do? Should you? Will you? How?

Paying attention is difficult under the best of circumstances. This morning I listened to a sermon by someone who has paid attention to others for many years, and that was one of his primary observations: Paying attention is difficult. He pointed out that we know when we are talking with someone who is really listening, that we recognize that the quality of the listening differs when the hearer is truly paying attention.

Paying attention is almost impossible when loss is fresh, when grief has splintered the pieces of your life into a puzzle no longer recognizeable.

And yet, it is the task of Advent. Pay attention, even if you have no idea how. Pay attention, even if you don't want to. Pay attention, even if you can't.