Christmas 1.4 - Blue Christmas Service

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.

Advent 4.2 - Discernment

'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 3.1 - Desert in Bloom

"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 2.1 - Knowledge

"[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 1.1 - Walking in the Light

"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.