Feast of St. John the Baptist--two poems, an essay, and an icon

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I found this icon, reproduced without attribution, at the blog below.  If anybody can help me with a more accurate attribution, I would appreciate it.  So many of the icons of John show him beheaded.  I didn't find many that show him baptizing.  (Probably if I'd looked at "Baptism of Jesus" I would have hit the jackpot.  How like John, who said of Jesus, "He must increase; I must decrease"!)

http://ecumenicalbuddhism.blogspot.com/2011/01/last-old-covenant-prophet-john-baptist.html

The two poems which follow are somewhat different responses to the life and ministry of St. John the Baptist, written over the past several years.  For some reason, I suspect that I will return again and again to reflect on how God was at work in the life of St. John the Baptist; and how God is at work in my own life.

First Poem -- I stayed with the Sisters of the Community of St. John Baptist in Mendham, New Jersey last year on retreat for a few days the week before their patronal feast.  As a "thank you" to them, I wrote this poem.  The Community's motto is John's saying: "He must increase, but I must decrease."

John, with rough, prophetic voice—a strange

imposing figure, clad in camel’s hair--

Three Gospels tell us of his tragic death,

And Matthew shows how, when he meets Our Lord,

(Thirty years of age—as he begins,

before he teaches, heals, or wakes the dead

he comes to John, he asks to be baptized)--

John points upward—maybe with a shrug:

“Must you, who bring the Spirit’s holy fire

be baptized here?     

                              By me?.......”

                                           

                                         He frowns.  We see,

In crease of forehead, how he strives to grasp

what Jesus wants: the Fire in Water plunged.

But can this faithful, odd Forerunner know

how, ever after, we who are baptized,

I and you, and all who follow Christ,

Must die in baptism’s waters? Then we’re raised,

Must find the Cross the way to Paradise,

must never let the longing of our hearts

decrease for that Celestial Banquet, when

the Lamb of God, the Spirit and the bride

say, “Come! Come feast on Living Water, Child!”

 **********************************************************

Second Poem--I wrote this one a few years ago.  It's not as disciplined as the first poem.  It's longer, and I would still like to rework it some day.  But I'll share it anyhow.  

The Way of John

I am an old man.

Not in years—

In years I am in the prime of life.

But I am now not long for this world. 

This I know.

I was one who baptized,

Also,

I was one of those who define ourselves

By who we are not,

(“I am not the Christ, or Elijah, or the Prophet…”)

This is knowing our limits--

I was one who baptized,

Also,

I was one of those who define ourselves

By what we don’t know,

By whom we fail to recognize.

“There is one in your midst,” I once said,

“ whom you do not know….

You thought my words were harsh?

But we are not so different, you and I. 

There was a time when

I did not know him either.

More than one time.

First came my mission: “Baptize!”

Baptize, trusting, believing

            that Israel will know him when he comes.

I did not know him at the start. 

But I started on my mission.  I baptized.

I baptized and preached--and

Still I did not know him. 

But a Voice once told me,

Told me what to watch for—

“Him on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain--

Watch for this one!”

I baptized the young and old of Israel,

trusting: “Israel will know him when he comes.”

I baptized rich and poor.

I baptized sinners blatant and secret,

trusting: “Israel will know him when he comes.”

Always I watched.

Always I longed.

He was no different from the rest,

not glowing with the Light to come,

no mighty hand, no outstretched arm,

not more beautiful, nor taller, nor special in any way.

In fact, he was my cousin.

He stepped into the water and

the Spirit came…

Always I sensed the Spirit come

when water dripped in shining rivulets

from faces released from guilt and shame and sin.

This one time only, the Spirit came,

bright bird-like wings flickering in the light,

And stayed.

Dropped like a hawk, I tell you,

onto his Victim

Bright Raptor shot from heaven,

with talons spread.

Someone may try to tell you it was like a dove

But they would be wrong.

So there he was.

And I saw.

And I testified.

Once I knew I knew.

I’d been saying all along: “Get ready!”

I’d been saying all along: “Turn around!”

I was out there in the wilderness.

But that was what I said.

I said it in what you might call

The wrong place and the wrong time,

to the wrong people.

So here is where I am:

in this dungeon now,

dark, with walls of stone.

Light a couple of hours a day when the sun is far to the west.

I know I saw the Spirit.

Let me humbly correct myself.

…I think I saw the Spirit.

Once I did not know him.

Do I know him now?

The world goes on,

so little changed.

The wicked are still wicked.

(I cried so long and loud.)

Israel  will know him when he comes.

I thought I knew him…

But Israel pays him so little mind.

Is he the One who is to come?

He is not long for this world, I fear.

The Spirit—the Holy Hawk-- is with him still.

He is still God’s Victim.

He is the Lamb.

 


The Essay

This was a short column for the Pickens County Progress that I wrote when I was the December religion columnist one month.

We all know people like him.   They are very bright, gifted in their own way. They pay no attention to fashion in how they dress.  They don’t pay much attention to the rules of etiquette, either.  They live on the fringes of society.  Their eating habits are strange—maybe there are only a couple of things they will eat at all.  They get so focused on a subject important to them that they don’t notice when people’s eyes glaze over.  They say what they think, even if it offends people.  They draw no distinctions between “important” people and ordinary people.  A couple of generations ago we might have called such people “quirky.”  Today they’re likely to have a diagnosis on the autism spectrum.

There’s a biblical figure we know as John the Baptist, because baptizing people was one of the things he loved to do. We might have called him quirky, too.   He had a brilliant, electrifying way of speaking to the crowds. He dressed in clothing made of camel’s hair, cinched with a leather belt. He lived in the wilderness. He ate locusts (yes! the bugs—I once thought the Gospel writers must have meant locust beans, but they didn’t) and wild honey. He would speak the unvarnished truth to any who came out to hear him.  He didn’t care or notice if his message made him popular.  He simply had to bellow it out: “Repent! Get ready for the coming of God!”

 God couldn’t have picked a better man for the job than John. John jarred people out of being set in their ways.  John called them to repent, literally, to turn their lives in a new direction.  John told them this repentance was urgent because the Lord was coming, and it was their job to prepare for that coming. 

 Christian churches that follow a calendar based on the life of Jesus are now in the rich and wonderful season called Advent. “Advent” means “Coming,” and in Advent we tie together time and eternity.  We remember the comings of God into our lives. We remember the coming of Jesus, fully human and fully God—God’s most profound and beautiful way of speaking to the human race.  We remember that we are still longing for the fullness of the Kingdom of Heaven where mercy and truth, justice and love coexist.

John is the classic Advent figure.  He’s not on Christmas ornaments or in crèche sets.  But he is the Bridge that holds the Comings of Christ together.  He is, like the Hebrew prophets, concerned with calling God’s people to repent, to allow God to turn their lives in a new direction.   John proclaims that the new path leads to One who will set their lives on fire with his love.

In Advent, John the Baptist reminds us that the Baby in the Manger grows to be the Son of Man, and if you follow him you will never be the same again.  Take some time with John before Christmas this year.  John calls us to prepare for the Lord’s coming. You can find his story in your Bible in Matthew 3, Mark 1, Luke 1 and 3, and John 1 and 3.

Practicing Poetry

Last winter a friend, responding to an offhand comment I'd made the previous fall, invited me to join her and two other women in forming a poetry group.  The four of us have been writing poems for years, but we were looking for a way of sharing our work and learning from one another.  Two of the women had been in groups before; for two of us this is a new experience.  We meet once a month in a home.

Everyone brings enough copies of a poem she has written for each member to have one.  With no introductions allowed by the poet, someone--not the author--reads the poem aloud.  Then the poet reads the poem aloud.   Conversation follows about the poem:  the choice of form, rhythm, words; the context, the hearers' responses.   Each evening I leave, delighted by the fresh perspectives and skills of these poets, and inspired to keep at it.

The first meeting I had a number of poems I'd written in the last several years that I could choose from to present.  But after that I had to produce a new poem.  Recently, I've been playing with traditional forms: haiku, ballads, sonnets, and even villanelles.  I'm still trying to decide if, in our post-modern era, these forms serve.  The three poems below rather strictly follow the forms of Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets and the villanelle.

• One, "Crumb Cake," is really just a little light-hearted exercise with the form.  
• The second, "Egypt," I wrote after hearing about an American woman journalist, assaulted in the aftermath of the populist revolution in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and the commentary that event engendered from other women who constantly endured a spectrum of disrespectful treatment on the streets of Cairo that ran from catcalls, leers, and groping to rape.  I don't know if the form helps or hinders the message.  Or, to put it another way, I don't know what I think of poetry as a medium for social commentary.  Also, I chose to split several lines and to indicate spatially how two lines actually comprised one "sonnet line."  I thought it might make it easier to read.  But maybe it merely obfuscates.  You tell me.
• The third, "In which the Poet Audaciously Argues with William Butler Yeats," is very much a work in progress.  It's the poem I will take with me on Tuesday to the Poetry Circle.   The form, the villanelle, is tortuously restrictive. (I broke the rhyme scheme in the final stanza.)  But its repetitions and circling back lend themselves to a tone of regret.  This sense of regret and dissatisfaction about my mis-spent months of unemployment is what I sought to express in the poem the audacious argument I took up (for the moment) with Yeats.  The point of contact is the "public solitude" of a cup of coffee and a book enjoyed al fresco.  But where Yeats experiences 20 minutes of unanticipated and profound joy, I did not.

So here they are:

I.  Crumb Cake Sonnet

There’s coffee in my mug, and though the cream

I poured in-- and, okay, I must admit,

liqueur and cocoa mix--perfume the steam,

it somehow fails to satisfy, or fit

into that labeled place that, as a child,

I saved inside my belly for “dessert.”

A recipe for crumb cake that I filed

away--for when it really wouldn’t hurt

to use the bag of cranberries that lurk

long past the holidays, still festive red,

on my refrigerator shelf—could work.

Ahhhh, Sweet, tart, crunchy,  densely warm! My head,

my nose, my tongue are longing for a taste.

 No!

            Crumb cake only settles round my waist.

II.  Egypt

“When Israel was in Egypt-land,” we sang—

and “Let my people go!”         

                                     I saw a slave

in Alabama cotton fields, who, brave

and desperate, exhausted, heard the clang

of Freedom’s bell.

                                     I saw a prison gang,

chained black men whom white juries wouldn’t save

despite their innocence. (The white folk crave

a scapegoat.) 

                                     I saw lynch-drunk crowds shout “Hang

him high!”

                                     I never thought that in my day

I’d see the squares of Cairo full of men

of Egypt-land,  their Pharaoh holding sway

for thirty years, but finally toppled when

they cried “Enough!” 

                                     But not enough till they

Sing, “Let my women go!”

                                     They’ll be free then…

 

 

III.  In which the Poet audaciously argues with William Butler Yeats

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

                                    William Butler Yeats, from “Vacillation,”1932

            Five years ago, I longed for time to sit and gaze

Alone, with pen and paper, open book at hand,

The poets’ vivid vision teaching me their ways.

            My terrace now, with concrete floor in shades of grays,

Rug gray, chairs red, teak table, coffee iced: it’s grand!

Five years ago, I longed for time to sit and gaze--

And now I have that time.  More time, less work that pays.

A balcony herb gardener; this I hadn’t planned:

The poets’ vivid vision teaching me their ways

To contemplate tomato blossoms, and the haze

Of basil blossom fragrance. Almost bored, I stand.

Five years ago, I longed for time to sit and gaze,

Then, choosing words with care, attentive, in a blaze

Of insight, write a poem, strong and real, not bland,

The poets’ vivid vision teaching me their ways.

In Florida, six floors up, and now that all my days

Are free to think, to write, I yawn.  I got my wish.

Five years ago, I longed for time to sit and gaze,

The poets’ vivid vision teaching me their ways.

                                                                                   

On the Via Dolorosa

On Monday mornings I pray with a contemplative prayer group some of whom have been meeting together since 1975 at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Luke here in Orlando.  We range in age from our mid-fifties to mid-90's.   Normally, we begin our time of contemplation with a quiet, measured, repeated recitation of the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Then the officiant claps her hands once and we lapse into silence, to continue, each in her own way.  (I say "her" because at the moment only women are in the group, though at times in the past there have been men, as well.)  Some of us continue with the Jesus Prayer or other forms of breath prayer.  One finds her meditation formed by the hymns that come to mind unbidden, but virtually always appropriate to her spiritual condition.

During Lent, we have taken a break from this practice, and have instead been led in our meditation through several Stations of the Cross.  Four of us have been to Jerusalem and walked the Via Dolorosa during Lent or Holy Week, and this experience surely has shaped all subsequent contemplation on the Stations.  (An aside: I often hear people refer to this Way of Pain as the "Via de la Rosa," the way of the Rose--and find my thoughts moving to the thorns and blood-red color of the rose, and the Advent hymn, "Lo, How a Rose e'er Blooming,"  in which Christ is the Rose.  So maybe Way of the Rose is not so far off....) 

I missed the first Monday of Lent because I was traveling.  The second week, we were at Stations 4 and 5.  The woman assigned to lead our meditations on these events was the one who prays in hymns.  She is a retired school music teacher.  Having made a remarkable recovery after hip surgery in the summer and knee surgery in the fall, she walks enthusiastically, sings in a jazz ensemble, and leads the music at her church's monthly children's Eucharist.  She is charming, athletic, and not given to unnecessary speech, though she has a wry sense of humor.  She is nearly 90, and has outlived her husband and one of her sons.  Our facilitator had assigned her these stations because, she suggested, they might be the easiest for children to connect with, and Mildred works regularly with children.  She even lent Mildred a little booklet of Stations for Children.

Mildred chose to address us as children, as if she was teaching a Sunday School class and we were her pupils.  For some reason, it enabled us all, "teacher" and "pupils," to access some tender spots in our hearts.  All of us are mothers; all of us are still children, though none has a mother still living. 


Station 4:  Jesus Meets his Mother

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you
because by your Holy Cross
you have redeemed the world.

Simeon said to Mary his mother: "This child is destined to be the downfall and the rise of many in Israel, a sign that will be opposed. And you yourself shall be pierced with a sword, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be laid bare." 

Holy God,
Holy and mighty
Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy on us.

Mildred said words to this effect: "Boys and girls,  have you ever been lost in a crowd and then suddenly noticed your mother?  Do you know how much your mother loves you?  Do you remember to say 'Thank you' to her?  Jesus was doing something very hard, carrying a heavy wood cross to the place where he would be killed.  A crowd was mocking him and his mother could see how Jesus was in pain and how tired he was, but she could not do anything for him, except to be there."  Mildred's eyes were filling with tears.  Her voice was almost breaking with quiet emotion.  Every one of us found ourselves weeping quietly. 

All of us had been there. I think all of us missed our mothers. All of us thought of what we might have said to express our gratitude for their love.  All of us had longed, as mothers, to be able to do something more than simply be there, at some time or other, when our children were suffering or in trouble.  Maybe it is axiomatic that all mothers know that sword that pierces the heart. 

This stained glass piece suggests the possibility that Our Lady was perhaps able to touch her Son again while he was on this painful journey.  The look in her eyes, of love, pain, concern, worry is compelling.  James Ceaser of Fiatlux Glassworks in Vancouver is the artist, and this is one of the fourteen Stations, completed in 1998, at St. Mark's College at the University of British Columbia.

Station 5:  Simon of Cyrene is compelled to carry Jesus' cross.


We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you,
because by your Holy Cross
you have redeemed the world.

A man named Simon of Cyrene, was coming in from the fields, and they pressed him into service to carry the Cross.


Holy God,
Holy and mighty
Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy on us.

"Boys and girls, what do you do when you see somebody --say, a boy or girl on the playground who has fallen down?  Do you tease them and laugh at them, or do you help them?"

Our discussion turned to how Simon, like so many of us, was just going about his own business.  He was tired after working in the fields.  This crucifixion procession was none of his business.  But the soldiers made it his business.  He, a hard-working peasant, just trying to stay out of debt and put food on his family's table, was compelled to carry the cross for this man, ostensibly a common thief, or, more likely, what we would call today a terrorist.  I thought a lot about how the suffering of others has a way of drawing us in.  We can't immunize ourselves from the hurt of our sisters and brothers. 

This image comes from the Stations for Xaverian Missionaries on the website of the Xaverian Missionaries, USA.  I don't know where they got them.  These are beautiful examples of the sorts of marble or stone Stations we see on the walls of so many American Catholic and Episcopal churches.

A week later, our group gathered again, and Sally, a wise and well-read woman, led us through meditations on Stations 6, 7, and 8.  After giving us a gentle introduction to the event commemorated at the Station, we were invited to meditate for 5 or 10 minutes in silence, and then to share our responses to a simple question she asked.

Station 6: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.
This is one of the stations that has no biblical basis.  Rather, early Christian tradition has this woman compassionately doing what she could.  Often the illustrations of this Station have the face of Jesus miraculously appearing on the cloth Veronica held.  Sally asked us: Who has been an icon of Jesus for you?  Who has shown you Jesus' face?  The responses ranged from clergy who had been there at key moments in our spiritual lives to our mothers and grandmothers.  In every case, as she told the story, the woman made it clear that it wasn't because this person was perfect that they were effective in inviting us into closer relationship with Christ.  Indeed, in every instance we acknowledged that the person was deeply flawed, and that perhaps it was the brokenness that enabled the person to be effective.

This is a detail from Peter Paul Rubens' painting of Veronica.

Station 7:  Jesus Falls for a Second Time.
 The conversation continued, about how God is with us even when we are very weak.  As I meditated on this Station, I realized that I talk a good talk about how important it is to fall and to get up and to fall and to get up again on the journey.  But when it comes to my own life, I really resent falling a second or third time.  I was brought up short: falling is not a sign of sin; it is a sign of weakness; and God said to St. Paul, "My grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect [complete] in weakness."  This is kind of the opposite of the success mantra that appears to drive Americans in business. 

This image comes from the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee.   Of Venetian mosaic inlay, the Stations are copies of those of St. Anne's Church in Munich, Germany.  I find this very traditional depiction compelling because it illustrates how the soldiers are continuing to harrass Jesus, just because they can, though there's really no more he can do.  This is so typical of the way that ordinary people, swept into positions of relative power in the Empire, can become callous and abusive. 

Station 8: Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem, who weep for him. 

"This is all of us!" said Margie.  "This is our station.  We are the women of Jerusalem."  One of the women mentioned the Libyan woman who had burst into the hotel in Tripoli where all the journalists were staying, to try to tell them the story of how she had been gang raped by the government soldiers.  As she was being violated yet again, dragged off to near-certain imprisonment, she wept and cried out.

When is is right for us to use our voices?  When does it do no good?  Perhaps Jesus was saying to the women that there was no use calling out to the authorities about the great miscarriage of justice that had been perpetrated as this innocent Man was being led to crucifixion. No one would listen.  After all, it was the political authorities who had authorized this political assassination.  But still more, in some hard-to-grasp way, I think Jesus was insisting on letting events follow their course.  The way of the Cross leads to life only through suffering and death, it seems...

This is a photo taken by Joe Goldberg in the fall of 2009, at the 8th Station along the Via Dolorosa.
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/goldberg/4098306777/ )  I like it because of the very ordinary women it depicts.  Ordinary women when Jesus was led through Jerusalem on his way to crucifixion.  Ordinary women in our time.  Pilgrims from all over the world walk the Way of the Cross in Jerusalem, through the Old City, while ordinary life is going on for the people who live there.  That, too, is not so different from the day when Jesus was led on a similar path. 

And that is as far as our journey has taken us.  Next Monday, Pam will share, and then it will be my turn.  Margie does the final meditations.  I am profoundly blessed to share the journey with these women, and we all know ourselves blessed and challenged to share the journey of Jesus to the Cross-and beyond into new life.  

Middlemarch and Middle Age

This week's New Yorker has a wonderful article by Rebecca Mead, "Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot teaches us."

I think it's been at least 15 years since I've read this novel, and I was fascinated by Mead's comments on how differently she has read it over the years: "I have gone back to "Middlemarch" every five years or so, my emotional response to it evolving at each revisiting." On her most recent reading, Mead writes:

Rather than limning the inchoate hopes of youth, "Middlemarch" seemed to be about the resignations that attend middle age. It became a primer to the limitations on accomplishment that are, for the most part, the lot of even the most ardent and aspiring among us. (Lydgate dies at fifty, believing himself a failure: "He had not done what he once meant to do.") ...With each reading I became only more grateful for Eliot's wise, consoling grace, and only more admiring of the quiet celebration of the unremarkable that infuses the book's unforgettable conclusion: "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Mead's essay is challenging me to re-read Middlemarch. (And being able to read the Kindle free download on my iPhone is very convenient.) What might not have looked to me in my thirties, or even a couple of years ago, like appropriately challenging aspirations now appear honorable to me. "Living faithfully a hidden life" looks just fine to me. The novel's ending is framed by what one might wish to see as a companion quote at the beginning, in the section titled "Prelude":

Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

From the vantage point of middle age, I see myself in just that predicament. My own attempts at goodness seem largely failures, and are, indeed, virtually always dispersed among hindrances in scope petty, tragic, or somewhere in between. Mead says that Eliot is unfailingly charitable in her authorial evaluations of her novels' characters: "even when it comes to her most flawed characters...her default authorial position is one of pity." I hope I can learn to be as charitable in my evaluation of my own life. I don't think it is possible to be as insightful or accurate about one's own life as someone else can be, given the inevitable blindness that Jesus described as having a log in one's eye.

Somehow in the world of refrigerator magnets, inspirational books, and greeting cards, people began to attribute to Eliot the sentiment that "It is never too late to be what you might have been." Mead describes her futile attempt to locate such a quotation anywhere in Eliot's writings, given that most of Eliot's work seems to argue the very opposite: that "it is always too late to be what you might have been--but...virtually without exception the unrealized life is worth living." (In a lighter vein, but expressing not too different a sentiment, G.K.Chesterton once said that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.) Middle age is about facing limits. Perhaps, one may hope, those very real, non-abstract limits may function as the rules for writing sonnets function for the poet: to give structure and context to the time that remains in one's life.

If my attempts to complete a re-reading of this novel from a vantage point of middle age do not founder on hindrances, perhaps I will follow up this post with further thoughts on Middlemarch and middle age. Is anybody else inspired to read along with me?

Advent Wreaths and Lucia crowns

This is our funky subtropical Advent "wreath." It may be pretty non-traditional, but I love lighting it. It puts me in touch with all the warm fuzzy elements of Christmas preparations in my childhood.

Each year, families were selected each week to light the candles of the Advent Wreath at church. There was a small liturgy at the beginning of the main Sunday service. I'm sure it was created by the pastor each year to teach whatever theme he wanted to develop. One year, as I remember it--and my memory may have invented more of this than it actually remembers--the four candles were for Waiting, Patience, Hope, and Joy. The first week, there was a frank acknowledgment of how hard it is for a child to wait. The second week, we were invited to keep waiting, patiently. The third week we spoke of the hope that carries us through the hard times. And the fourth week we learned about how love makes it all worthwhile, because God's Love brings us the great gift of the Savior, coming into our world as a beautiful and innocent baby in the manger.

In the rarefied liturgical atmosphere of the Episcopal Church I used to be embarrassed about these homespun rites. They didn't seem to have sufficient gravitas. But Wikipedia says that Advent wreaths were invented in the 19th century in Germany as a teaching tool for boys and girls. So it makes complete sense that Pastor Wiens would use it as a teaching tool for us. It was very effective. It helped us look forward to the coming of the celebration of Christ's birth. The cumulative effect of lighting one more candle each week as we looked forward to greeting the Light of the World was to give our excitement a much better "container" than the commercial "Santa Claus is coming to town" that we heard in school and stores and on television.

Scandinavians love Advent. It's dark in Sweden this time of the year. When I visited my daughter Anna, who was studying in Sweden in December 2005, the sun never rose more than about 30 degrees above the horizon, leaving the countryside in near-twilight during the day, and utterly dark by 4 pm. Nearly every house and apartment had candles in the windows; and outdoors people made little shelters for candles out of snow in their yards. It is easy to see why early Christian missionaries to the Nordic peoples associated the celebration of the birth of Jesus, the Light of the World, with the winter solstice. When it seems that things can't get much darker, the days begin to grow longer again. "The light shines in the darkness," we read in the prologue to the Gospel of John, "and the darkness did not overcome it."

December 13, is the feast of Saint Lucy, who is the patron of teachers because her name is associated with light and the enlightenment of the mind. Swedish girls in their white nightgowns wear a crown of candles and carry coffee and Lucia buns to family members early in the morning. They sing the beautiful if somewhat corny Sicilian "Santa Lucia" ballad. The Lucia buns have raisins in the middle, evocative of the eyes that St. Lucy carries on a platter in traditional iconography. (One story says that, the young Christian virgin Lucy, in refusing to marry a pagan husband--who admired her beautiful eyes-- in the time of the Diocletian persecution, plucked out her eyes herself and handed them to him, saying, "Here are my eyes. Now let me go and serve God.") Some Swedish congregations in the Lutheran and Covenant Churches have Lucia festivals. Ours did not, but I always wanted to process up the aisle in a white gown with a wreath of candles on my head, even though the thought of doing so always put a frisson of fear up my spine as I imagined my hair catching fire! Here is Carl Larsson's famous illustration of this tradition.

Almost Advent

(WARNING: Some readers may think what follows is a rant, and is ridiculously naive and blatantly political. I don't deny their claims.)


Tomorrow in the liturgical Christian Churches, we begin the season of Advent. It is not a way of getting started celebrating Christmas a little early. It is something else entirely. It ties together the comings of God into our lives: the startling and astonishing coming of God into human existence in profound vulnerability as the Child adored by the shepherds, to be sure. But also the coming that we sometimes call the Second Coming, the coming that represents the equally startling and counter-intuitive truth that, in the end, the God of justice, mercy, grace and love wins!

It is this Second Coming that is where our Advent observances begin. In that sense, Advent ties the beginning of each liturgical year to the end of the year before.
We read this year from the Gospel of Matthew, and so we get a "Joseph perspective" on the story of Jesus' birth. We also read during this season, as always, from the Hebrew Bible. And all our readings are from the prophet Isaiah. In each, Isaiah casts a vision of an alternate reality from what his hearers were experiencing. And in each of those visions followers of Jesus have seen his coming expressed as well.

So, in order to get a handle on how I will preach about the Comings of God this Advent, I pulled a wonderful book off my shelf. I’d started it about three years ago, but now is the time for me to read it in its entirety. It’s The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001). He writes:

It is the task of prophetic ministry to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of enculturation into an effective interface (2).

…The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us (3).

Brueggemann writes in this book both about the prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the prophetic elements in Jesus’ life and ministry. He says that the New Thing that God did under Moses’ leadership when liberating the Israelites from Pharaoh is paradigmatically prophetic. God’s radical and absolute freedom always challenges the institutions that kings and emperors put in place in futile attempts to domesticate and control God. In Israel, under King Solomon, God’s vision of justice was co-opted, and in its place there arose Solomon’s vision of a continuing dynasty. To that end, he developed a harem; tax districts; bureaucracy; a standing army; a close court-cult relationship with the Temple--Brueggemann describes them as a religion "in which God and his temple have become part of the royal landscape in which the sovereignty of God is fully subordinated to the purpose of the king" (p.28); and conscripted labor.

The prophet is the one who, in that context, speaks the poetry and sings the songs that allow people to envision an alternate reality. But we can’t even hear until the spell of the dominant culture is broken by the laments of the marginalized folk who know that something is terribly wrong with the way things are now. Out of lament and despair and tears comes, then, God's surprising hope.

About hope, Brueggemann writes:

Hope...is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk.

So, I got to thinking: what is it that I hope for, long for with intensity, but I'm embarrassed to admit I hope for so much, because it seems impossibly unrealistic? What is it, that when I talk about it to "reasonable and sensible" people, I sense that they think that I've got my head in the clouds and need to quit being such an idealist or such a bleeding-heart liberal?

To be very specific, I hope for a way for my 21 year old daughter, who has Type I diabetes (the kind where your pancreas doesn't make any insulin, and you die if you don't receive insulin via injection or pump), to receive the health care here in the United States, that she needs to stay alive and healthy. She could be on our insurance policy next year if we were going to have insurance ourselves (which we may possibly not have), and if she was in college or otherwise our dependent (she's living on her own and working a minimum wage job without insurance on offer). She has some other disabilities that, despite her high IQ, make her almost unemployable. She's not held a job for more than 3 or 4 months in her life, and she flunked out of college because she refused to avail herself of the assistance she was eligible for under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She's not merely being obstinate: her brain is just wired very differently from the rest of us, and her diabetes, when her blood sugar is too high or too low, also sometimes makes her so exhausted and miserable that she misses more work than a healthy person might. Her insulin, blood glucose testing equipment, and pump supplies would cost us about $500 per month retail. She's been told that, even if she was eligible for medicaid, there would be no coverage for the insulin pump that has made her very brittle diabetes more controllable and has kept her from life-threatening and irreversible organ damage. The provisions of the wimpy, terribly-compromised Health Care Bill that might help (no denial when applying for insurance for pre-existing conditions, coverage on parents' plan for children under age 26) don't come into effect in 2013.

In the dominant culture of Solomon's day, there were quite a few people with significant affluence. But their affluence, their full banquet tables, meant that others went hungry. In our day, the inequality between the richest Americans and the rest of us is greater than at any period since the Gilded Age. It is greater in the USA than in Nicaragua or Honduras, places we sometimes hear disparaged as "Banana Republics." My question then becomes: Who benefits from a system that allows my daughter to fall between the cracks? So many people out there would say (behind my back, if not to my face):

"Well, too bad! She has a pre-existing condition."
"No insurance company should be compelled to lose their competitive edge or fail in their fiduciary responsibilities by being forced to take clients with serious chronic disease."
"It's not MY fault, and MY taxes or access to health care shouldn't be affected by HER problem, or problems of other people like her."
"Don't bring Jesus or justice into this conversation. It's strictly a business decision."
"We don't need to have a nurse-maid society that takes care of people. That is their own responsibility."

How many millions of other people are there out there, who are either being bankrupted or being denied health care because the people of the United States can't see a way to do what the Europeans have done, and make health care available to everyone?

My hope, my deep yearning, is for a day when everybody here in the USA can get the care they need to be as healthy as they can be. When people won't have to decide between making a house or rental payment or paying for their medicine. (And just because my hope is specific to the USA in 2010 doesn't mean that I don't long for all the hungry, the sick, the poor, the imprisoned.. to be made whole and free.)

So what does this have to do with Advent? The coming of God, the fact that God entered our world as a fully-embodied human being, means that we may have hope for a time when justice will prevail. Bodies matter to God. Hungry bellies and sick people and the blind and the lame and the deaf all don't need to have their suffering ignored. Jesus proclaimed that healing was a hallmark of the coming Kingdom of God. The coming of God at the Eschaton, the culmination of all things, doesn't let us off the hook for doing what we can to live justly, to work for justice now. Rather, it allows us to do justice fearlessly, because there are no threats, not even the threat of death, that can shut us up.

Advent is about hope. Ridiculous, enormous hopes, however counter-cultural they are.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It's a cloudy "soft" day here in Orlando, and some rain fell earlier. This is a novel and wonderful thing after 42 sunny days without a drop of rain. It smells different now, more like it did when I first came down to visit Wayne on New Year's Eve last year. It's quite a subtle change, not nearly as dramatic as the coming of autumn in the North. But there it is! Even the Starbucks where I'm sitting has switched to its "holiday theme" cups with red trim and stylized snowflakes.

This is the week of All Saints and All Souls in the liturgical churches, including the Episcopal Church that has been my spiritual home for the last 30 years. This isn't your tradition. But it is the place where I have landed. You gave me a precious gift when you prayed with me, taught me to pray, told me Bible stories, showed me lives that were founded and centered on God. You raised me to trust that God is good, that God loved me more even than you did, that God created this beautiful world for us to explore and learn about, to live in in ways that were loving and generous. What a foundation! I have taken this foundation and carried it into my "new" spiritual home, the Episcopal Church. But it was in the Covenant Church of my girlhood, from Pastor John Wiens that I first was pointed to the Communion of Saints, surrounding us as a "great cloud of witnesses." So I am writing you a letter. It's a little act of pleasure. I loved writing letters to you when we lived far away from each other. It was a way of drawing near to you when I missed you. It was a way of sharing what was going on in my heart.

The last substantive, hand-written letter I received was from our cousin Joy. It was more than a year and a half ago. I have it in front of me, and I owe her a response. So much has happened in our lives in the last couple of years that every time I thought I would write, something big was in flux or changing, and I delayed until there might be some sort of resolution. It was also such an anticipated pleasure to respond to her letter with a hand-written letter of my own, written at leisure, that I waited (in vain!) for a good time to respond. Maybe this weekend???

I began this letter to you, as I usually did, with a description of the weather and the place I am sitting. It situates me concretely in one place, and invites you to imagine yourselves here with me. It invites or evokes communion, one might say. Dad, I remember all the letters you used to write on Sunday afternoons to your brothers and sister. There was lots of talk about weather in the letters from Norquay that you received, and in those you sent. I suppose that's because farmers are so affected by weather and attuned to its subtleties. You can take the man off the farm, but you can't take the farmer out of the man. (I remember a birthday card that said you were a man "out standing in your field"!) You used carbon paper before the days of easy photocopying. Over the years you would occasionally write me, too, more often with a word processor. Your writing got a little bit shaky at the end. Mom, your little letters on smaller pieces of stationery were also precious. Even though we could talk on the phone regularly and easily, there was something about a letter, arriving in an envelope, that lent gravitas and importance to the communication. I miss your letters, perhaps even more than the phone calls. I have a bunch of them in files.

You are now in a place beyond where letters can reach. I am counting, however, on time operating somewhat differently from the perspective of the heavenly realm than it does from my more limited perspective here and now. My prayers to God of love for you continue, and perhaps your prayers to God for me continue,too. After all, the scriptures say that the prayers of the saints rise like incense, and they do not specify whether those saints are in heaven or on earth. There were many days when the children were younger and my life was supremely challenging that your prayers, which I knew you prayed each morning at breakfast for all your children and grandchildren, sustained me.

Now, in my mid-fifties, my life seems--what? Becalmed, perhaps. I am not in the work force. Actually, I loved being the parent at home when the kids were younger. There was much to do and I loved having more time to devote to making meals, keeping the house more organized, being available for the children, etc. It seemed that I was adding value to the family by my contributions. Now, not working a regular "for pay" job, I feel guilty and unproductive. Yet I enjoy the rhythms of my present life: having time for regular exercise, prayer, and meditation; being able to read more widely and deeply, having time to travel to see the grandchildren, being able to make meals and entertain friends more frequently.

So, if you still pray, will you pray for me not to succumb during this time to laziness, passivity, or disorganization? to frittering away this less-structured time that is, in some senses, a gift? Will you pray that I not waste this precious time worrying, but will trust that the right work will come along for me AND that I will devote an appropriate amount of time to looking for that work?