Advent D

This is it -- the last pre-Advent Day. Tomorrow it will be Advent 1.

I read something a few days ago, perhaps in our church bulletin, about Advent as a time of preparation reflective in some ways of the nesting instinct many women feel toward the end of pregnancy. I say "many women" because I myself recall no such instinct. Perhaps if you are pregnant with twins, meaning that by month seven you have reached the size usually achieved at month nine and are therefore staring down two MORE months in which your lungs and bladder have been squished into the tinest of somethings no longer resembling functioning organs, or if on Day 270 you are still unable to retain much of anything in your tummy (I could describe the effects more graphically but, in deference to the season, I will restrain myself), the concept of nesting is an elusive one. At any rate and for whatever reason, it wasn't something I experienced.

Today, however -- a different story. All you have to do is look at the disastrous consequences of my decision to reorganize our library and you will see that there is some serious nesting going on. Or you will see that the reason I never grasped end-of-pregnancy nesting is that the entire enterprise is simply beyond me.

Unless it's the monk parakeet variety. In Hyde Park, where we visited our University of Chicago son last week-end, a squadron of monk parakeets took up residence some decades ago. Huge green birds who pass over your head in dive-bomber formation. And they build the most astonishing nests! They live in community, in massive and messy structures that look as if they could bring down trees or transformer poles with just the slightest of additions.

So I am a monk parakeet nester.

And it turns out that nesting, even my newfound version, is relevant to Advent. I received an email from an online friend today in which she mentioned that her Church of Christ does not recognize Christmas as a Christian holiday. Of course, I immediately plied her with questions, but my fascination with religious practices is unquenchable and well known, so I'm sure she's not surprised that I've already done my own search. I found one site that offered an explanation mostly in terms of the pagan origins of our Christmas celebrations, origins that render Christmas decidedly “un-Christian.”

Well, yes. The Romans and the Druids and I suppose other peoples as well had more to do with the dating and practices of Christmas as we know them today than Jesus and his parents did. But, with all due respect accorded to the good folks of the Church of Christ, I can’t claim to be perturbed in the slightest by those historical realities. Christmas is about something so spectacularly beyond our concept of space and time and, paradoxically, so completely enmeshed within our earthly existence and very human lives, that a little confusion over its celebration is to be expected.

Which makes Advent all the more important. Somehow we have to find a way, in four short weeks, to balance the excesses of money, gifts, and food in which we are about to partake against the birth of someone who is about to say, “Sell everything you have.” We have to balance the extravagance of our music and decorations against a chilly night on the outskirts of a small town. We have to balance our intellectual and scientific achievements against the appearance of a star that no one can explain.

It’s not surprising that we are a bit confused, or that our attempts to satisfy all those contradictory impulses render our solutions about as orderly as those of the monk parakeets, who remain under the impression that they are in the rain forest rather than Chicago and behave accordingly. (Probably a good thing, given the blizzard of the past few days. Those parakeet condos may have saved them.)

Luckily for us, the weeks ahead are for preparation, not perfection. Luckily for me, anyway. I realize that other people are better at all of this. Me? I need to create a lot of room ~ a wild nest for a wild event.

Mishbarim: Dismantling Your Life

Like most middle class Americans my age, I have invested most of my life in building. School, marriage, family, career, home. It all went pretty well for awhile. I was a reasonably generous person ~ nothing outrageous, no Mother-Theresa like complexes for me ~ but certainly I gave of my energy and my time and my money and my gifts to my family, my church, and my community. And why not? I had plenty to give; it hardly hurt me to spread a little of it around. Oh, every once in awhile I would find that I had over-committed myself in one realm or another and I'd have to invest some effort into stepping back, but that was about as difficult as it got. We are not talking Ms. Self~Sacrifice here. Except for a couple of times, when disaster hit and left our family confused and hurting ~ but we were capable of determined re-building efforts, and we were always surrounded by people who helped us. So re-build we did.

This is different. This is so different.

Everything has to go.

OK, not everything. Not much of anything exterior, really. The house is still (barely, per usual) standing , the Quiet Husband is still employed, I am still in school. The Gregarious Son and The Lovely Daughter are employed and moving forward, and working to heal a little. We are all trying to heal a little.

But the interior everything ~ it has to go. I have found virtually nothing in a traditional life of Christian faith and practice, at least as I once knew it ~ and I knew it pretty well ~ to sustain me. I remember that a year or so ago, a fellow blogger wrote frequently of feeling shielded under God's wing. No wing for me. One of my professors, when I visited him last spring to seek some academic advice, apparently felt obligated to offer some of what must have seemed to him to have been kindly words of pastoral assurance. It was all I could do to escape his office without throwing up. I have had a number of conversations with others who have experienced similar depths of trauma in recent years ~ and very few have found in church a place of respite or solace.

I have found nothing in my own efforts. I have been busily erecting walls of self-defense against the endless waves of sadness and anger but there is, in fact, no technology available for building walls thick enough to withstand them. I know that, of course. The primary emphasis of the program which I attended a few weeks ago on death and dying was on the need to go deep into and all the way through sorrow in order to make any sense at all of it and to absorb it into the rest of your life. That was not news. But the reality is that the dailiness of life requires a good deal of wall-building. The balance ~ between the barriers you need to secure in place to walk through the grocery or to withstand a basic class discussion on baptism (oh, right, actually I didn't make it through that one . . .) and the openness and honesty needed in order to confront and accommodate one's real life of struggle and sorrow ~ the balance is a tenuous one to maintain. It's no wonder that bereaved people tend to isolate themselves. I'm certainly much more content when I do.

I like that word, accommodate, at least for now. I've read several comments by parents of children who have died by suicide to the effect that acceptance of our loss will never be a possibility, but that accommodation is a realistic hope. I looked it up in the thesaurus and, while some of the synonyms make sense in this context and some do not, the one that resonates with me is attune. We do have to make room for and host this terrible reality, whether we want to or not, but it is perhaps an additional goal to attune ourselves to the nuances of loss and pain in this world, beyond ourselves.

To dismantle and to re-attune who we are, how we hear, what we see, how we know and how we understand. It seems to me an optimistic approach, given that our lives have been pretty well smashed into little bits of broken debris.

(And here's something interesting, for the academically inclined: For that mammoth paper I've finished on Psalm 88, I did a little research on the word mishbarim (breakers), because of the line in verse 8, "Every breaker of yours knocks me down." It seems that the word mishbarim is used in ancient Semitic writings in two fundamental ways: to mean either "waves" in the context of the sea, or "pangs," as in birth pangs (which of course, come in waves). In either case, it refers to powers that shatter or break. In one text in the Dead Sea Scrolls (no no no, of course I haven't read the DSS ~ but I can read about them), the images of birth pangs and the waves of a storm at sea are combined, and the mythologies of other Mediterranean cultures are filled with references to waters, waves, and floods of chaos.)

I am quite taken with that information; that for thousands of years people of a multitude of cultures have melded wave imagery for sorrow and brokenness with wave imagery for birth, and have woven both strands into their sacred texts.

Many (many!) years ago, before my children were born, I read some words of wisdom in some magazine article or other. In response to someone's Yuppie-oriented reluctance to have children for fear that they would change her life, the writer suggested that no one should have children until and unless she wanted to change her life ~ that that is the point, to want to change your life by bringing the abundance of love into it in a form that will change it in every possible dimension. To welcome mishbarim, both literally and figuratively.

Well. One does not want or welcome the mishbarim of the death of a beloved child. But here they are. Breakers and birth pangs, the complete dismantling of the old outlook and understanding.

Can it be reshaped, perhaps tentatively and gingerly, with something fragile and frail? That's what I'm going to imagine this Advent. I'm going to spend some time over in my Advent blog, and I'm going to take at least part of it to explore the Advent of the Heart words of Alfred Delp, S.J. Alfred Delp was a Jesuit caught up in the Holocaust. He shares a great deal in common with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose work we read a bit of in school last quarter; both were engaged in resistance work against the Nazis, both were imprisoned, both were executed shortly before the end of the war. (Interestingly, according to the introduction to this particular book, during his imprisonment Father Delp received assistance and care from a Lutheran pastor, and is probably quoting Martin Luther at one point. It would appeal greatly to my ecumenical leanings to know that Deitrich Bonhoeffer received care from a Cathoic priest as well. I have certainly heard him quoted in Catholic sermons. One never knows.)

At any rate, Advent of the Heart has popped up on my computer screen via various sources over the past couple of weeks, so I am taking that to mean something. There was nothing fragile or frail about Alfred Delp or his faith as he confronted evil and chaos during Advent. Nothing about Bonheoeffer or his, either. Mishbarim in both of its meanings, and neither of them ever forgot it, whereas I am much more inclined to let myself be shattered rather than reborn.

May this Advent be for the latter, even if in only the smallest of ways. For the tiniest flicker of candlelight in the midst of all this darkness.



Cross-posting at Desert Year.

Ash Wednesday

A year ago, I experienced a bit of Jewish-Christian tension over my desire to observe Ash Wednesday, and wrote the following:

< I wanted to go to an Ash Wednesday service today. My own church's service is at night (which I don't much like ~ it seems that we're saying, "OK, we'll do this, but late enough that no one will see us") and I have a class on Wednesday nights.Then I discovered that my old Methodist church has a service at noon, so I thought I'd go over there.

And then I spent some time agonizing over whether I wanted to spend the afternoon teaching my Jewish students with ashes smudged on my forehead. Most of them would be merely curious, and supportive rather than offended. Many of the teachers, perhaps the opposite. I finally decided against it.

If I worked in a secular environment, my solution would be different. During Advent, I wrote about going to a church meeting one night where one of the gentlemen had come directly from work wearing a Christmas tie. That would not have happened in my workplace. My workplace is a community and a home for people whose beliefs, and contextualization of their their beliefs, differ from mine.

I don't know whether or not I was right. One of my colleagues, headed for her UCC service tonight, agreed with me. Another, a rabbi, said he was genuinely sorry that we felt our observance might be offensive to others.>>

Today, some improvement. I am using both Pray As You Go and the Creighton University Lenten Site for my prayer, so the morning got off to a good start. Then as I moved through my classes, I asked three people whether there would be an imposition of ashes at the seminary chapel service today. The answers? "Gee, I don't know," from a professor; "I doubt it," from a puzzled student; and "No," from the professor preaching this morning.

I was prepared for the possibility that the observance here might not be what I was hoping for, and so I had already scouted out the local church scene. As a result, a friend and I took off at lunch for a spectacular church only a few blocks from our seminary.The service was perfectly beautiful and with its Taize-like chapel set up ~ candles, icons, stained glass windows ~ satisfied my longing for image and ritual that so often suffers in the utter starkness of our seminary architecture and practice.

Best of all, I have found, I think, a local church home. I haven't spent a week-end here yet, so I am unlikely to worship in the magnificent Gothic sanctuary, but there are Taize services in the chapel on Wednesday nights - and a labyrinth !

Last year someone left me a comment to the effect that God tells her (and not necessarily others) to wash her face after an Ash Wednesday service. I left mine untouched today. I understand the issue of ostentation in obervance and prayer, but sometimes it feels right that my ordinary self in my ordinary jeans doing my ordinary things might be a witness to the reality of the interjection of the extraordinary into our lives. If nothing else, I am probably the last person whom anyone would suspect of harboring a call to inner silence and prayer, so there's something to be said for letting that be known, however subtly.

In Extra-Ordinary Time

I wanted to go to an Ash Wednesday service today. My own church's service is at night (which I don't much like ~ it seems that we're saying, "OK, we'll do this, but late enough that no one will see us") and I have a class on Wednesday nights.

Then I discovered that my old Methodist church has a service at noon, so I thought I'd go over there.

And then I spent some time agonizing over whether I wanted to spend the afternoon teaching my Jewish students with ashes smudged on my forehead. Most of them would be merely curious, and supportive rather than offended. Many of the teachers, perhaps the opposite. I finally decided against it. If I worked in a secular environment, my solution would be different. During Advent, I wrote about going to a church meeting one night where one of the gentlemen had come directly from work wearing a Christmas tie. That would not have happened in my workplace. My workplace is a community and a home for people whose beliefs, and contextualization of their their beliefs, differ from mine.

I don't know whether or not I was right. One of my colleagues, headed for her UCC service tonight, agreed with me. Another, a rabbi, said he was genuinely sorry that we felt our observance might be offensive to others.

Result: No ashes on my forehead. Ashes in my heart.

(Image: Armenian Temptation of Jesus).

Advent 10: Reprise

I guess I was thinking about the same things last year as this. We got the tree tonight and it's shaking itself itself down in the living room, and I told the Lovely Daughter over the phone that it was already here ~ which saddened me a bit but did not perturb her in the least.

From last year about this time:

At this particular moment, I'm listening live to the Christmas Vespers concert from my boarding school in western Massachusetts. My son made it home from Chicago tonight and, as I waited for his flight to arrive, I reflected on how things have changed. If I were a teenager in the Connecticut Valley, I would be in a candle-lit chapel participating in a concert of haunting beauty and anticipating my own flight home. But now when I go to the airport at holiday time, it's to pick up and drop off -- my own Christmas traveling days are long behind me.

For the last couple of years I could deny it, but this year I can't: all three children have gone and we are the ones at home, anticicpating their return. It's an odd feeling. They all have lives, activities, friends, far from us. We've never met either of our sons' most important girlfriends of the past couple of years. When they come back, they spend some time with their best friends of those Montessori years past, the closely knit group that numbered only 15 by the time they graduated from eighth grade and headed for six or seven different high schools ~ and then they are eager to return to the lives they have created as young adults.

I found myself thinking tonight that maybe we should have had the tree decorated and waiting for them. It's always been a family tradition that the five of us choose the tree together, with much squabbling over height and width, and then decorate it over the course of a week. But Christmas will be only a week away by the time the Lovely Daughter returns -- maybe it's time to revamp that tradition and create a festive atmosphere to welcome them home.

I'd like to turn the clock back at least a few years.