Advent 13: Lights

It's taken me all night, but the outdoor lights, mostly blue and green with a little pink on the dogwood to one side, and the tree lights, the big old-fashioned brightly-colored ones except for the star with white lights on top, are all up. James Galway music is on. The husband is almost finished painting the dining room ceiling, which I guess means the sanding is behind us and the plaster dust has finally settled. Everywhere.

But it doesn't matter because I've just been outside. I always forget about the wonderful moment when I go across the street and look at the lights shining around the porch and from the tree through the front windows.

Magic.

And, let's not forget:

Happy Chanukah!

Vent Rant I Can't Stand It Whatever

I don't know what on earth I am going to do if I ever get really sick. Cancer or something. That little trip to the ER a couple of months ago? OK, I was in unbelieveable agony and so I am glad there was someone there to shoot me up with something. I'm equally glad they told me to go home four hours and $1400 later. But the regular kind of medical visit? COUNT ME OUT.

I have just had my third experience in the past six months of waiting over an hour to see a doctor for something that, once the MD-person actually materialized, took all of 15 minutes. Today it was a new gynecologist. I was forced into making an in-person appearance because I need a mammogram and, therefore, a prescription for same. (With my doc of the past 20+ years, a phone call was sufficient. I did go to see him on occasion, but I stretched the guidelines to the outermost limit and then some. I figure he agreed with me that we spent enough time together during the two days it took the Lovely Daughter to get here.)

This new doc was very nice and I am sure she is an excellent physician. I was sort of looking forward to beginning a new relationship with a doctor, since I am reaching That Age Where Things Change and, with my tried and true OB leaving the scene, it would be nice to develop a sense of confidence in someone else.

Not likely.

When a doctor is already more than an hour behind when she sees you, she isn't looking for the drama or stories a medical history reveals. Overdue twins? A vbac at a time when 95% of women were signed up for a repeat section, no questions asked? A major surgery and a minor one? All old, old stories. I myself am passionate about stories and what they reveal about the characters therein. Mine tend to reveal someone with something of a stubborn streak. Someone who might lie to get what she wants. But, as I said, they're old stories.

However, what about that little rise in blood pressure? What about those one or two little nagging concerns you mention? What about the fact that, if the doctor paid attention, she could easily see that you are working on practically a hypnotic trance to get yourself through this little visit?

I hate it. I HATE GOING TO THE DOCTOR. I cannot think of one single thing about a doctors' office or a hospital that I find remotely tolerable.

I'm thinking that my good health is a precious thing, indeed, and I'd better stay this way.

This amazing work of artistry is brought to you by the folks over at Quotidian Grace, where the author of that illustrious blog suggested a need for the sappiest Christmas Song Ever. In addition to QG and GG, the inspired lyricists include Psalmist, Presbyterian Gal, Rev Dave, purechristianithink, and Toby Brown.

Pets Need Christmas, Too: A Sappy Christmas Song

C'est Fini!

~cue the steel gee-tars~
And grab your hanky.

The Sappy Christmas Song is dedicated by Gannet Girl to the memory of Gretel, The Noble Dog, who surely would have walked away in disgust.

Pets Need Christmas, Too

'Twas lonely at the manse that Christmas Eve
As the pastor's dog waited under the tree
Buster's health was failing fast
When an angel came and asked
"Hey there Buster, I come to lift
Your sorry state with a heavenly gift"
She drew out a biscuit from her robe
And held it under Buster's nose.
"Smell this old friend, isn't it fine?
Guess what! It's 'Doggie Communion Time!!!

"Pets need Christmas too....
Just like me and Yoooooou....
When Santa lights Jesus' birthday cake......
Pets need Christmas too................

But the offering of that angel bright was not yet done,
For as soon as she had begun,
She served old Buster a dish of wassail true
And then, the dog did feel his strength returning,
Just then, with a flash of silken fur
The minister's cat, with a lordly purrA
nd a silver bell hung around his neck,A
nnounced, "No eggnog?! What the heck?

"Pets need Christmas too....
Just like me and Yoooooou....
When Santa lights Jesus' birthday cake......
Pets need Christmas too................

But cats are notoriously intrepid and brave
Especially when it's that eggnog they crave
And this one, with feline grace and speed
Leapt to the counter with little heed
For the cookies and cakes impeding her glide
And toward the vast bowl of eggnog did slide.
and drank deeply with kitty glee
and headed off to climb the Christmas tree

Pets need Christmas too....
Just like me and Yoooooou....
When Santa lights Jesus' birthday cake......
Pets need Christmas too................

But the nog had been spiked with whiskey,
(The pastor was not baptist, you see,)
Making the kitty rocky on his feet,
And seeing not one but two trees.
In one was her own dear mama
Dead these years gone by
She was hit in the road by an eggnog truck
And lives with that Lion in the sky.

Pets need Christmas too....
Just like me and Yoooooou....
When Santa lights Jesus' birthday cake......
Pets need Christmas too................

So I sing this sad song from the kitty stockade,
Awaitin' the hangin' tree:
I'm guilty of my sainted cat mama's death,
And as sorry as a drunk cat can be.
Dear Santa, if you're hearing my song,
Give my mama a message from me.
Tell her I'll look for her at the pearly gates,
And we'll go climb St. Pete's Christmas tree.

Pets need Christmas too....
Just like me and Yoooooou....
When Santa lights Jesus' birthday cake......
Pets need Christmas too................

Advent 12: We Are Still Waiting

"I closed my eyes, drew back the curtain
To see for certain what I thought I knew
Far far away, someone was weeping
But the world was sleeping
Any dream will do

I wore my coat, with golden lining
Bright colors shining, wonderful and new
And in the east, the dawn was breaking
And the world was waking
Any dream will do

A crash of drums, a flash of light
My golden coat flew out of sight
The colors faded into darkness
I was left alone

May I return to the beginning
The light is dimming, and the dream is too
The world and I, we are still waiting
Still hesitating
Any dream will do."

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

Tonight I celebrated Advent by going to a production of Joseph in which three of my students have lead roles. They were FABULOUS!

If you know this musical, the tunes will adhere to your brain as soon as you read the lyrics and will replay for days. That's certainly been my experience as the kids have talked about their work over the past few weeks.

They, of course, don't see it as an Advent production. But Advent is about the powerful movement of the Divine. So Advent it is.

"You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good."
Genesis 50:20

Advent 11: On the Question: Why Church?

Glasgow Cathedral

I came across this a few days ago, and it presents part of the answer:

"The postmodern mind is haunted. A great religious tradition is the home of wisdom. It is the public locus in a culture where the great eternal, spiritual questions are kept alive and kindled. Kept clear of unworthy answers, they invite each epoch to journey toward the inner and outer frontiers of its possibility and potential. This is the enthralling task of theology: to probe those frontiers anew in each generation. Never was there such possibility for ground-breaking conversation and exploration. But it is not happening. The hunger is intense. The keepers of the treasure are frightened, discouraged and blind to the nourishment of which they are custodians. The hungry ones now think less and less of revisiting religion as the granary of divine nourishment. The keepers of the food and the victims of the hunger pass each other by with little recognition of the enriching possibilities they have to offer each other."

John O'Donohue
Spirituality as the Art of Real Presence
Here

Commenting

Apparently there is yet another glitch in blogger beta. As far as I can tell, you cannot comment on a beta blog if you are signed into Blogger but have not switched to beta yourself.

The solution seems to be either to switch to beta (forced mass marketing) or to sign in under a different server than the one you use for Blogger.

Or just send me a comment and I'll post it myself.

I was wondering whether I was simply boring everyone into disappearing.

There are other commenting glitches, too, even when you are on beta, but they seem inconsistent.

It's a pain. This is approximately the first anniversary of the Great AOL Advertising Debacle that brought many of us to Blogger in the first place. At the time, I was as frustrated by the glitches in the system changes that made it impossible for me to post anything at all for several days as I was irritated by the advertising. And here we are again.

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.

Advent 7, 8, 9 ~ It Goes By Too Quickly

Christmas Eve 2004

It has occurred to me that this is the last year in which we can count on all three of our children being home for Christmas. The guys will probably (one hopes!) both be employed by this time next year; the Lovely Daughter hopes to be studying in Europe. As Jobs and Significant Others and Spouses and Grandchildren gradually become realities, the committments of these past two decades will be transformed. Already we are abandoning our family tradition of choosing the tree together, and instead making plans to get a tree tomorrow night and set it up before the kids come home next week-end, so there will be more time to enjoy and less need to run around once they are here.

This time of life reminds me of when they were tiny: as soon as you thought you understood what was going on and found routines and systems that more or less worked, everything changed and you had to devise a new plan. Next year may see them in Chicago, France, and the Czech Republic. Or not. And the year after that? Completely unpredictable.

*****

On the I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas front: the plastering is completed and looks great, but the thin layer of dust covering walls, furniture, poinsettias, piano, and Baby Jesus and entourage? Not so much.

*****

On The Friendly Beasts front, the following conversation took place between my neighbor (on the other side from the previous neighbor) and me this morning:

Neighbor: You know your soffit is falling down on the front corner.

Me: Yes, I know.

Neighbor: That's how the squirrels got into our crawl space. We can hear them up there. They've made nests in the insulation.

Me: Sigh. I had, actually, been thinking about the squirrels.

Neighbor: We chopped all the branches away from our gutters. I was watching today, and the squirrels seem unperturbed. They just ran up the trees by your house instead, and into your attic.

Me: Actually, I couldn't think of anything else to say about the disturbing presence of the squirrels. My neighbor's daughter, who lives in Germany, is in the same condition that I was 23 years ago, expecting twins, so we turned to that much more cheerful topic.

*****

I notice that the lyrics to The Friendly Beasts are not inclusive of squirrels.

The Second Sunday of Advent

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'" (Luke 3:1-6)

I just got back from a Messiah presented by a small but magnificent orchestra playing the baroque instruments for which Handel originally wrote. Such an evening! And the words of Isaiah are ringing in my ears.

Advent 5 and 6: Have You Seen a Child?

I've been indulging in one of my favorite holiday pastimes and listening to a recording of Amahl and the Night Visitors (while I washed down the kitchen floor in a house where plaster dust reigns supreme -- okay, no evening is perfect).

Amahl was a favorite in a childhood that was on the short side. We must have seen it on television once or twice in the 50s, and my father took my brother and I to a production in Cincinnati in the early 60s. I'm guessing 1962, as I remember that I promptly memorized most of the score from the record album jacket. I sang it to myself over and over as I wandered the dusty paths around the Florida cottages where my brother and I spent much of the following March with our grandparents while our father was off marrying Stepmother No. 1. I was nine, and the marriage was an unwelcome one from my perspective.

Oddly, Amahl, maybe because of his own status as a child of loss and resiliency, never lost his magic for me. For years I insisted that my own children settle down to watch a video production each December, and a few years ago we all went to see a wonderful production at the Institute of Music here. It never grows old.

If you aren't familiar with this little operetta written for children, I urge you to pick up a CD and sit down for an hour to listen with the script in hand. From the humor of the impoverished young boy who can't bring himself to come in from the night where he is mesmerized by "a star as large as a window," moving across the sky "like a chariot on fire," to the frustration of the skeptical mother who tells him to try telling the truth "for a change," to the perplexing arrival of the three kings, among them Caspar with his box of beads and stones and licorice, to the mixed motives among the small cast of characters that finally yield up the first miracle of Christmas -- it's a wonderful production.

And the haunting quartet sung by mother and kings (click on number 14) captures the essence of the moment both out of and in time that we celebrate this month:

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.

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's my child, my son, my darling, my own.

HappyHolidaysHappyChanukahMerryChristmas

A question about holiday greetings elicited a number of comments on the PresbyBlog site, most of them lighthearted. My own vignettes on the subject:

The topic of appropriate greetings actually comes up for me all the time, since I teach in a Jewish school. It seems clear to me that it would be the height of rudeness and insensitivity to wish a Merry Christmas to someone who finds in Christianity a flat negation of everything she holds dear. On the other hand, I think it's a gesture of generosity to extend the appropriate greeting to someone who celebrates an event that you do not. Some of my students wish me a Merry Christmas with great warmth. Others tell me that it is halachically (legally) forbidden for them to do so.

A couple of mornings ago I walked in to work from the snow humming music from the Messiah that had been playing on my car CD. The front hallway had been decorated with rather an abundance of huge construction-paper dreidels hanging from the ceiling. Dreidels and an off-key "For unto us a child is born..." ~ that's my day.

The other night I asked the janitors, neither of any evident religious persuasion, whether they celebrate Christmas. They both do, and laughed about being in the minority where we work. "OK," I said. "I'm just looking for people to whom I can say "Merry Christmas" at the appropriate time." I admit it; I miss it. That same night one of the men on the personnel committee at church came to a meeting directly from work wearing a tie decorated with Christmas trees. That would just not fly at my place of employment ~ although I do wear a lot of Celtic jewelry and no one comments. I think most people have no idea about the symbolism, although I know for sure that one person does.

I love Christmas lights. Like many parents, we used to pile our jammied-kids in the car one evening during the holidays and drive them around to see all the lights, including the extravaganza at the local lighting company. I've always loved late-night drives during this season, thinking about what the lights represent. And then a few years ago I was reading a Chaim Potok novel in which one of the characters thinks, as he walks home through the city streets one Christmas night after school, that each light represents to him one of six million fellow Jews murdered in the Holocaust. You might find that a bit extreme if you're not Jewish, but it's seldom far from my mind, the thought of what might have happened to any of my own students had they been born two or three generations earlier. So I still love Christmas lights, but now there's a certain inner tension that I balance as I gaze at them.

Tension. I guess that's what we don't appreciate during the holidays. Christmas or Passover; we want interactions among strangers to go smoothly and meals to go well. It's not so easy, but I persist in believing that the way to make it easier is to acknowledge the complications.

So . . . for my winter photo today, I'm avoiding both my own advice and monotheistic celebrations, and going with the Greeks, as revived in the cemetery where I walk.

And it's Friday. Shabbat Shalom.

Hired!

We have some really, really good news around here. Several days ago our eldest son (yes, even with twins, one is older then the other) received a much desired job offer. For a real job. The kind where you get up every day and go to work doing some kind of adult thing with computers and you get paid and have benefits and a Future with the Company. The kind that required two interviews and, prior to those, the purchase of a suit and overcoat and dress shoes.

I keep thinking about the little blond boy who used to spend entire afternoons on construction projects in the backyard sandbox, running into the kitchen ocasionally to advise me on his progress or ask about the finer details of engineering.

He didn't reveal nearly as much about his job search. It's such a grueling process, especially for someone whose natural inclination is to shy away from self-promotion and group interaction. Occasionally he would ask us questions, revealing that naivete about the work of work that we all experience as we leave school, and reminding me how many mistakes I made in what now seems like another lifetime. Luckily for him, he is already a far more deliberate and thoughtful person than I could ever be.

One of the most delightful aspects of the whole situation for me is to see our faith in the value of a liberal arts education vindicated. Several people have asked whether our son has majored in business or computer science. We live in a world in which people increasingly seem to see college as a trade school, with certain majors as a necessary foundation for specific areas of employment, but in this household we tend to embrace the luxurious vision of learning for its own sake, with the confidence that having learned to learn is the most important product of an academic education.

Of course, there are some specifics one should learn. One should, for instance, learn where to look. In a University of Chicago newspaper I picked up over Thanksgiving, a professor noted that it might have been of benefit to us all had the current President been familiar with Thucydides' Melian debate before he embroiled us in war in Iraq. At Chicago, discussion of Thucydides is considered an essential of the first-year core experience, and my ninth grade world history students receive at least the most minute of introductions to his work. Yes, we are elitists around here. It would be better for the world if Mr. Bush shared a touch of that tendency in the form of curiosity and rigor of learning.

When we were visiting colleges, this son gave serious consideration to Davidson in North Carolina. Our tour guide mentioned that one of the major banks in the South was particularly enamoured of Davidson art history graduates, with one of its executives having concluded that they could teach anything at all about banking to a young person who had survived the Davidson art history curriculum.

My husband, who has spent thirty years in computer architecture and commercial management, takes a similar approach. These days, almost every technological skill is obsolete as soon as you have mastered it. The critical skill is to be able to master a new one.

For the record, the newly-employed-almost-graduate has taken plenty of higher math along with his endless sequences of courses in philosophy and civilizations. He does know how to learn across a wide spectrum of fields, despite his major in the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine. So it's a pleasure to see that the company for which he will go to work lists among the majors of its new hires fields like Greek, Dance, English. . . and pretty much everything else. I hope that list means that he has found a good niche.

As for his mother, she is still working on learning how to pick up the books that represent that insistence upon the luxury of learning. They are EVERYWHERE.

Advent 3 and 4

I love having smart and talented friends who happen to be eloquent writers as well.

All I have left to do tonight is refer you to what Cynthia has to say about the church thing.

The Saga Moves to the Exterior

If you have been following this distressing but scintillating tale, you know that my husband thought that plaster, paint, and dining room would make a good Advent combination.

So.

Today I'm standing in the drive giving my neighbor some mis-delivered mail and he points upward in the general direction of our roof and says, "Have you noticed that?"

Ice pulling down soffit and flashing. Rotted wood dangling from what was once a portion of the corner of the gutter.

Hmmmm.

"No," I said. "I have not noticed that, and I plan to continue not noticing it."

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

I'm trying to remember the year we came home from an extended family holiday week-end to discover that the entire front gutter had come down. The first call was to the electric company, since it had brought wires down with it, and said wires lay waiting in live and murderous wait across the driveway. The next call was to the insurance lady, who said, "If you call again, you are going to lose your coverage." To which I said, "I am not responsible for the tornado last summer or the tree limbs that landed on the car, and I did not knock the second floor bathroom into the kitchen, and I did not spend New year's Eve pulling the gutter down onto the porch."

What I can't remember is whether we found anyone to replace the gutter during the winter or whether we had to wait it out till summer.

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

The theme song for this particular Advent episode is In the Bleak Midwinter.

Advent 2

OK, now I'm behind. Not on my interior Advent, but on writing about it. I got so engrossed in the plaster-and-paint issues yesterday ~ which only goes to make the point. Advent occurs in the midst of all the muck.

Some brief notes from yesterday, illustrated via the Iona nunnery, gone since the Reformation:

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

~ Psalm 122:1

(from yesterday's Lectionary)

Much that was is lost. For none now live who remember it.

~ Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings

(from yesterday's Celtic and Nature Advent Calendar)

A lot of my friends are mystified by the church thing in my life. Maybe I will write about that at some length after Advent. For now (since I am a day behind!) I will just say that it's a mystery to me, too. I do not have my friend Lynda's string of pins for thirteen years of perfect Sunday school attendance. I do not look like Mrs. Osteen in a pink suit and pearls. I schlep around in my jeans and clogs, nails always breaking off ~ and I have a life hugely full of the light of faith.

The church, whether you are thinking in terms of buildings or community, concrete or ineffablility, long ago past or paint-splattered present, is a repository for that light.

Barbara Brown Taylor has a wonderful sermon in which she speaks about a visit she made to the ruins of a church in present day Turkey (I think), and about her understanding of what can happen to a building and its community. A community and its building.

I can't entirely explain it. But tending that light is a good thing. And remarkably, even when the buildings turn to ruins and the community vanishes, the light remains.

Advent for Atheists (or, Dining Room Saga II)

I am not getting involved with the dining room, except for choosing colors.

In case it is not clear, I think December is sufficiently full absent any major projects, especially major projects that have already waited at least a decade for anyone to embark upon them anyway. I was thinking that just cleaning up and decorating the house and planning the annual meal extravaganza and interacting with our kids, plus taking time for a couple of movies and concerts, would constitute a full plate for one little holiday month.

As far as the colors are concerned, I am hoping it will look something like this blog. I am thinking about the colors of the Maine coast and the Algonquin wilderness. Two of the little jars on the kitchen counters have Yarmouth Blue and Nantucket Fog as names ~ maybe I will choose on that basis alone.

In the meantime, I have to say I got a chuckle out of QG's thought that we couldn't do Christmas if the dining room were torn up. We live in the City of Homes Under Demolition. A couple of years ago there was a full page spread in the New York Times Home section about a woman who was writing books and making LOTS OF MONEY off the fact that her house was not "done." "Most people wouldn't put up with this," she said. "The exposed ceiling, the wall knocked down to studs and lathe, the second floor leak down the newly painted first floor room."

I laughed hysterically as I called all my friends. "We could be RICH," I said. "There are people who think the way we live is noteworthy. Unusual, even. They pay good money to read about it. Money that could go to contractors."

So I'm probably going with the idea that someone at work floated this morning. "Bare plaster walls?" she said. "Tell everyone it's a Tuscan villa."

OK, Paul. I need to find those Italian cooking babes you wrote about, Rachel and Francesca. I'm thinking that this Christmas dinner will be one for the record books. We all know I can't cook, but I bet I can persuade my friends to bring stuff that matches the Tuscan walls. Lots of Italian food and lots of Italian wine.

And so far it seems that we are inviting atheists who don't celebrate Christmas, Jews who can't celebrate Christmas, members of the Church of Christ who won't celebrate Christmas, secular Christians who celebrate Frosty and Santa as Christmas . . . OK, par for the course. Bring on the wine. It all sounds exactly like the kind of gathering Jesus would attend.

The Dining Room Saga

No tree yet. No lights. No gifts. No menu plan. I am beyond proud of myself for having picked up and vacuumed the living room today so that I could plunk poinsettias on the mantel and put the nativity set out on the piano. A touch of the season: a bit of living green, red, and white. My little carved figures, including shepherds with all kinds of instruments and sheep, as well as ducks, geese, and a turkey. I could invite someone into my front room and not pass out from embarrassment.

While I was foolishly engrossed in a Desperate Housewives rerun tonight, my husband ripped all of the paper off the dining room walls.

I am speechless. Perhaps I will simply remain in that state for the next 22 days. I think that might be best.

Advent 1 !

I just got back from a discussion of next Sunday's lectionary. We spent about an hour on this little phrase, so I'll just leave it here:

"...the dawn from on high will break upon us..."
Luke 1:78

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.

Advent C

Several weeks ago, I was asked to make a contribution to the Presbytery Advent devotional booklet, and so I did. I have no idea what happened to my submission ~ whether it was ever received or whether the booklet has been published. So it's possible that this piece of writing is out there somewhere. Or not.

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Reading for Today: Leviticus 19:34
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Meditation:

As a teacher in an Orthodox Jewish school, I often find myself in the role of the stranger. Last Passover was no exception, as I was invited to a Seder by one of my students.

I could see that my presence created a bit of stress. All of our hopes as we prepare for such an occasion are heightened when the celebration is a religious one and the guests follow a different faith tradition. What if they don't like the food? What if they are bored or, worse, offended, by the religious rituals? We have often had Jewish guests for Christmas Dinner and, when Christmas and Chanukah have overlapped, we've lighted Chanukah candles and Christmas candles. I've always felt that everyone was happy to be there. But you never know.

For the record, let me say that I was indeed happy to be at the Seder. I learned a lot. I was inundated with various copies of the Haggadah, the "telling of the story" that serves as a guide for the fifteen steps of the meal. My favorite was one illustrated with copies of medieval illuminated manuscript pages -- I hadn't even known that Jews as well as Christians created those exquisite book illustrations. And as I engaged in the readings and conversation, with a family fluent in Hebrew generously tolerating passages in English whenever my turn rolled around, I also quietly observed the meal from the point of view of a Christian who had just left her own Maundy Thursday church service in which the Last Supper was celebrated as a communion.

When I left the Seder at nearly 1:00 am, under the full Passover moon, another family was emerging from a house across the street, going home after a similarly lengthy celebration. I felt much as I do on Christmas morning, when my son and I typically return from a midnight service along the several streets in our neighborhood where luminarias have been lit along entire blocks and left to burn all night. There is something deeply profound about participating in a ritual that is being celebrated around the world, whether among your own people or in fellowship with another.

Whether we are host or guest, citizen or stranger, we have much to learn from one another as long as we are willing to risk extending ourselves across the usual boundaries.


Prayer:

Holy God, You stretched far and wide beyond your usual dwelling places in order to join us as Host and Guest, Lord and Stranger. Remind us that it is the example of your Son in our midst that we seek to follow each day. Amen.