To listen, or not to listen by stuffing my ears with cotton

So: do you listen to Christmas music in Advent?  Or is that cheating?

Advent, for some of you less church-ritual-inclined folks, is the season of preparation before Christmas.  Historically, it's something of a "mild fasting time", which is rather oxymoronic.  It's a time of preparation, like preparing a room for a guest, or tending a seed, or watching the sun rise--those are some of the traditional images.  So each year, we all have the annual debate: is it cheating to listen to Christmas music in Advent?

Given the commercial nature of the Christmas season these days, if you walk into any public space, you will hear Christmas music whether you like it or not.  All the contemporary stuff, though, is strangely heartless.  It's grown increasingly formulaic, thoughtless, and depressing--like much of pop music, really.  The moldy oldie stuff seems strangely disconnected and hollow.  White Christmas?  Really?  That's what we dream of?  How about no more wars overseas?  Or: Santa Claus is coming to town?  That's why we better watch out?  What about a broken economic system?  That seems like a better reason to watch out--Adam Smith's invisible hand might just punch us smack in the face.

But aside from that awful fluff, that cultural snow, we all have Christmas songs that speak to us, and that's the real heart of the question.  Do we best prepare for Christ's coming by fasting from that music?  Does listening to Christmas music too early count as cheating, like opening presents too early?

Increasingly, I think it takes an odd mental gymnastics to put off listening to Christmas music.  Sure, I love Advent music--probably more than your average bear, and that music is very appropriate for the time of year.  But could we really prepare for Christ without knowing what that sounds like?  Can we truly clean up our hearts and minds without a vision in front of us, of humanity reconciled to God, of angels singing?  The Guest who comes at Christmas is a stranger, but that Guest is also a friend.  Listening to no Christmas music ahead of time reminds me too much of false piety.  Fasting is important, but Advent is about not much about fasting--when we arrive in Lent we can speak of fasting.  Advent is about a light in darkness, about clarity of vision, about refocusing, about letting the unimportant fall away.  And Christmas music, for me, is of paramount importance.  Nothing speaks in my heart like those old carols.  And so nothing inspires my preparation like a taste of what we will celebrate soon.

So keep Advent, I say, by keeping a vision of the Holy before us, knowing what we prepare for, what we will celebrate for 12 days. Something has to fight off all of this soulless wandering in a winter wonderland.

And, in that spirit, I offer you my annual tradition: what may well be my own favorite Christmas hymn.  Just click the play button a little down the page.  This is tradition.  O night divine, indeed.

Preaching kingliness

In one of its former incarnations, this space was taken up with thoughts about the upcoming readings in the Revised Common Lectionary.  Today, that old spirit is taking over here.

Specifically, the hymn from Colossians (the spell-check inherent in this blog-device does not seem to believe that 'Colossians' is an acceptable word.  Sigh.  It does accept Colombians, however, which is a friendly amendment that might make everyone's sermon more interesting this weekend).  The passage extols whom we understand Christ to be--firstborn, head of the church, etc.  It's interesting how little of that bears on contemporary piety.  It's not that some of us couldn't go through and talk about the Christology described here--we could, surely--but would anyone care?  It doesn't seem very relevant.  The teaching device here isn't nearly as poignant as the parables that Jesus seems to prefer, or the poetry of the psalms, or the insane details of Revelation.  In other words, the style of this passage runs counter to most church life these days.  If we are going to hear anything from it, we're going to have to  work at it.

So I pick two small parts that have special relevance for us.  The first is this bit about "in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell."  What, exactly, does that mean?  It's a pretty abstract image--God's full presence there in Jesus, and let's just never mind the heresy it seems to suggest about a fleshy outside, with a crunchy and delicious divine interior.  Somewhere lurking in the the background is a theology connected to the temple, the arc, and the space between the cherubim--it's not that God isn't present elsewhere, it's that God is somehow especially present in this particular place, namely, Jesus.

But I think what strikes me about it is that God is 'pleased' to dwell there.  Do we imagine, much, that Jesus is 'pleased' with our bodies, our physical selves?  Go stand naked in front of a mirror and decide whether God would be pleased to dwell there.  Is God pleased to dwell somewhere with stretch marks?  How about love handles?  Does God find much pleasure, which is what it means to be pleased, in me before I've brushed my teeth?

In other words, consciously and un-, we all secretly doubt that God likes bodies very much.  They're either good as sex-objects on bulletin boards or properly hidden in stylish clothing.  Or, depending on the koolaid we've had to drink, they're holy temples that are redeemed as such only by never doing anything normal and bodily--like balding, sagging, or growing old.  And yet, in one of us, a Middle Eastern man of dubious parentage, a man we know didn't wear deodorant, and whose his feet were in desperate need of a pedicure--there God fully dwelt and was pleased to do so.  Basically, my point is this: we all suck at recognizing the goodness in bodies.  God seems to find them pleasurable anyway.  Perhaps we need to revisit how we think about them.  If God finds pleasure in them, perhaps we should, too, without trying to make them less like bodies.

And second, Jesus reconciles all things to himself through the blood of the cross.  We often struggle with and hassle ourselves with the blood of the cross being a reconciliation--and that's fine.  But I'm more interested in a throw-away line--reconciling "all things".  Weird, if you pause to think about it.  All things?  Or more accurately, things?

Jesus' reconciliation happens for all things, which presumably includes but is not limited to: hydrogen, the orange seeds currently on my mouse pad, Herman Melville, grains of sand in Indonesia, Alpha Centauri (both the actual star and the video game), and my memory of how lemonade tastes.  That is to say:  all created reality is brought into this process of healing and growth through Jesus' work.  That's the kind of king that Jesus is, the kind of king celebrated on Christ the King--a king who saves all not through a military campaign but through sacrifice, who reconciles every part of this created reality, including (presumably) those parts of reality about which we know nothing.

So: we are not different from this world, and it is all of it that has entered new relationship to God.  If we think that's weird, it's probably because we fail to see our interconnectedness to this reality and dream, instead, that we are unique rather than blessed.  And: when God, in Genesis, invites humanity to have dominion over the world, to be kings over the world, perhaps this is the kind of kingship God had in mind.  We are not set apart from the world to dominate it; we are set here to exist in servanthood to it.  Bluntly: global warming isn't a problem because it might affect our flourishing, although that might be true.  Global warming is a problem because is shows that we've abdicated our throne for the hard seat of a petty tyrant, and the only difference between the world and a us is that we currently hold the conch shell.

Discernment via Nabokov

A dear friend pointed out to me the wonderful content here.  It's a story of discernment, honesty, and the Spirit's movement.  It's a familiar story to me as an Episcopalian, but his telling of it is so fresh, in part because of how fresh it is for him, and because of his background.  And, really, what makes this story sing out is the that somehow the Spirit is involved there.

How do we recognize the movements of the Spirit?  I think that's one hell of a question, and maybe the question that most stumps us in the modern era, but on some level, it's the only one that matters to us.  In the old days, you could roll out the urim and thummim to see where the Spirit was moving.  Or turn the tea leaves upside down.  These days, my rough impression is that only church nerds talk about discernment, about recognizing the Spirit's movement, in personal life.  And in our post-modern era, almost everyone is reticent to talk about the Spirit's movement in creation or history--if those are actually different things--because it sounds prideful at best and Third Reich-ish at worst.  When we do say "the Spirit was active there," we try to do it only when it seems uncontroversial or unchallenging of the status quo.  It's all well and good to claim that MLK was a prophet, speaking with the Spirit, after he's dead.  I've always thought that one of the reasons people struggle with liberation theology is because it claims to recognize the Spirit at work, and in the post-modern (and modern) era, we just "aren't supposed to say that."

Is the movement of the Spirit recognizable along the lines of the now-traditional definition of pornography--"I know it when I see it"?  Although I find that a highly unsatisfying definition for a dozen reasons, I can't help but think that it's at least partly true.  Before I can make a guess about what the Spirit is up to, I have to see what I'm evaluating.  I can't just hear about it. 

It's like Lolita: if you've heard about it, it might be hard to differentiate it from pornography.  But if you've read it, the powerful penultimate closing image of HH standing on a mountain, hearing the tragedy that is the lack of a child's voice, you're much less likely to confuse Lolita with pornography.  Seeing is a prerequisite to discernment.

That's not to say that some people might have different readings of the book.  Seeing is most emphatically not believing.  Not all who saw Jesus, in person or in resurrected person, believed.  The gospels are careful to say that.

But it seems to me that the first step in discerning the Spirit is seeing, experiencing, being involved, encountering, beginning a relationship.  Discernment walks a fine line between saying "we" and "you," without giving up either.  Otherwise, it's just garden-variety judgment, and we know how well that comes off in the gospels.

The end of the world, and other exciting conceits

I wonder how many sermons, preached in the last decade, have been titled: "It's the end of the world as we know it/ and I feel fine."

Does eschatology hold any real claim on us these days?  I doubt it.  I sense rather that two basic poles anchor our brains when we think about the future.  Well, three basic poles, with the third being 'De Nile,' that lengthiest of psychological rivers.  The two other two poles are apocalypticism, which is quite different from eschatology, and the 'I am a rock/ I am island' mentality, quoting the wise Paul Simon parodying the great Donne's 17th.

Apocalypticism is probably the most obvious, the sense that the end of the world is a "bad thing" with much destruction, whichever side of Robert Frost's Fire/Ice line we might decide on.  It does come in several varieties, though, that lurk around our consciousness.  It appears in things like The Left Behind Series, which is essentially revenge pornography directed against those who disagree.  It also comes in the bizarre news coverage of asteroids that might destroy us--sooner or later, it will happen, we are assured, but we do not know the hour the thief is coming to steal our comfortable temperate climate and turn us into earth's new dinosaurss.  Apocalypticism arises when we think about "mutual nuclear destruction," or even global warming.  It even comes up with the end of the Mayan calender, because clearly the calender ended at that spot because all created reality was going to explode, not because someone ran out of wall space.  The world will end and it will be unpleasant.  This alternately terrifies and delights us, rather like a roller coaster.  We don't hold an eschatology--a belief that God might become all in all, that creation might be redeemed, that new life might extend in all directions.  We're more like voyeurs hoping to catch a glimpse of something really nasty, hopefully at someone else's expense.  And apocalypticism does not orient us in a particular direction--it's a little too busy glorifying in the Big Crunch/Cool, as the case may be.  It doesn't move us toward anything--mostly, it turns us into viewers.

The 'island' mentality is essentially the sense that, whatever may happen to our world, I don't care because I am not the world.  You can hear this from bankers who received the bailout money from the US government in the wake of the global economic meltdown.  By and large, they are not thankful or penitent--hey, they tend to say, it's survival of the fittest.  This stance is not unique to them--we also drift that way, like when we all make our individual plans about what to do in the zombie apocalypse.  It's like we've developed a perfect predator gig: hunt to extinction, and then have the prey apologize for not reproducing fast enough.  But it's fundamentally a stance about the end of created reality--even as economic worlds collapse, the predators cultivate new pray.  It is, in effect, a belief that the world will never end for sufficiently excellent economic predators, because they will always escape.  Global warming?  They can afford air conditioning, not only for themselves, but for their crops.  This is the island mentality, the belief that changes in the ecosystem won't ever kill an infinitely adaptable predator--never mind the impossibility of being infinitely adaptable.  The 'Island' mentality, the belief that I am an island and not a part of a whole created reality, orients us anywhere but toward the end of the things.

So: what would it mean these days to live into an eschatology, a belief in 'final things' that we hope would come to pass, that would be a new creation, God having become all in all?  One or two thoughts about that.  First, we would have to rediscover the importance of 'surprise' in our theology.  Foundational to our contemporary problems is our sense that we can no longer be surprised, or we will shortly reach a time in human history when surprises will be gone.  We've got to give that up.  Interestingly, though, it's incredibly hard to construct an argument, or an article, that doesn't somehow abrogate surprise inherently.  It seems to me that if we are all going to be eschatological people, we will somehow have to redeem 'surprise' in our discourse in a way that is currently nowhere on our maps.

Second, we need to take seriously the insistence that we are not judges of ourselves or each other.  This is not a polemic against fundamentalism.  Rather, I intend it as a guide to the idea that, given the radical diversity of life within traditions, much less among them, different communities may need different visions of the future, potentially irreconcilable visions, and we might all have to live with all of us not having the same vision.  If that sounds abstract, how about: people in California may need a different theology than people in Chicago for visioning the end of the world, and those two communities are in close to the same tradition.  In other words, we might have to recognize that each of us inhabits many traditions at different depths.  More on this another time.

And third: we need to claim and explore our profound interconnection.  John Donne is more right now than ever.  Each of us is part of the main, and the loss of every part of the world affects us all.  Therefore, we might consider as Donne does that every time the environment takes a hit, every time poverty is strengthened and oppression reinforced, we won't have to send to know for whom this is bad news--it's bad news for us.

Surprise, reserved judgment, interconnection--I think those are the building blocks that might reconnect us to a real hope for new creation.

Dining alone

Sacred time happens for me when I dine alone.

Certainly, that's not an exclusive statement; sacred times occur on other occasions for me.  But there is no time so full of God's presence as when I am able to dine alone with a book.  It helps if the music is forgettable--it almost always is, whether it's New Age vibrations or alternative whines.  It's better if the restaurant is locally owned and cheap.  I prefer Thai, Indian, and Vietnamese--nothing beats a pho shop--although large, commercial burrito chains can do in a pinch.  Eating spicy soup, grateful for my existence, talking in my head to the characters and writers through the page, enjoying the restful silence of the brain so often denied us in the loud, loud West.  This is holy time, sacramental time.  The shoulders ease, time changes texture, and silence seems mingled with the sound.

And I'm not alone.  Today, I saw four or five other people, outrageously doing nothing: eating, reading, staring into the distance, solitary in the crowd.  It was oddly like being in church.

Traditionally, in the history of the faith, meals are festive and sacred occasions for the community.  Eucharist is a ritualized community meal as well as a sacrament.  Agape and Seder meals happen in families and communities.  Meals are shared affairs, and sacred meals are especially shared.  Or at least, they happen only with others.

But in our own time, I wonder about the need for solitude.  Thomas Merton doubts that true solitude is possible in a city--he thinks solitude is replaced with loneliness and alienation.  Maybe there's something to Merton's comment, but mostly, it sounds like good old fashioned aesthetic preference inflated to ontological status.  He didn't like cities and they didn't work for him, and so he extrapolated that, therefore, cities must be bad.  Solitude is as accessible in cities as elsewhere--even the suburbs have solitude.  It's a matter of temperament.

Even more, many people lament the loss of communal meals, with more dining alone, as one symptom of our alienating culture.  There's something to that critique.  But for me, well, I like dining alone as well as with others.  It speaks to me.

But what about sacred meals alone?  Are they sacred because tacitly they embrace a broader communion, one with all the saints, and in fact, while sitting alone, we are dining with God, writers, literary characters, and other presences that make it a kind of silent community?  Or, are they sacred because of their "solitude in company"?  Are they made profound by the silence in the midst of others, tables empty and full?  I'm more inclined to think of it in terms of solitude, that sacred space is more than a designated area.

Perhaps sacred space would best be understood as that space, in time and physical space, which frees us to be ourselves.

"In the strong name"

I once heard someone end a prayer that way--"in the strong name of Jesus Christ our Lord."  God knows where I first heard it, but now, in my own public prayer improvisation, I tend to end all my prayers this way.

Strong name.  I listened to an excellent political commentary on This American Life this week calling Democrats to account, not for their politics but for their refusal to let their message be a strong one.  Their lunch gets eaten by bully Republicans, who then call them names and make rude comments about their mothers.  The Democrats don't exactly turn the other cheek, a posture which requires a defiant sense of integrity--instead, the apologize.  So, Democrats have been "shellacked" in the election, in Obama's phrase that has now entered the long media echo chamber, even though their policies are potentially far more popular with most Americans and have spared us what could have been a far worse economic crisis.

I am struck, not for the first time, that we Christians have a similar problem.  We tend toward an apologizing Christianity, when we ought to be an apologetic Christianity.  We fear offending others, when we ought to respond to our truly offensive culture.  We have words and ideas and relationships that can heal the world, but we allow our culture to beat back our voice.  Fundamentalist Christians clearly do not share our issue, as they proclaim their violent and half-baked gospel.  Worried and scared, we find their confidence frightening and a further reason to shut our mouths--if that's what being confident sounds like, we fearfully mutter to ourselves, perhaps we should just give them our lunch money and language about God and start over somewhere else. 

The need for us to be strong, precisely because Jesus is still strong, is starting to sink home with mainstream Christianity.  Well, it's sinking in a little, anyway, and rumor and religious sites carry to us news of great strength--emergent churches, rule-of-life communities, whole mainline churches reborn as mission-minded communities supported, rather than hindered, by their establishment history.  I do notice that for most of us, the strong messages of Jesus Christ always seem to happen somewhere else--in the rural areas for urbanites and vice versa, up the road, in Africa, and so on, and many places of hope seem dogged by personality issues.

What makes it all more complicated, of course, is that the culture war is also an internal war, and we Christians--even excluding the fundamentalist ones--are having our own quiet war about the best way to speak Jesus' name and ministry in this particular era.  Some think the best way is to give up historic theology and remythologize ourselves; others believe we should reclaim different ideas from our history for this one; still others believe we should simply restate our claims with more confidence; and still even others believe we should abandon current institutions and go underground.  And of course, even more alternatives present themselves, from withdrawing from society to covering our ears and pretending nothing has changed, which continues to be the posture of many.  And, weirdly, the successes that happen elsewhere also undermine us when, because their context is so different from ours, those successes make it seem like speaking the strong name of Jesus is impossible in this context.


So how do we speak the strong name of Jesus in this time, in this place?  Today, I'm not sure--but I do sense that if we don't work it out, something terribly important is being lost.