Living Wittily

When Suffering and Sorrow Feel Like the Longest Night and Shortest Day

Jane Kenyon's poem, At the Winter Solstice, describes the effects of the longest night and the shortest day. It's easy to be negative about the mathematics of light, shortest day, longest night. But light isn't amenable to clocks; whether they go back or forward the sun still shines. The spinning of the earth, the pull of the moon, the orbit around the sun, these determine our allotted daylight and night. 

The pines look black in the half

light of dawn. Stillnes…

While we slept an inch of new snow

simplified the field. Today of all days

the sun will shine no more

than is strictly necessary.

This, the first stanza declines to be negative. The clue is in that last word, necessary. Light is necessary for life, and the sun will shine. As for the second last word. We live in a TV saturated culture where the word 'strictly' evokes quite different, less portentous, and more transient concerns! It's well into Advent: "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light...the true light, that lightens every person, has come into the world."

The sun will shine no less than is strictly necessary is not what she wrote. This wise poet recognises that for some folk the sun doesn't always shine no matter how pleading the prayers or desperate the hopes. Or so it can seem.

Some full time carers, exhausted by the demands of their own loving, work on and on, driven by that potent mixture of guilt at not doing more, and love that wants to do its best.

People struggling with various forms of addiction, and their decision time without number to quit, to change, to reclaim their freedom, dignity and self worth. And still the night goes on, and light is hard to find.

Grief is one long, long night of looking for enough light to go on living by. Hope isn't extinguished, but for now it lacks the fuel of possibility, opportunity and new beginnings. Bereavement is one of the longest nights in the human calendar.

Modern praise songs lose much by their over-positivity, and their lack of accommodation to the soul shadowing realities of many who come to worship. Earlier hymn writers seemed to have a more mature range of emotional options. Maybe our so light ridden existence, flattened by fluorescent, illumined by light emitting diodes (LED), has made us less familiar with darkness, less sure of how to deal with those overshadowing experiences that are part of the rhythms of life. Those emotional long nights and short days are as much part of our existence as the lengthening and shortening days throughout the seasons, dictated not by our mood, but by gravitational pull and the orbiting spin of our planet. Amongst those earlier hymns I like this one, and in particular, this verse; a good late Advent verse:

Long hath the night of sorrow reigned,

the dawn shall bring us light:

God shall appear and we shall rise

with gladness in his sight 

 

Advent Intercessions For Those Who When Christmas Comes, Don't Get It.

“We bring good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people."

Advent God, who comes to us in love, peace and joy, We thank you

• for love that nourishes and sustains our hearts,
• for peace that enables us to live in friendship with others
• for joy that illumines and inspires our lives.

 Yet

• To be loved and not care for the unloved,
• To live in peace and ignore the shattered lives of others
• To celebrate our own enjoyment selfishly,

Are sins against you, O Advent God, which deny the very message we preach.

So in thanking you for the joys that illumine our lives, We pray for those for whom joy seems far away and for others to enjoy.

• For all whose loneliness is made worse by parties, laughter and other people’s joy:
• For bereaved people still hurting from the death of someone they have loved

• For wives, husbands and children, whose lives have been broken by family break-up, divorce and the dismantling of their hopes.
• For older people now living on their own, 1 in 8 of whom will see nobody over Christmas

Lord in their loneliness, may these your children know the presence of the Wonderful Counsellor, and comfort them through us. 

 ..........

In thanking you for the joys that illumine our lives, we pray for all who are hungry and homeless at the very time when everyone else will be eating their fill, enjoying the warm comfort of home.

• Those men and women and young people whose lives simply collapsed and they fell through all the safety nets
• Those for whom the big issue isn’t a magazine, but the hopelessness, loneliness and placelessness of not having a home
• Those who have to stand in supermarket queues looking at others with stacked trolleys and finding it impossible not to envy
• Those who won’t receive any Christmas cards because they have no address, no live relationships with their past

 Lord for those who feel empty and unwanted, be to them the Everlasting Father, and love them through us.

 ,,,,,,,,,,,,

In thanking you for the joys that illumine our lives, we pray for all who are ill, or suffering, or anxious about their future

• We pray your compassion on those who are in hospital, feeling isolated, dis-empowered, and often disorientated
• We pray your strength for those who struggle day and daily with chronic illness, constant pain, and a sense of their own weakness
• We pray your peace for those who care for their loved family or friend, and who often wonder how long they can keep up with the demands and needs of one they love
• We pray your patience and respite for those who care for those suffering from Alzheimer’s and other conditions that take away the sense of self, and descend into loneliness.

Lord for those who are suffering and anxious, and for those needing strength to care for them, be to them the Almighty God whose love and joy and peace surround, uphold and will never let go,

Through Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, Amen

(I wrote this prayer for those who find Christmas an ordeal and yet another expreience of exclusion - we'll use it at our Advent Service of reflection in Montrose this Sunday - feel free to use. I've always thought it odd to put a copyright on prayers :))

He made the stars also: Advent in Five Words.

 

 December Moon, Through Winter Trees

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...God made two great lights - the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God...all things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made...The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld His glory, full of grace and truth.

I call it the ultimate parenthesis. "He made the stars also." The best theological put down in the Bible. Stuck in Babylon, with the gods of the Empire in your face, stamped on your money, sold in the markets, and made permanent in the power-speaking architecture of Temple and State, you'd think the Exiles would get the message: our Gods are bigger than your god. But no. Some clever Jewish priest writes and tells the story of creation, and describes the architecture of the heavens. The stars are not gods, they are the handiwork of the God of Israel. Babylon is a mere empire, but God is the maker and breaker of the nations. So, these stars that the Babylonians worship and fear; those zodiac signs that an entire civil service studies in order to predict events and control the future. They're no big deal. They are a side show, albeit the greatest side-show in the universe. "He made the stars also". It's that devastating diminutive, "also". The whole infrastructure of Babylonian religion collapses under the weight of that parenthesis.

Advent is a time to look at the night sky, preferably just after reading Genesis 1 and John 1. And remembering that we live in our own Babylon of consumer capitalism, technological addiction, globalised trade, ecological vandalism, oppressive imagery, militarist problem-solving, and selling out to all the other gods of our own making. We may behave as if we are masters of the universe. But the masterpiece we are busy dismantling, defacing, despoiling and 'owning', belongs to the Creator God, who, by the way, "made the stars also". The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not - neither understands, nor defeats, the light of God. "He made the stars also". That is Advent in five words.

Advent and the Light on Our Faces

 

Marianne Stokes, "Candlemas Day", 1901

Advent I turn to my favourite poets. Even those poems I know by heart, shed light into the duller recesses of routine, and illumine the dark corners that threaten hope. Candlemas is the other side of Advent, but Levertov's poem, in three short sentences, contrasts the certitude of faith with the realities of cross, tomb and darkness.

Candlemas

With certitude
Simeon opened
ancient arms
to infant light.
Decades
before the cross, the tomb
and the new life,
he knew
new life.
What depth
of faith he drew on,
turning illumined
towards deep night.

Denise Levertov

Advent is for a world of the short term solution, selling its soul for immediacy.

Fra Angelico, Naming of John the Baptist.

Advent is when, in an impatient world, we wait patiently. The connection between waiting, patience and hope is strong, and if we can wait in patient hope then perhaps we are beginning to understand what it means to live by faith. Because to wait patiently and hopefully is an act of continuing trust.

In an impatient world we've become used to speed of delivery, everything from fast food to same day online pick up points. Saving time, filling time, using time, we've slipped into a mindset that thinks we can control time. Slow it down, speed it up, adapt it to our own purposes. The default secular worldview ignores, perhaps deliberately obscures our ultimate helplessness to control time. Indeed, the pace of our lives these days, our determination to compress as much energy, achievement, possession, entertainment, work and doing into every hour and day and week and year, is making us impatient with, well, with waiting. No wonder hope is all but obsolete, and the long view of the forward looking spirit seems hardly relevant in a world of the short term solution, selling its soul for immediacy.

Advent comes as a reminder to our time obsessed times, that time is passing. God is not the servant of our wants. The determined redemptive purposes of a love that is Eternal are not likely to be derailed by our impatience. "Time like an ever flowing stream , bears all its sons away; / They fly forgotten, like a dream dies at the opening day."

So as Advent begins, even if we do live in a frantic culture which idolises now and worships time saving efficiency; wait patiently; hope trustfully; look attentively; live faithfully. Pray with urgent slowness. Speak with considered kindness. Let longing be as the word says, long. Wonder cannot be rushed. Mystery takes time to unfold.

Year on year, each day of our lives, God comes with the slow deliberation of eternal purpose into the frantic filling of our days. If we can slow down, stop and wait long enough, the Advent of God brings life's renewing. The connection between our waiting, our patience and our hope is secured only by God's unbreakable promise. Advent is the time to offer once more the vulnerable but heart meant yes to that promise: "But to you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings." And no. For all our attempts at control and speed, we can't make the sun rise on demand. In God's time. That's what Advent is. Learning to live in God's time.

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

.

Come Thou long expected Jesus: Advent is Just Round the Corner.

Reading Joan Chittister can sometimes feel like someone has had access to your personal journal and decided to read it back to you sentence by sentence, with her own comments and asides. She is a Benedictine no nonsense nun, and is both shrewd and sensible, writing with candour and compassion. Her insights into what makes community healthy, organic and fruitful are constant gifts scattered throughout her books. Discussing how stability is an essential of Benedictine life, and how that is rooted in community, she recognises that a community never stays still, unless it has become paralysed by the anxiety that clings to where and who it is. Relationships are central and essential to Christian discipleship, and to Benedictine obedience, which is one ancient and distinctive style of Christian discipleship.  Here is her take on how all that works:

"That's how relationships sanctify me. They show me where holiness is for me. That's how relationships develop me. They show me where growth is for me. If I'm the passive-victim type, then assertiveness may have something to do with coming to wholeness. If I'm the domineering character in every group, then a willingness to listen and be led may be my call to life. Alone, I am what I am, but in community I have the chance to become everything that I can be." (page 49)

Those words come from Wisdom Distilled from the Daily, is Chittister's take on what it means to commit to Living the Rule of St Benedict Today (the sub title). Bob and Becky, my friends from Henniker New Hampshire, won't be surprised I bought this book while with them on holiday years ago. The Dartmouth Bookstore was where I discovered several writers and books that have stayed with me after making the point they were 'meant' to make! The photo is Becky's church.

The Rule of Benedict has been a constant source of thought and redirection for me over a long time. The emphases on stability, contemplation, community, hospitality, study, prayer and scripture have been necessary if quiet correctives to a life that often enough has been restless, activist, self-absorbed, too busy to have enough time for others, including God.

As Advent comes, such correctives are important. Waiting, longing, being open to others, sharing generously the gift that is our life, looking attentively at the wounds of the world, finding ways of showing mercy, listening for the sounds of hope, allowing our minds and our lives to be enlarged.

Come Thou long-expected Jesus,

     Born to set thy people free;

From our fears and sins release us;

     Let us find our rest in Thee.

Epiphany and the Memory of My friend Stewart.

A year ago my good friend Stewart suffered a catastrophic stroke, from which he died last May. One of his great loves was to find reasons for parties and gatherings at his home where he and Helen would arrange food and entertainment. And when Stewart organised things, they were choreographed with care and forethought, with the invited guests made welcome and expected to join in the fun and games, the food and drink and the laughter and conversation.

Stewart and Helen introduced Sheila and I to Epiphany parties. At such parties we would have soup, home made bread and then a large cake, preceded by games inside or out, with a memorable evening of shove ha'penny on the big dinner table.

I mention this because the season of Epiphany is here again, and memories of those Epiphany parties are still vivid and carry the emotional freight of good memories and meticulously planned fun and liturgy. Because we prayed and heard the story of the Magi and their gifts on those evenings too.

The Nativity picture by Burne Jones is one of my favourites, and it captures the splendour and mystery of gifts being brought to the child who is the Gift of God, the God who gives of God's deepest self. This post is in memory of a man who brought much love and laughter into my life, and whose spirituality may best be described as making the welcome of God tangible. He was deeply read in Christian mysticism, and for him deep thought, strong passion and embrace of human life in its diversity and fullness, were given expression in a man whose smile was a benediction, and whose prayers made you feel intrusive yet welcome to overhear a conversation between a man and God. There are many privileges in being a pastor, not least of them coming within the companionship of those whose love for God is contagious.

Like thos Magi of old, he was a wise man, who brought his gift, and worshipped the Christ child.

Poetry, Stained Glass and Being Content with the Inexplicable

Wit Wonders

A God and yet a man,

A maid and yet a mother:

Wit wonders what wit can

Conceive this or the other.

 

A God and can he die?

A dead man can he live?

What wit can well reply?

What reason reason give?

 

God, Truth itself doth teach it.

Man’s wit sinks too far under

By reason’s power to reach it:

Believe and leave to wonder.

(Anonymous – 15^th C)

Joseph kept these things and pondered them in his heart....

The incarnation of our Lord lies at the heart of Christian faith. When the arguments for and against virgin birth have been faithfully spoken and honestly heard, there remains a residue of truth, a core of mystery not amenable to explanation. A small part of that mystery is the faith of Mary who was able to say, 'Be it done according to your will,' and the faith of Joseph prepared to live with consequences he had no way of foreseeing. Clustered around the divine miracle of annunciation and incarnation are a number of smaller miracles of human trustfulness and openness to the coming of God. Perhaps we can be helped in our appreciation of such miracles of faith if we do a little reverent prying into the emotional rationale behind Joseph's reaction to Mary's own disturbing annunciation.  

................................

Joseph kept these things and pondered them in his heart.......

 

Every time one of our old Rabbi's conducts a betrothal, or a wedding ceremony he tells the joke about the angel who gives just one wish. He told it at our betrothal reception, when Mary and I got engaged.

One day a man did an act of great kindness. As a reward he is visited by an angel." Heaven has sent me to reward you. Whatever you want done, heaven will grant."  After thinking carefully the man said " Build me a bridge  from Jerusalem to Rome so I can visit my family  whenever I want to without going the long way round."

" Wait a blessed minute ", said the angel. "Have you any idea what that costs?  Fifteen hundred miles of bridge! Even angels have to stick to spending guide-lines and work within the constraints imposed on the miracles budget. Choose something else. Give me another option. " The man replied, " O.K. Help me to understand how a woman's mind works." After much thought the angel asked, "How many lanes do you want on your bridge?"

The rabbi told it as a joke. But hard as I've tried, and long as I've thought, I still don't understand the mind of Mary. What she thought, and what she felt about what happened to her, and what it did to us. I didn't understand why Mary disappeared for three months to visit her cousin Elizabeth. I didn't understand when she came back and said she was three months pregnant.  I didn't understand when she said " I've never been unfaithful.  The baby is God's gift."

I didn't understand why she, the woman, should be the one who got to decide on the name. I couldn't believe her story about being visited by an angel, who told her that, of all the women in the world, God had chosen her as his point of entry into human affairs,  I didn't understand, and I don't understand, in fact, I'll never understand how a virgin can be pregnant.

What I did understand, was that the Mary, who was promised to me, now belonged to someone else. What I did understand, because I'm not just a man, I'm a just man, was the need to protect Mary, from public shame and legal penalty.  What I did understand  was that our future stops here. No marriage! No shared joy! No family! Just this unwanted pregnancy forcing us apart. And what I did understand, and felt fully, unflinchingly, was the sense of opportunity lost, grief at the wasted possibilities, the certainty our dreams had ended.

 

But the dreams weren't ended! I thought, just like the just, sensible, unimaginative man I am, I thought, I'll deal with this rationally, quietly divorce her, and get on with my life. Still, before doing anything I decided to sleep on it!  But it wasn't a slumberland sleep. It was restless, anxious sleep; my mind and body tossing and turning. in synchronised uneasiness. Then through my confusion and hurt a shining clarity.  Interrupting my scheming and dreaming,  a voice,  that shook my whole being awake. An angel, not like the one in the rabbi's joke. He didn't ask  me what I wanted more than anything. Not that it would have mattered.  I wanted the one thing I could no longer have...Mary, uncomplicated, faithful, understandable Mary. Mary before all this angels and God nonsense.

But before I could think of what to say, the angel spoke. "Joseph, don't be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you are to give him the name Jesus."  I no longer doubted Mary. But what it must have meant for her, what it does to a woman to have others question her integrity as a woman,while all the time she is being faithful to God by receiving the gift of the Almighty. That I have not, cannot understand.

 I don't understand how Mary, carried the burden of truth, that she would mother God's son. I don't understand her openness to God, her obedient humility, or her determined yes to the purposes of God. Like the child she carried, she nurtured and nourished the truth of God's loving purposesfor us and the whole world. I don't understand the ways of God, not even when angels tell me.

In my dream a deeper reality than I ever imagined had come close to me;  And in Mary, the deepest reality of all was coming true. God coming close to the world in an inconceivable conception. God with us, love made flesh, borne and born through Mary.

The Rabbi's joke about bridges and a woman's mind? To unimaginative, rational patronising men,perhaps understanding a woman is miracle enough. But when it comes to bridges, through the faithful intuition, the imaginative love, the trustful yes of a woman, God built a far, far bigger bridge than a Jerusalem to Rome flyover.; the promised bridge between heaven and earth, through the faith of a woman, and the birth of a baby.  That's a miracle of love that exceeds all budgets, and like much else in this story, I’ll never understand it.  But I’ll sleep on it.

The Shalom Tapestry and Shalom as Vocation.

The Shalom tapestry is coming along slowly.

          Peace Haiku

     Shalom comes slowly,

     each stitch hand-crafted  prayer,

     for mercy, peace, love.

For a couple of months now I have lived with the form and the content of this beautiful strange and life-enhancing word. The quest for shalom means seeking well-being of heart and body, discovering energy and resilience to live faithfully and creatively for God, receiving from the Holy Spirit the freedom to trust our imagination to envision healing and wholeness and justice for our world.

This small  tapestry (4 inches by three) is part of a bigger project. When finished it will be the small panel at the bottom of a larger, brasher celebration of Shalom based on rainbow colours. Working with these Hebrew characters, and the English letters in the larger panel, is an experiment in contrast, construction and compassion. This small panel is entirely impressionistic. I love the sound of the word Shalom – the threads impossibly try to give sight to the sound as I say it or hear it spoken; the colours depict mood which you may rightly say is likewise impossible, but the attempt is still important; sometimes while working it I listen to music, carefully chosen music. So reader, what music should be played when stitching Shalom?

During the last two months of stitching Shalom I have prayed for Malala Yousafzai and Afghanistan; for Palestinian people and Jewish settlers; for children, teachers and families in Newtown Massachusets, and for children and families in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan; for people close to me struggling with the life they are living or trying to survive, and for others I hardly know but whose hurt makes prayer and work for Shalom both an enacted imperative and an essential attribute of spiritual integrity.

To seek Shalom and pursue it, to be a Shalom maker, to recognise again the words of Jesus ‘my Shalom I leave with you’, to lie within reach of and to trust the Shalom that passes all understand ding – not a bad way to live really, or to really live.And during Advent to share the longings of millions for peace on earth and mercy mild....