O Magnum Mysterium
December 11, 2010
One of my cherished Advent traditions for many years was a choir concert in an old chapel on my college campus. Here’s a link to O Magnum Myesterium performed by Miami University (my alma mater) Glee Club: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP0QHkvJd84
If you listen to it, close your eyes. Or even better, turn out the lights and light a candle. Imagine being packed in on the worn wooden 19th century pew, hipbone to hipbone with townspeople and college students, winter coats occasionally shuffling in the dark. The choir and stain glass are dimly lit by flickering candles. You feel a connection to your beloved friends to your side and hundreds of neighbors, transported out of your context to gaze on something larger than yourselves, into the glimpse, the idea, the hope of heaven on earth. Then? Now? How mysterious!
Then imagine yourself as a shepherd, a humble field worker with an indescribable stirring within you at this mystery; the import of this hidden-from-the-world event communicated in a language more felt than understood. What can you say to your fellow field workers, your fellow townsmen, you G-d about what you have just seen and heard?
- Latin text
- O magnum mysterium,
- et admirabile sacramentum,
- ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,
- jacentem in praesepio!
- Beata Virgo, cujus viscera
- meruerunt portare
- Dominum Christum.
- Alleluia.
- English translation
- O great mystery,
- and wonderful sacrament,
- that animals should see the new-born Lord,
- lying in a manger!
- Blessed is the Virgin whose womb
- was worthy to bear
- Christ the Lord.
- Alleluia!
Appropriate Christmas giving (and receiving)
December 11, 2010
Seinfeld created a fake winter Holiday called “Festivus” as an alternative to Christmas when one of the characters became fed up with the seasonal stress overwhelming him, born from the consumerist frenzy that he embraced so fully until he found himself physically fighting a stranger in the store aisles over a doll that obviously (to the audience and anyone else with common sense) would be insulting as a present to a typical male child, especially this character’s son.
Like I said last week, if you find yourself in such a situation, you are at the very least dangerously close to idolatry, and doing Christmas wrong.
And to disdain Christmas so thoroughly as to create a holiday solely in reaction to the common stumbling blocks of love is also wrong. More or less as wrong as disdaining the season with a “bah” and “Humbug” and “what right do you have to be merry? You’re certainly poor enough!”
These are wrong attitudes because they make tragically false assumptions. The Scrooge and Seinfeld attitudes assume that human capacity to love each other and be genuinely joyful is impossible, and that the closest deception we can make is to tolerate people we spend too much time with anyway a little more, at the expense of strangers and at the mercy of evil marketing weenies.
In reality, we geniunely love, and become genuinely joyful all the time. The regular miracle of the season is that though the nights are dark and cold, leaving us farther apart and isolated from each other, where this season should be the most difficult to be joyous and and show love, because the bringer of joy and the lord of love is born in this darkest hour, this is the easiest and most appropriate season for merriment in abundance.
A traditional (and legitimate, in fact wonderful) way to demonstrate our love and bring joy to each other is by saving up resources, searching frantically, and spending much time, energy and “wasting money” to give gifts to our loved ones. After all, how happy an occasion when there’s something you’ve always liked, or perhaps wanted, but never got around to getting for various reasons, and suddenly you get it for free!
There are common dangers though, based on other false assumptions and leading to the maddening Christmas stress that lead to fights with strangers and family members alike. I’d like to put all of the blame on those that think they have nice, cool or hip things people might pay money for, and do their darnedest to convince us that buying their wondrous “ProductMatic(tm)” for someone is the best way to show love and bring happiness to all. But honestly, they might seriously believe this, and for some situations it may be true.
The true dangers lie in the hearts of the givers and receivers. Givers: just because you can get the latest fad doesn’t mean the latest fad is the best gift, or that you should be entitled to an overflow of gratitude simply because you got someone a gift someone else (who took your money telling you this) said it would be.
More importantly, receivers: desire is an easily manipulated emotion and just because someone (who would take money from your friends or family) says this thing is desirable doesn’t make it worth desiring, and just because you desire something doesn’t make you entitled to it. Those that love you (especially parents) will do really stupid things for the piece of plastic crap you think is so valuable, but if they have better sense or less capacity, your desire for the thing can easily outshine the love that the giver has shown in getting it for you.
DO NOT CONFUSE THE GIFT FOR THE GIVING. It is the giving that is ultimately more important.
When you give, don’t give any random thing. Take time to figure out who the receiver is, what they like to do, and what they might be interested in, or something they might realise they need only upon having it. When you give, you are telling your receiver “I love you, and so I have paid particular attention to you over time and want to share with you what wonderful things I discovered about you.”
Avoid arbitrary things. Don’t give a gun-rack to someone that owns no guns a la Wayne’s World. Don’t give things because you like them.
No bunny suits for your son a la A Christmas Story; this is particularly insulting, as you basically say you love yourself at their expense.
Avoid straight up money or gift cards, unless your receiver is a ninja, like Ask a Ninja explains: “a gift card says ‘I have no idea who you are, and that’s exactly what a Ninja needs to hear’” but everyone else needs the opposite. (Exception: I recently received a gift card to a particular grocery store from someone who I spent time with getting to know and sharing ideas revolving around food, and this gift told me that they paid attention in our time together, valued my thoughts, knew I shopped here anyway, and that I would grow closer to them when I shopped at this store again.)
Avoid things that your receiver has no space for, or clothes that are not in your receivers dimensions.
The best gifts I received through the years were completely unexpected and not even suggested, but were attuned to my interests or needs at the time and could engage me in my labor or recreation.
Receivers: remember that whatever happens, telepathy is impossible, and only God knows the hearts of humans. Your human givers are running on faith, assumption, and no grounds for certainty, even if they are your twin. They have gone out of their way to show you that they love you to their capacity, and what you expect may not be available to them, or they felt they found something more appropriate. Before becoming disappointed, either at not getting your specific desire, or receiving a gift that you believe reflects your giver’s utter failure to understand you, remember two things: first, they tried. Second, they might know you better than you think. Try appreciating whatever gift you receive before sending it to Returns.
If you get a gun-rack and you don’t own any guns, maybe some part of you that they saw wants guns, so you could get a gun, practice in the wilderness, and use your gun-rack for your gun, and suddenly you have a hobby you never thought to love before.
If you get something you don’t have room for, or time for, or lifestyle for, make adjustments to your space or time to try to accommodate the gift. You might find your new adjustment to your life helpful in itself, that fax machine you would never need actually quite useful. I have a too-large stereo that is out of the way, accessible, and convenient.
If you receive something that your giver likes (dear God, let’s pray no pink bunny outfits) reflect that your giver loves whatever this is, loves you, really wants to share this part of them-self with you, and genuinely believes you will find yourself enjoying it. Try to indulge them. Perhaps they are right.
If ultimately you really have no room, space, or inclination for your gift, remember that your gift-giver is prone to sin, just like you (you selfish arse).
Remember that just because a gift is monetarily cheap or worthless doesn’t make it valueless. Remember that an expensive gift is not necessarily a sacrifice to Mammon. Remember that just because someone doesn’t want anything doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be happy with anything.
Remember that you are paying tribute to the Christ in your loved one’s heart. By doing so, there will be no stress, only excitement; no expectation, only surprise; no disappointment, only appreciation, and the idols of a commercialized Christmas will be powerless
Visions in the haze of fictions
December 9, 2010
Last week, I wrote about my belief that Advent should serve as a time when we can prepare ourselves to receive God’s message for our lives, by slowing down in the midst of holiday business.
This week I’ve been trying to walk the walk. I’ve tried to slow down and strip myself of distractions, and yet even as I stopped turning on the TV and started trying to meditate, I found fantasies and fictions still have quite a power. I dream of television characters and movies. In times of meditative walking, or other solitary activities, my head has been filling up with pop culture distractions that had been a convenience and a relief recently, whether YouTube clips from movies, TV shows, or of the fantasy novel I’ve been reading.
These fictions serve a purpose when they help me relax after a long day, or take my mind off of heavy issues. However, I’m now finding that they present an obstacle to my ability to be contemplative.
I am missing moments of the day, washing dishes, riding on train cars, walking down city streets: I am not there in mind — I am in a scene from Inception, or imagining moments between Alison Brie and Joel McHale (Jeff/Annie), or the Terry Pratchett novel I’m reading rather than living the moment.
Realizing this, I frustratedly push to clear my mind of the distraction and find a sadness lying beneath. Why? Because without the distractions, reality seems very dull all of a sudden. I am making myself the same breakfasts, lunch and dinners every day, doing the same physical exercises, praying the same way, going the same places and doing the same repetitive tasks at my job every day.
I would have hoped that when I cleared away my distractions, I would have begun to have some sense of vision, or an ability to connect with the voice of God. Instead, there is silence, and the dull white walls in my apartment and office.
But rather than just turn on the radio or TV again, rather than seek somebody else’s fiction to fill up that lonely space, maybe it’ll be helpful for now to be in that emptiness and hear what it might have to say. I’d rather be with my lack of vision, and the unaccompanying unhappiness, than just shake it off and turn on the holiday tunes. Because maybe the emptiness has something to say.
On the Day of the Lord’s coming, it was written in the book of Joel,
”I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.”
I pray that I, and all people of faith, may find dreams and visions awakened by this Advent. It may take some slowing down, and wrestling with emptiness, rather than settling for easy distractions (of which there are plenty) but maybe there is something we can hear once we reach the silence.
Nativity Mystery
December 8, 2010
a short play by j. Snodgrass:
[audio:nativitymystery.mp3]
With Power and Great Glory
December 7, 2010
People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
It starts with a bleep at 1 AM, and then a few more bleeps and flashing lights. Soon the entire hotel building is throbbing as the fire alarm grows in intensity.
This cannot be happening this morning. I am staying at the hotel because I was burned out of my apartment. My friend of 30 years died. I lost everything. Except my life.
Sirens blare. Firefighters arrive and arrive. Huge men, with stoic expressions, carrying medieval-looking hooks and pipes and boxes. A woman comes in from the outside, looks quizzically at the firefighters for half a second, and takes the elevator upstairs. I cannot stop shaking. Long after the firefighters leave, after the managers are smiling, I cannot stop shaking.
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars…” (Luke 21:25, the gospel reading for the second Monday in Advent.) And yet, in my experience, we all live calamity differently. The unmistakable signs do not seem universal. Nor are they always writ large.
My sign, my calamity, my foreboding is writ very small – measured in millimeters, visible only with special equipment. An aneurysm in my brain, threatening my perceptions, my intelligence, my very life.
In my entry for the first Monday, I questioned what we are waiting for in Advent, or even whether it is us mortals who are doing the waiting. In this entry, I now know what this mortal is waiting for – and scrambling for – and foreboding. My brain surgery now scheduled for December 16.
“Now when you see these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” May it be so. For me. For all of us mortals, struggling to see the signs with “power and great glory”.
Of Waiting … and Whining
December 7, 2010
Wait for the Lord, his day is near.
Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heart.
This beautiful song repeated and repeated and repeated as I waited for communion to circle around to me at table on the first Sunday of Advent. As we took turns handing each other bread and wine, and saying words of institution.
I had always heard that Advent was about waiting, and I had never thought that waiting was a problem for me. A problem for other people, maybe, but not for me.
Growing up in New York in the middle of the century, waiting was a fact of life. No one drove, we waited for the bus or subway. No television on demand, no dvd’s, we waited all week for an episode to be broadcast. My own favorite kind of waiting was waiting for my turn when playing a board game. I preferred going last. It all made sense. The rules were in front of us, and we all followed them. Why whine?
Then I got a little older. And sometimes I found myself waiting patiently for things that never happened. And then I started to whine. It’s not fair. I’m playing by the rules. Why aren’t you?
Just what are we waiting for in Advent? For Jesus to have been born 2000 years ago? In what mirror universe do we wait for something that happened long ago?
What rules are we playing by here? Is the bible the equivalent to the instructions on the game box?
If so, Jesus doesn’t play fair. In the gospel reading for the the first Monday in Advent, Jesus is confronted about where he gets his authority. His answer? “I won’t tell you.”
Into this mirror universe, I am going to toss a possibility. Perhaps.., just perhaps, we’ve heard it a bit wrong. Perhaps Advent is a season of waiting. A season when God waits for us.
Waiting for Fragile Things
December 5, 2010
This fall, I got to hold a friend’s newborn baby in my arms. He seemed fragile to me, with his delicate fingers, unfocused eyes, soft skull, and feeble neck muscles. It was seeing that final detail in person that made me understand the total dependence of infants on their families in a real and visceral way. He needed my help to hold up his head.
A couple of years ago, I was talking to some friends at a seminary, and they started discussing an ancient Christology that eventually was declared heresy. According to the understanding of the nature of Jesus that was developed in Adoptionism, he was born as an ordinary human and then “adopted” by God at his baptism as God’s spirit, shaped like a dove, descended on him; God’s nature and God’s power did not enter into Jesus until this moment. Two of my friends argued that they believed this to be true, that God’s nature and God’s power could not possibly have rested in an infant’s body.
There was something very disturbing about this idea to me. I want to believe that incarnation means that God understands what it is like to live with the fragility and limitation that being human entails. I want to believe that God knows what it is like to be poor, hungry, tired, unable to communicate clearly, and dependent on people for life itself. When I need God and can’t even put words to my prayer, I want to believe that God “remembers” what it was like.
The scripture in the lectionary for today, the second Sunday of Advent, is Isaiah 11:1-10. It begins, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” This image speaks to me of fragility, of the seedling that needs protection, of the green life that needs care to thrive. This Advent, I am keeping watch for fragile things, the green shoot bursting into my life from some dark corner, the infant idea that needs my help to hold up its head, the emergence of God in delicate and breakable moments. Oh come, oh come Emanuel.
Between distinguishing and trusting
December 4, 2010
From the Book of Common Prayer, December 4
Praise to you who lift up the poor: and fill the hungry with good things.
Psalm 22:22-25
I will declare your name to my people;
in the assembly I will praise you.
You who fear the LORD, praise him!
All you descendants of Jacob, honor him!
Revere him, all you descendants of Israel!
For he has not despised or scorned
the suffering of the afflicted one;
he has not hidden his face from him
but has listened to his cry for help.From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly;
before those who fear you I will fulfill my vows.
Commenting on the activities of the early church, Roman Emperor Julian said, “The godless Galileans feed our poor in addition to their own.”
Lord, keep us from trying to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Help us work to alleviate suffering and injustice wherever we find it, trusting that the rest is up to you. Amen.
May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you : wherever he may send you
may he guide you through the wilderness : protect you through the storm
may he bring you home rejoicing : at the wonders he has shown you;
may be bring you home rejoicing : once again into our doors.
The Better Part
December 3, 2010
I’ve been reading recently about how Advent is supposed to be the time of waiting and preparation for the coming of the Lord. I’ve never been one for waiting—when I travel, if I have the option of driving on a highway at 10 miles an hour, or get off at an exit onto a local road that’ll take me the same amount of time to reach my destination but lets me drive at 40-50 miles an hour, I take the exit. Because it allows me to keep moving, keep busy, avoid being idle.
When I think about this tendency of mine in relation to my faith, I think of the story of Martha from the Gospel of Luke. Jesus visits two sisters, Mary and Martha, and during his visit, Martha gets all wrapped up in the chores associated with his visit while Mary sits at his feet, listening. And Jesus turns to Martha and says,
“Martha, Martha, you worry and fret about so many things and yet few are needed,
indeed only one. It is Mary who has chosen the better part.”
Martha sounds a lot like many of us in these busy holiday times, juggling busy work deadlines, getting ready for holiday vacations and trying to take care of gift buying for friends and family.
But few of these are truly needed. We are called to choose “the better part,” to stop fretting, and prepare ourselves to take in what Christmas 2010 may have to reveal to us.
For me, Christmas ceremonies don’t reveal much, don’t mean much in my faith life when just sandwiched into my busy schedule. Such church ceremonies, whether at Easter or Thanksgiving, often seem the stuff of TV re-runs. I’ve seen the mangers and the plays, sung the carols, and sat in the candlelight. Though the feelings and sentiments are often quite comforting and peaceful, I find it can also be all too familiar by the end.
The inherent problem with the liturgical calendar is that on their own terms, they largely take us in an annually-repeating circle. And for those of us who like to think of our faith journey as a road, that involves exploration, breaking barriers, going new places and reaching new heights, what’s the point of going in circles? The cyclical repetitive nature of these holiday can leave their messages meaning less and less every year they’re repeated.
Unless we stop ourselves. And observe. Look for a way to sit at God’s feet, and listen to his Word for signs of where we are being called in our faith journey. Armed with such a vision, Christmas 2010 goes from being a re-run to a source of nourishment for the journey ahead.
Psalm 46:10 said, “Be still and know that I am God.” The existence of Advent prior to Christmas seems to me to be a message, a warning of the stillness it truly demands to know that fact and what it means in our lives. We can be still for one late December night, and know the joy that Christ was born, but to know what that birth means for us this year, at this moment in our journey, may take a little more time. When it comes to our spiritual journeys, this is a time calling us to sit in the traffic, and take in exactly where it is we’re headed.
Not Waiting in Advent
December 2, 2010
Honestly, counting days to Christmas is not the most exciting thing about Advent to me. In fact, it feels a little false – after all, the people who were waiting for Christ the first time around didn’t know when Jesus was going to come. They didn’t have fun little advent calendars to help them count the days, nor did they have advent wreathes to mark the passing weeks.
No, when Jesus was made known to the shepherds, they were just chilling on a hillside and then suddenly: HOLY CRAP! ANGELS! Similarly, the Magi took a couple of years to make it to Jesus because the star took them by surprise, too. Even John the Baptist, the guy who made his entire career by announcing the coming of the Messiah, didn’t get going until Jesus was well into adulthood.
Jesus took everyone by surprise. The season of Advent certainly captures the feeling of waiting, but it misses the feeling of uncertainty – the process of waiting in hope and faith for something even though you have no idea what it is.
That’s pretty much what the Kingdom of God is like, though – we can’t predict it, we can’t control it, and we don’t always recognize it when we see it. Emmanuel – God With Us, the Incarnate Deity – is revealed to us when we least expect it. Jesus didn’t tell us to wait, he told us to keep watch, for we do not know when our Lord will come.
This year, instead of thinking of Advent as a countdown to Christmas, I’m going to treat as a challenge to keep watch for every way I see God breaking into our world.
I’ll let you know how it goes.