Yesterday began the church season of Advent. As my friend Leah puts it, “I’m so tired of ordinary time.” Ordinary time, in short, is that season of the church calendar that spans from Pentecost back around to Advent, leaving us with a long, dry Autumn with nothing to do but wait, so to speak, for the coming of Christ. It’s very poetic, the drudgery and gradual dying of the natural world each year corresponding to the waiting for Jesus to show up.
It’s a waiting game, Advent. Why does it feel so much more like Lent this year than last year? Lent is the season for repentance and remorse; Advent is supposed to be the time for anticipation, for not being able to stand still from jumping up and down. In one, you’re awaiting the birth; in one, you’re leaning towards a great death.
But waiting is waiting is waiting, isn’t it? Waiting for all things be made new is hanging around by any other name, right? I sit on a half-written paper, three months of shrapnel crowding my floor, shoved around by unwashed laundry, hopes, regrets, addictions, present glories, coffee stains, and maybes. Waiting in the end, is just waiting.
Waiting the redemption of our bodies, that is. And our souls.
I’m back in the Pelican State, which means 1) any morning runs I’ll do will involve hills, and 2) any coffee I drink came straight from the good heart of Community Coffee.
***
“Of the three Wise Men
Who came to the king,
One was a brown man,
So they sing.
Of the three Wise Men
Who followed the star,
One was a brown king
From afar.
They brought fine gifts
Of spices and gold
In jeweled boxes
Of beauty untold.
Unto him humble
Manger they came
And bowed their heads
In Jesus’ name.
Three Wise Men,
One dark like me—
Part of His
Nativity.”
–Langston Hughes
I’ve been rereading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence, which is a good book to revisit every few years for the following reasons:
1) It’s the story of a guy who had a promising career in academia, and gave it up for his sanity’s sake. Now, he writes technical manuals. As one entering academia, caveat emptor.
2) It’s a book about neither zen nor motorcycles, really, but about how to reconceive of that which is quality. It’s a book about how to discern what is good, and how to bridge the divide between function and form. Inherent to function is a kind of beauty known to those that love good function; inherent to form is a similar beauty, but a beauty that arises from communicating well that which is part of the creator.
3) It’s a book that challenges me to get back into photography, not because I’ll ever again be paid to do it, but because once upon a time, I really enjoyed shooting.
4) It’s a book that reminds me that writing is about the nuts and bolts, and harnessing creativity into deep rivers, lest it become a sprawling ocean and ruin the shoreline.
5) It’s a book which reminds me that lives are not ultimately divisible into this category, and that hearts are not ultimately one without the other.
Which brings us to Christmas.
**
Earlier this semester, I read Gustaf Aulen’s Christus Victor, which for its faults, is a pretty interesting analysis of how the church has thought about the life of Jesus. It’s particularly helpful when Christmas comes around, and we have to be reminded that this manger has some connection to the cross, but what? For Aulen, the patristics had it right when they viewed the incarnation as being salvific because of the life that Jesus lived: birth, death, resurrection. To be sure, the cross was part of that life, but apart from the life which was lived, makes no sense. As a result, two strains of thought have emerged:
1) Jesus’ life was about getting to the cross, with the teachings and miracles demostrating what kind of God was going to be killed.
2) Jesus’ life was about the teachings and miracles, with the cross the tragic result of being faithful to God in the world.
Both of these are inadequate, because they make light of the unity of Jesus, splitting him into function and form. As such, there is no better time than Christmas, the time when the cross seems so far off, to remember that the point of the incarnation was not to head towards the cross only, or to teach good things only, because lots of people did all of the above. The point, as the baby lies helpless in the manger, is that he is here. And as he is here, the miracles of our redemption unfolds: the life we live is mysteriously taken up into God’s life in a way that neither diminishes God nor ourselves. By Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection, our lives are refigured and renarrated in a way which says that death is not the end, and the beginnings are not the final word on where we will go.
At the manger, our beginning. At the tomb, our other beginning. And in between is a dance, as Flanner O’Connor says, of mystery and manners.
“Oh the glory
When He took our place
And took my shoulders
And he shook my face
And he takes and he takes and he takes.”
–Sufjan Stevens
**
Apparently, I’ve unwittingly started writing Advent reflections, which works for me, since I have a terrible time remembering the seasons. The past two years, I couldn’t get away from Christmas music or Christmas schlock. Frankly, it kind of ruined the season for me. So, now that I’m back in my native waters of academia, Christmas sneaks up on me like a house guest that doesn’t bother to ring the doorbell. I’ll be upstairs getting ready to take a shower, and Advent’s prowling the fridge and eating my leftover chimichanga.
Somewhere along the line, my church apparently got the reputation of being the one in town that professes that if you’re broken and messed up, that’s okay, because the fact that you are in trouble is not the end of the story. As such, we talk a good deal about suffering and the existential messes that we find ourselves in, often of our own doing, sometimes because of the way the world plays itself out. And as such, in the middle of Advent, we offer a service of consolation to remember those during Christmas season that don’t feel as if Christmas really belongs to them any more.
Craig came this year, and wrote about it here. I’ve been at the church for five years nearly and never been before this year. And I was awed at how much of the Christmas story is shrouded in mourning, and not in expectation or rejoicing:
**Anna is noted as being a widow.
**Simeon mentions his impending death in the same breath as his seeing Jesus.
**Mary’s heart is pierced with a metaphorical sword of grief.
**The babies of Bethlehem die at Jesus’ birth.
**Joseph contemplates divorce before he’s even married.
I think this fits my disposition just fine this year. This morning, LeAnn left Waco for good. Meghan and I stood with her at 7 a.m. as she pulled out of Waco for the last time. I can’t explain any more than to say that this is one of those days that indicates that something has changed, though I can’t be sure just what. What I do know is that instead of Christmas carols, I’m listening to Josh Rouse and Elbow, Sufjan Stevens and Radiohead. Instead of hot chocolate, I’m still drinking my coffee black. Instead of putting up Christmas lights, I’m installing some overhead lighting to clear room off the desk. It’s the Big Lebowski instead of It’s a Wonderful Life.
Two years in retail, I fear, has competely jaded me from wanting to participate in the traditional Christmas stuff that for the first time in my life, I have a choice to do with or kick to the curb. I have friends who listen to Christmas carols all year long.
I am not that friend. As far as Christmas sentiment goes, Chevy Chase is about as good as it gets. Granted, my kids will probably get pictures on Santa’s lap and do Advent calendars, and maybe they won’t be infected by their old man’s bitter behaviors, but for the time being, I’ll do Christmas from the underside, and enjoy the company of Anna and Simeon and the babies. I’ll enjoy knowing that there’s a whole portion of the story that, I think, points to the very heart of the Christmas season: that Jesus did indeed come from the lowly, and came to those who were a little put out with all the hap-hap-happy noise that surrounded the inn.
The truth of the Christmas story is that Jesus came to and was rejected by those that were not looking for a downer. It is to those that mourn that comfort comes, to those that know that all the crap of the season is the reason that reunion is what we really need, to those who know that our lives are built and rebuilt forever towards the One who gives and gives and gives.
P.S. Update–in eating my words about Christmas carols, I stumbled across this.
(HT: Cawley’s Blog)
“Where do you think you’re going? Nobody’s leaving. Nobody’s walking out on this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas. No, no. We’re all in this together. This is a full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency here. We’re gonna press on, and we’re gonna have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny fucking Kaye. And when Santa squeezes his fat white ass down that chimney tonight, he’s gonna find the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse.” –Clark Griswold
**
Upon my annual watching of Christmas Vacation, I realize that Clark Griswold may perhaps be my generation’s George Bailey. He’s a family man, subject to extreme moods, works for a terrible boss at a meaningless job making coating for cereal, and is henpecked by a family who really cares for him. So it goes. Sometimes, I’m closer to kicking over the reindeer than I am planning the next great family Christmas reunion.
A phone call tonight from two friends telling me about a college acquaintaince whose life is coming to a close tonight. A friend is in from out of town for a few days; another beautiful one is leaving on Tuesday. Life is not kind enough to give us time to absorb one direction of emotion before handing me its equal and opposite child, to hold its hand and guide it into being as well. The overwhelming presence of love is more than we are equipped to stand, and so, we hide ourselves away from it most of the time, allowing love to touch us when we are ready, and shutting ourselves down when we can no longer stand its light. We forget that the backside of love is its leaving, that the price we pay for loving one instant in a world with so much worth believing is the ache of never being able to love enough.
As Jesus came out of the birth canal, slippery with the world of the womb, the whole world broke into mourning, as the babies of Bethlehem were killed. The occasion of the birth of the Messiah was the occasion of the murder of the children of Bethlehem, mourning filling the streets as child upon child met the sword before they could hold one. It was from the beginning that our Lord set foot in the world, crowded by love and destruction, equal plagues of compassion and death. To the very cross, Jesus loved his mother as his arms stretched out to the grave. It was to Mary that the sword in the heart and love in her life was promised in the same life.
It’s a tragedy when children are taught that opposite feelings are wrong, that we must feel one at a time. It’s human to be able feel both extremes, and a gift to feel them both at once. For it was into the vast contraction of extremes that Jesus entered, finding room for the whole of life, and in his taking up of the whole damn thing, saving the whole damn thing.
Christmas begins in a celebration which comes commensurate with wailing and gnashing of teeth, two events which are impossible to separate, for us or for our faith. If the Lord is unable to hold them both, what hope have we of making any way by day or by night, without this pillar of smoke twisting before us in the desert, circling and revelling in the winds, the same as the pillar of fire by night, daring us to come near? The events of life and death are too close friends to be weeded out by anything stronger than the promise that truly God came into this mess, and that because of that, life has the last word.
“He did not empty himself by losing what he was, but by taking what he was not. Nor did he empty himself by destroying what belonged to him, but by assuming what belonged to us and by being obedient as man in the form of the servant even to death upon the cross.”–Augustine, Answer to Maximinus, V.
“You came to take us
All things go, All things go
To recreate us
All things grow, All things grow”
–Sufjan Stevens
***
The baby in the manger, the one who we refer to as Jesus, the one whose name I took in vain yesterday as someone walked in front of my car–God with us, Emmanuel, the God-man.
In this quote, Augustine puts into a nutshell part of what is so significant about the incarnation: that God took up that which was not God. We, frail, vibrant, emotional, wavering, quaking in our teeth–taken up and enjoyed by God, steady, able, strong, true. The glory of the incarnation is not so much that God showed up in human flesh, so that we could see what God was like, but that in the body of Jesus, God was taking up all of us, the fullness of what it meant to be human and finite and creaturely, without losing anything.
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