Advent begins

From the Divine Office for the first Sunday of Advent:


Jesus Christ is the joy and happiness of all who look forward to his coming. Let us call upon him and say:
-Come Lord, and do not delay!
In joy, we wait for your coming,
-come, Lord Jesus.
Before time began, you shared life with the Father,
-come now and save us.
You created the world and all who live in it,
-come to redeem the work of your hands.
You did not hesitate to become man, subject to death,
-come to free us from the power of death.
You came to give us life to the full,
-come and give us your unending life.
You desire all people to live in love in your kingdom,
-come and bring together those who long to see you face to face.

Father in heaven,
our hearts desire the warmth of your love
and our minds are searching for the light of your Word.
Increase our longing for Christ our Savior
and give us the strength to grow in love,
that the dawn of his coming
may find us rejoicing in his presence
and welcoming the light of his truth.
We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord.

My God, good or evil!

In what had surprised me by becoming my most controversial post, I once observed some of the peculiarities of the way the writer of Hebrews goes about telling the story of the great heroes of the faith. I failed to mention one of the strangest ones:

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, "Through Isaac shall your offspring be named." He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.

“That’s not faith!” I always wanted to protest. "You're messing up the story! Abraham is our model of costly sacrifice; if he thinks God is going to raise Isaac from the dead, it's no longer costly!" After all, isn’t the story commonly understood as God’s testing of Abraham’s faith and Abraham passing the test by sacrificing even when it was costly? How would it be faith without sacrifice?

But now I wonder... what if the writer of Hebrews was onto something? What if Abraham showed faith not by being willing to suffer for God, but by following a God he knew to be good? I had always assumed we are to follow God simply because of his authority; maybe Abraham showed faith because he insisted on following a God into a place where God's goodness would be tested (and God passed the test! Huzzah!). Maybe faith is not saying, “My God, good or evil.” Maybe Abraham’s obedience was holding God to his goodness.

And on that note, the Psalmist’s words come to mind on this Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. May we all offer to God this ultimate “sacrifice,” like Abraham before us.

Hear, O my people, and I will speak;
O Israel, I will testify against you.
I am God, your God.
Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you;
your burnt offerings are continually before me.
I will not accept a bull from your house
or goats from your folds.
For every beast of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills.
I know all the birds of the hills,
and all that moves in the field is mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you,
for the world and its fullness are mine.
Do I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of goats?
Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and perform your vows to the Most High,
and call upon me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

Its Damp but where ok

Friday morning my friends in Cork woke at 2am to the sound of running water, and went downstairs to find water pouring through their floor. Two weeks of record-breaking rain had finally overwhelmed the dam upstream, and officials were forced to let out water to avoid a bigger catastrophe if it were to burst. Cork, lying on an island between two channels of the River Lee, had become part of the river. By the morning, the water had reached the top of the kitchen table where I had sat every day over the summer.

People lost businesses. The art museum lost the works that were stored in its basement. Several houses may be irrevocably damaged. The city has been essentially shut down. Who knows what the costs of repair will be.

Immediately upon hearing the news, I wrote to friends in various corners of the devastated city to let them know of my prayers, coveting the scarce pieces of news I could acquire from their facebook information and my own internet searches.

This morning I heard from Finbar, a native Corkonian whose blue-collar upbringing, shady history, warm hospitality, and simple approach to life (not to mention his nearly incomprehensible accent) set him apart as pure Cork, through and through. He responded to my concern with a short note that, both in its brevity and its message (not to mention its diction), well-depict what seems to me to be the Irish approach to suffering:

“Thanks for the prayers but don't worry where fine out. Its Damp but where ok.”

It’s damp.

How Irish. How delightfully Irish.

Bitterness unbridled

We only see you in this world of mud
When both your hands are stained with our own blood.

“Dear Lord,” I remember one of the leaders in my church praying after a local high school shooting back in 2006, “we cannot imagine what would make a child do a thing like this...”

...only I could. High school is brutal, and I remember just what it felt like to be rejected by the savage in-crowd... and I was only a little bit nerdy. I can’t imagine what being a little more outcast would have done to my little teenage soul.

I am a part of a generation that grew up with tragedies, I suppose: the Columbine shooting happened at the end of my sophomore year of high school, the Twin Towers fell three weeks into my college career, and the Virginia Tech massacre happened right as I prepared to begin graduate school. And whenever I hear about another story of unbridled bitterness, I can only shudder and think, “There but for the Grace of God go I...”

So when I bumped into an article yesterday about the execution of the DC sniper from seven years ago, back when I had been a rootless college sophomore whose family lived overseas and who was constantly driving to DC to spend time with my cousin, I could not help but be grieved. I remembered the terror in DC on those mornings when I was visiting my cousin; I remembered the frustration of the African American community back home when the man was caught; I remembered the stories of my housemates who would visit the families of people on death row in the ensuing years.

I don’t mean to poke at controversial political issues, but when I read an article like this I can’t help but be grieved for all parties: for the innocent people who were killed, for their families who lost loved ones with no reasons or a chance to say goodbye, for the man’s ex-wives and children who years ago had lost the man who died yesterday, for the man himself who died without having seen his four children in his seven years in prison. The story seems laced with bitterness from start to finish, bitterness that indeed rots the soul but for the forgiveness of Christ.

Come now, Lord Jesus. Come into those high schools. Come into those broken families. Come into those prison cells. Come into our bitter hearts. Clean the bitterness from us, before we rot completely.

God have mercy on the soul of John Allen Muhammad. God have mercy on the souls still grieving. God have mercy on mine.

Lost in Translation

I was in a coffee shop the other day and heard two young men talking. Before I had heard a single Christian reference they made, I could already tell by the language they were speaking (the particular mannerisms and metaphors), to say nothing of the almost-hip way they dressed, that they were Evangelicals, and had somewhat of an idea of what sort of interdenominational/emergent church they probably attended. It brought back four-year-old memories from my senior year of college.

In college I was part of an Evangelical Christian fellowship that was particularly concerned with finding ways to “reach” the broader campus community with the Gospel. Because I had decided against the Bible colleges where my high school friends attended in favor of the largest liberal arts university in the state for the sole purpose of learning to love a wide range of people different from me, this was a compelling mission. Because I was a somewhat of an eclectic girl with a wide range of interests and influences, it was easy for me to get sucked into being the figurehead of various incarnations of this mission.

Since my family moved to Europe after my first year in college, they suggested I could help lead their outreach to international students. Since I was an artsy kid with an eyebrow ring and boy-short hair, they suggested I could help lead their outreach to the hippie/artsy crowd. Since I was attending an African-American political organization in efforts to understand some of my friends better (where I got sucked into being a leader as well), they suggested I could help lead their side-missions of racial reconciliation and multi-ethnicity.

On my last day of leadership as a burned-out senior, our time of worship was cut short by an announcement that the university had double-booked the room where we were meeting and we would have to leave to allow the next group to come in. The lights popped on and the startled 250 Christians looked disorientedly around as if they had been roused from sleep a half-hour before their alarm was to go off. I was certainly surprised as well, and stood back to take the scene in.

The young nicely-dressed Evangelicals began to evacuate the room as if it were on fire, and were replaced by a large assortment of people of various ages and races and classes who were gathering to watch some pro-environment anti-war film. The room smelled different as the hippies arrived.

“Maybe God had orchestrated things this way,” I heard one of my friends say as she evacuated. “Maybe one of those people had needed to hear the words of songs we were singing when they arrived. Maybe the mix-up allowed us to reach people without realizing it.”

Because of my aforementioned connection with the international/artsy/multiethnic crowd that my Christian fellowship had wanted to “reach,” I lingered in the lobby to talk to the collage of people who were arriving as my friends left the building. The organizers of the event apologized to me for the mix-up, and suggested that our groups had much in common. Our group was concerned with loving God and theirs with loving the poor, they suggested; did I think some of my friends would linger to watch the film with them? I did not, so I made my answer ambiguous.

As the heavy-metal sounds of their film began to play in my right ear, my left ear picked up the acoustic sounds of some familiar worship songs outside the building, where my friends had gathered to finish the evening of worship on the steps. On our last time of worship for the year, I could imagine the leaders asserting, we would not need to the technology of the speakers and overhead equipment; we could worship outdoors with two guitars and the whole campus walking by to watch. We could be a witness in our faithfulness to worship.

As I stood in the lobby hearing the sound of one culture in one ear and the other culture in the other, I felt like I was standing between worlds that spoke different languages and did not realize their inability to communicate.

“Did you see what’s going on outside?” one woman in dreadlocks asked her friend in cammoes.

“No, what is is?”

“There’s a group out there on the steps playing... folk songs or whatever. It’s like... ‘movement music’ or something. I’ve never seen anything like it!”

Once again...

Another dear friend of mine lost a baby this week: a seemingly healthy five-day-old little boy whom she put down for a nap only to watch him stop breathing.

There is a name for this syndrome (as it is called): Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. From what I can tell, that is just a fancy way of trying to define the unknown, to diagnose undiagonosability. When life slips through our fingers like sand, we cry out to doctors for reasons, and receive mere descriptions. They could have just as easily named it Frailty; they could have just as easily named it The Fall.

Once again, I find myself grieving for the little momentary miracle that shocks us like a lightning stroke and is gone. Once again I find myself amazed at the human capacity for love, that the human soul can make room for love so quickly, that love can leave a hole so large after so short a life. Once again, I find myself longing for the Resurrection, and find the little seed of love that the little boy’s life creates within us being the germ of hope, the deposit in our souls to remind us that life is not a flame that can be extinguished. But the germ is a small one.

And once again, I find myself pontificating, trying to distract myself with philosophical musings to avoid the only response that makes any sense: grief.

On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.

On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;

he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove the disgrace of his people
from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken.

In that day they will say,
"Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the LORD, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation."

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.


Photo taken by Franklin Golden. Franklin is a volunteer with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a non-profit foundation that provides professional maternity and birth photos to parents who are losing a child.

Out of the Mouths of Undergrads

The Roman poet Horace once said, “It is when I try to be brief that I become obscure.” I have developed a similar maxim as I struggle through life as a professional paper-grader: “It is when I try to be nice that I become snarky.” Sometimes the students make it quite difficult not to be.

But since this is supposed to be my listening-blog, I thought I would try to extract life lessons from my most recent round of undergraduate pontifications.

* * *

Beware of the ol’ bait-and-switch: "Freedom is there for the taking, but it has to be worked for."

Equality is relative: “They were still limited and not treated as equal as white Americans.”

Any statement can be contradicted by saying the same thing with more words: “This difference that he references is not a social difference, rather it is a difference in perspective and conflict between social identities.”

For postmoderns, stories can be characters: “Being the main character but not the narrator, the entire story is focused on the man.”

What do authors know about the work? “Granted, Hemingway may feel that I am evading his point of the hero…Yet the fact of the matter is that…”

The best metaphors make meanings more obscure: “A slow death has the chance to act as a kind of time-travel reflecting pond.”

And, most importantly by far...

Bloggers are the world’s best humanitarians: “What better way to assist the rest of the human population in deciding how to live than by publishing your opinion on the subject?”



Surely these lessons were worth staying up until 5am to learn!

Losing of our prayers

Since I don’t shout-out to other blogs very often, I thought I’d post an excerpt from one of the blogs I read, in which a mother often writes about her precocious 5-year-old Calvin and his 3-year-old brother Hobbes. In a recent post she writes:

Calvin and I had a rough night tonight, and he was angry when he went to bed. I asked if he would like to pray and ask God to help him get rid of the anger. He prayed, "Dear God, please help the anger to stay inside of me."

Hobbes piped in, "Dear God, please help the anger to go out of Calvin."

Calvin countered, "Dear God, please don't listen to Hobbes. Make the anger stay inside of me. I want to be angry forever, so just don't listen to Hobbes."

Yes, little Calvin, the idea of healing is often offensive to crippled souls. I can’t count how many sermons I’ve heard from John 5 that suggest that Christ’s question to the lame man, “Do you want to be healed?” implies that we bar the doors for our own healing because we would rather be lame. The first step to healing, the standard formula goes, is wanting healing. For the Calvins out there, that prospect can be pretty bleak.

But I wonder... I wonder if, just as little Calvin’s prayers for God to preserve his anger in his spirit forever will hopefully not be answered, our stubbornness is not as detrimental to Grace as we might fear. If I would rather keep my bitterness and God would rather I lose it, maybe I’m fighting a losing battle. Maybe redemption, regardless of the ways I try alternatively to concoct or hinder it, is inevitable anyway.

Be still, my soul; redemption cannot be hurried or slowed. When you would recoil at the thought of healing, maybe it’s only a matter of time before reverse entropy takes you there anyway.

As a better writer once said:

We ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers.
-William Shakespeare

Genocide with Morning Coffee

Edmund Spenser was the poet who settled me once and for all on Renaissance literature, and in that way at least you could say he changed my life. While I was still living in my intercity commune imagining that higher education was the Isaac I had sacrificed on the alter of service to the poor, I found myself sneaking cantos here and there of the half-finished masterpiece The Faerie Queene, finding the beauty of the poetry, richness of the allegory, and depth of the ideas just the medicine I needed to keep my spirit alive.

After coming to graduate school, I could only fall further in love with his poetry. I wrote a paper on the Amoretti, in which Spenser is instrumental in directing the Petrarchan love tradition toward marriage. I wrote a paper on the Epithalamion, which C. S. Lewis cites as being one of the few successful portrayals of pure joy in English poetry. And of course, I wrote a paper on the breathtaking, masterful Faerie Queene itself.

I decided that if I were to ever have a son, I would name him Edmund.

“I love Spenser!” I said to Seamus last summer in response to a mention of where he had stayed in Cork. As the words spat recklessly out of my mouth, I anticipated my error, and was tempted to look over my shoulder for fear that members of the IRA or their 16th-century equivalent would emerge from the shadows in response to my flippant utterance.

The Irishman looked uncharacteristically soberly at me, his constant smile dropping momentarily as he gained his composure. “Edmund Spenser essentially lobbied for the genocide of the Irish people,” he stated mater-of-factly.

What does one say to that? I remembered that Spenser had written something called A View of the Present State of Ireland when he was secretary to England’s lord deputy of Ireland, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it. “Oh,” I managed.

“He was a terrible man,” Seamus maintained, adding graciously to lighten the mood, “but he did write some beautiful poetry.”

Maybe so... but after all, isn’t that the way with most evil in the world? Weren’t lynch mobs composed of salt-of-the-earth Southerners who rallied after church on Sunday? Weren’t Nazi death camps run by fathers and mothers who were probably otherwise pleasant Germans? Weren’t Rwandan massacres carried out by joyful, hospitable Africans? Weren’t terrible atrocities committed by people like... me? Weren’t their hearts shaped a lot like mine?

It seems an undeniable fact of history that mostly-lovely people can have shocking blinders that somehow allow them to confuse genocide with morning coffee (oops!). Spenser was not the first to make this kind of error; “the man after God’s own heart” found himself committing murder to cover up his adultery (rape, by most modern definitions), and needed a prophet to come spell it out to him before he realized it had been a bad thing. I know a lot of people who are perturbed at God for thinking so highly of such a scoundrel. I sometimes figure that that very egregiously overlooking nature of his is the only hope most of us have.

Maybe the primary reason we are called to forgive is that we don’t know what genocides we may be casually supporting with our mundane morning coffee. Maybe most of us are likewise terrible people who write some beautiful poetry (or, more gently, beautiful people with some terrible blind spots). Thank God he likes the poetry!

Bagpipes and Beauty

On Tuesday I was driving my two older nephews, five and three, to a nearby lake to do some plant identification with a horticulturalist friend of mine (a.k.a. Plant Guy). In my efforts to expose my godsons to the finer things in life, I played Celtic music in the car, which to my delight had the boys transfixed.

“This is a bagpipe,” I explained to them during one song. “They play them in Scotland, mostly, but I think there is enough sharing of cultures between the two countries that they play them in Ireland as well. At least, I saw them a few times when I was there, though they might have been there just for the benefit of tourists who don’t know the difference between Ireland and Scotland. They are really funny-looking instruments...”

At this point I began my feeble efforts to describe a bagpipe to preschoolers while I drove. The five-year-old who had developed an early love for musical instruments four years earlier listened intently, my description no doubt giving him a strange picture.

“Oh,” he finally sighed dramatically, “I do hope I get to see a bagpipe in real life before I die!”

I was shocked at his entirely appropriate response. “Well Buddy,” I replied, “I hope so too.”

“Actually,” he continued, “I think everyone should get to see a bagpipe in real life before they die!”

Again, I could not agree with him more.

But he was not finished. “But some people never get to see a bagpipe in real life before they die,” he lamented mournfully.

“No,” I agreed, surprised at the somber turn in the conversation. “It’s very sad.”

“Some people die when they are little babies, and they never get to see a bagpipe in real life. It is very sad when that happens.”

“You’re right, it is quite sad,” I said, never having thought of that particular aspect of the tragedy of infant mortality.

“And some people lived a long, long time ago before there were any bagpipes, and they never even got to hear a bagpipe.”

Again, what could I do but agree?

“But I am still quite young,” he mused, “so hopefully I have a lot of life left in me. I imagine I’ll get to see a bagpipe before I die.”

Well, Little One, I sure do hope so. In the mean time, thank you for the reminder of what I had felt the first time I had heard the bagpipe, and the reminder to love the beautiful things in the world. What a saturated world of gratuitous beauty we live in, full of mountains and skies and the color green and... as if that were not enough... bagpipes on top of everything!