Lent I

There is no right way to dissever rubble—
Just shard by shard on pirouetting toes
That flit between the groaning rafters, those
Who lifted up their heads and now pay double
Under dust. So on the chafty stubble
Lay out each shattered plank, each corpse that froze
In his own trenches where the poppy grows
Along his veins; for man is born to trouble.

I cannot be rebuilt from my own grout;
Dismantle my decay to feel the sun,
For what is living in these mildew eaves
Is not myself and I would sweep it out.
For you who resurrect yourself have done
The same in souls as in the budding leaves.

Mysteriously joyful

Christian devotional practices from the Middle Ages have included meditations of the “mysteries” around the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. The specific scenes selected for emphasis are called the “Joyful Mysteries,” “Sorrowful Mysteries,” and “Glorious Mysteries,” respectively, with five in each set.

Yet at the close of the Christmas season, I was suddenly taken aback at the name of the mysteries of this season—the "Joyful Mysteries." Perhaps we who read the story of Christ’s birth retrospectively in the light of his later death and resurrection can call these events “joyful,” but to the people involved, to Mary in particular, joy does not seem the most obvious common thread.

• The Annunciation: An angel greets a young teenager and announces to her that she will bear a son. The betrothed virgin is troubled, as any mother with an unwanted pregnancy can imagine, but humbly submits to what she knows will be a source of shame. A mystery, yes, but joyful?
• The Visitation: The pregnant girl travels eighty miles to visit her pregnant cousin. When she arrives, the baby in the elderly woman’s womb tips his mother off, and the secret is out of the bag. I wonder about Mary’s fear in front of her cousin. Her Magnificat may have expressed relief as much as joy.
• The Nativity: The long journey to Bethlehem climaxes when Mary goes into labor in the streets. There is no place to stay, and so the couple takes refuge in a barn, and Mary suffers the pains of childbirth on dirty straw among animals. Joy could only have come on the heels of fear and pain.
• The Presentation: The couple presents the poor-man’s sacrifice at the temple, and Mary hears Jesus’ screams as he is circumcised. An old man and woman recognize the child as the awaited Messiah, and Simeon gives a chilling prophesy that “This Child is destined to be the downfall and rise of many in Israel, a sign that will be opposed.” Then he turns to Mary and foretells that a sword will pierce her soul as well.
• The Finding of Jesus in the Temple: Mary and Joseph only discover they have left the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem after traveling for a day, and their panicked return must have been plagued by anxiety and grief. When they find him on the third day, the boy chides them for their fear and identifies his higher priorities.

I don’t know if I’m treading dangerous ground to say I don’t imagine these events being times of great joy for the Holy Family as they unfolded. Yet the Church calls them joyful: joyful for humanity, certainly, and thus by extension to the actors involved, however fearful and humiliating and painful they might have been at the time. Perhaps that is part of what is so mysterious about them.

I once wrote a (slightly controversial) post about God rewriting his own story in Hebrews 11, declaring against our available data that various men and women were heroes of a faith that they often did not demonstrate possessing. Perhaps the Church has done that here as well, pointing to this awkward union of God and humanity and declaring it “joyful.” The pain and fear of our human experience is not nullified by the Incarnation; it is heightened, and then redefined.

Only with a God who can enter a human womb can joy enter our human pain. As we close the Christmas season, that is still as much a mystery to me as it ever was.

"Here are my mother and brothers!"

Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?

A Dominican friend of mine once explained the fascination with the Virgin Mary to me this way, which made sense even to a Protestant who grew up with sola scriptura on her tongue:

“What is it that makes a saint, Em? What makes a person truly holy?”

I pondered for a minute, knowing to avoid an answer that had anything to do with holy actions, as if the fruit of a holy life were the cause of the holiness. Faith could have been a viable answer, but it seemed a bit vague and would cry for further description, and I knew that I Corinthians 13 had declared another virtue superior even to faith.

“Love,” I finally concluded. “Love of Christ is what makes us holy.”

“Absolutely,” he answered. “And assuming that some of us grow further in love for Christ than others, who do you think loved Christ the most?”

When he put it that way, the answer was obvious. I love my nephews something fierce, but I know my sister-in-law’s love for them trumps mine from the beginning; I love my mother something fierce, but I know her love for me trumps that as well. And it was with that love, the intimate love of a mother that finds its object within her, that Mary loved Christ.

The rest of us are learning to love, some more quickly than others, some more purely than others. My own growth in love is often severely neglected, taking a back seat to other more pressing demands of teaching and research and homeownership and social demands, and now Advent has come and gone almost unnoticed in the bustle of my superficially significant pursuits.

Yet like the baby in Mary’s womb, Christ has been present all along, present within me and bursting out into the world around me. Maybe what is so fascinating about Mary is not what is unique to her—that she carried the physical body of Christ growing within her own body—but the mysterious sense in which she is an archetype of what is happening to all of us (though in our case, in a much less obtrusive, more ignorable way). Mary could not ignore him like I have over the past few months, yet even in my case he is present, spiritually and (sacramental theology would insist) physically.

There is grace to me in that reminder, grace to remember that, whether or not I have been aware of it, Christ has come within me and without me. My own journey of holiness will be a process of learning how to love the Christ who is already there.

Unless the Lord builds the house

Today we read the great twist in the story of Advent, the great wrinkle as we have been preparing the way for the Lord. David wants to build God a house of cedar, and God comes back to him and says:

“Who are you to build me a house? I built you a house. Look around you at your palace, David: I built this for you when you had been living in the fields with your sheep.”

It is God who builds houses, it is God who chooses the place of his dwelling, not David. David thinks he can make a place for God’s dwelling, but all along God had been building one for David.

Moreover, God does not stop at building David’s palace that can be destroyed a couple generations later when the nation is divided, or a dozen generations later when the Babylonians destroy the city. God responds to David’s well-intended desire to build him a house by saying:

“Furthermore, not only have I already placed you in the very house in which you are living, but I will build you a house that will not fall. From your body, not your cedar, I will build your house, my house, that will never be destroyed.”

From David’s home in the fields, God built him a palace. From David’s loins, God built Solomon. From David’s son Solomon, God built a temple. From David’s children, God built a dynasty. From David’s daughter Mary, God built his Son.

And as we begin the fourth week of Advent, having spent three weeks responding (such as we have) to the call to prepare the way for the Lord, we realize that it is God who has been preparing places. God prepared the way for himself, not in a house of cedar, not even in a tent, but in a womb. God prepared the house for his dwelling within his people, within a woman, within me.

I take comfort in that, as I know my preparations for his coming this year have been no better than that of the people of Bethlehem, as I know I have no palace nor even a tent to give him, as I know my own sleep-deprived, mal-fed body has been too absorbed in exams to prepare a place for him to enter, as I know my own soul is not even a tent but a dirty stable: God has prepared a place for himself despite me and my weariness, without me and my ambitions, within me and my dirtiness.

Advent calls us to prepare, yet we are preparing for the one who has already built his home as he had already built David’s palace, as he has already entered Mary’s body, as he has already entered our own in the Eucharist.

And now, humbled by so subtle a builder, we can only wait.

Amen, Go Lord Jesus?

There was a song that was popular when I was in high school among the Christian circles in which I was walking called “Trading My Sorrows.” The jist of the song was quite simple: we trade our sorrows to receive the joy of the Lord. Other common trades we would talk about include trading our sin to receive Christ’s righteousness, or trading our death to receive his life. These are all a bit unbalanced as far as trading goes, and in each case we seem to get the better end of the stick. Perhaps that was supposed to be the scandal of the gospel. (I’m not going to attack these happy trades right now, though I have taken the first one to task in an earlier post.)

There was one passage in particular that confused me as a college student that did not fit neatly into the trading rubric. While Luke’s version of the beatitudes says logically enough, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh,” Matthew’s much more quoted version renders it, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” a strikingly less triumphant trade. Even if those who mourn have comfort to look forward to, I would ask, wouldn’t it be better not to have mourned at all? What is blessed about receiving comfort, at least as opposed to not mourning to begin with?

Moreover, the Ascension seemed like the worst trade of all. When Jesus is explaining to his disciples that he will be going to the Father and they will see him no more, he anticipates their grief and asserts, “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” How is it to their advantage that he go away in order that he may send them someone to help in his absence, I would wonder. Wouldn’t it be better for him to stick around so that they wouldn’t need a helper? It would have seemed a rotten trade to me.

Thus there is a mystery we celebrate this weekend on the Feast of the Ascension, a mystery that looks ahead to Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit, the mystery that the comfort for the mourners and the Comforter whom the Father sends the disciples is not mere consolation: it/He is further blessing. It is for our good that we mourn, for we will receive his comfort. It is for our good that we seem to be bereaved, for the Spirit has come.

It is good theology to be certain, a theology that says that God will not abandon his people nor allow their weakness to triumph over his redemption. Half the time I don’t believe it; half the time I think mourning trumps comfort and human frailty trumps the Holy Spirit. Thus this weekend the biggest act of faith I can muster is to rejoice.

Go on up to your Father, Jesus, in order that we can receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Alleluia, I suppose.

This is the night

I wish I had time to write, to process the events of the past week--from the six-hour procession around the city with the Bishop on Palm Sunday, to the night tainted by a murder on my street between leaving Christ weeping in the garden on Thursday night and observing his death Friday at noon, to faith in the resurrected Christ on Sunday that begins the new creation even on the very street on which I saw a dead man lie three nights earlier. You may get a lot of Easter posts as I process it all over the summer (if survive [academically] the next two weeks).

In the mean time, as we are still in some ways living in the night that the resurrected Christ has nevertheless entered, as the empty tomb still confuses us his friends who cannot always see him in a way we would expect, I thought I'd copy the words from the Easter vigil service on Saturday night, the night we celebrated the resurrection before even Mary Magdalen had discovered the empty tomb. These words take more faith than I can muster sometimes—try saying O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer! while a warm-but-dead body lies on your friends' yard, for example—but the Church says them nonetheless, and stands together in the faith that his Resurrection gives us.

Rejoice, my friends; rejoice, my neighborhood: Christ is risen, even as the night lingers.

* * *

Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God's throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!

Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!

Rejoice, O Mother Church! Exult in glory!
The risen Savior shines upon you!
Let this place resound with joy,
echoing the mighty song of all God's people!

It is truly right
that with full hearts and minds and voices
we should praise the unseen God, the all-powerful Father,
and his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

For Christ has ransomed us with his blood,
and paid for us the price of Adam's sin to our eternal Father!

This is our passover feast,
when Christ, the true Lamb, is slain,
whose blood consecrates the homes of all believers.

This is the night
when first you saved our fathers:
you freed the people of Israel from their slavery
and led them dry-shod through the sea.

This is the night
when the pillar of fire destroyed the darkness of sin!

This is the night
when Christians everywhere,
washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.

This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.

What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.

O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

Most blessed of all nights,
chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead!

Of this night scripture says:
"The night will be as clear as day:
it will become my light, my joy."

The power of this holy night dispels all evil,
washes guilt away, restores lost innocence,
brings mourners joy;
it casts out hatred, brings us peace,
and humbles earthly pride.

Night truly blessed when heaven is wedded to earth
and man is reconciled with God!

Earth felt the wound

(Apologies for the long blogger silence as I prepared for my recent conference in Montreal and entered the long push at the end semester. Posts will likely remain scarce as I work on final research and prepare for a trip to Asia.)

On Friday I had the moving experience of reading through all of Paradise Lost aloud in one marathon sitting with a group of students and faculty at the university. All morning and afternoon we moved through some of the most stunningly beautiful lines of English poetry, and I found myself shocked by the wonder of creation in Book VII as God separated the waters from the land:

over all the face of Earth
Main Ocean flow'd, not idle, but with warme
Prolific humour soft'ning all her Globe,
Fermented the great Mother to conceave,
Satiate with genial moisture...

But as the evening approached and we moved into Book IX, my professor retrieved his basket of apples, passing them out to all the women as Eve reached out “her rash hand in evil hour” and directing us to eat when

Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.

The men of course were not off the hook, and they were directed to follow as Adam “scrupl’d not to eat” and

Earth trembl’d from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan.

It was a moving experience, the first time my heart has ever been quite so grieved to consider the Fall in which I myself am complicit.

I too have taken. I too did eat.

The season of Lent reminds us of our part in this great epic of human history: not the part of the hero, not even only of the victim. Indeed, we who have committed to fast during this season and have found our vigilance waning over the weeks may have questioned such apparently arbitrary strictures to be “suspicious, reasonless,” and may have found our appetites to get the better of our piety. We may have also slighted

that sole command,
So easily obeyd amid the choice
Of all tastes else to please thir appetite,
Though wandring.

Lenten fasting may indeed be an opportunity for penance, but this year I have also found it to be a canvas on which I have painted my own sin. I am the woman who has taken from the tree. I am the friend sleeping in the garden. I am the disciple who has denied my tortured master.

I too need a savior.

True Fasting

This is a bit of an early Lenten post, but since it’s about time to start preparing for Lent, I thought I’d share some thoughts.

“Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
For day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
and seem eager for God to come near them.
‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?’

“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
The LORD will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

“If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the LORD’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
then you will find your joy in the LORD,
and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

* * *

A few weeks ago I was up late working on a paper when my doorbell rang. As a woman living alone in a rough neighborhood, red flags immediately went up, and I froze for a minute or two, hoping whoever it was would leave. When the doorbell resounded I decided to go downstairs and see who was there, though I did not open the door.

“It’s Johnny!” I heard from the other side.

“What is it, Johnny?” I asked in a friendly tone that disguised my sinking heart and cringing face, knowing very well that this homeless man was looking for money.

“I noticed the snowplows left a pile in your driveway, Ma’am,” he said. “I wanted to clear it off for you.”

“Oh, that’s okay Johnny,” I reasoned helplessly. “I’m not driving anywhere tomorrow.”

“Well, it’s just that, I can get it out of there for you for five dollars.”

“Johnny,” I insisted with an exaggerated cheerfulness, self-conscious of the fact that I had no intension of opening my door, “I can take care of it tomorrow. It’s a little late for shoveling.”

“But, Ma’am,” he struggled painfully, “I don’t have anywhere to stay tonight. For a couple dollars, I can stay with a man down the road.”

It was a familiar enough story I remembered from my college days with my homeless friends by campus. But I was no longer a college student in a well-lit, well-patrolled campus; I was a single woman living alone in a high-crime neighborhood. And thankfully for me, I had no cash on me.

“I’m sorry Johnny,” I yelled with that exaggerated pleasantness that felt quite hypocritically thin that night, “but I don’t have any cash on me here.”

There was a pause. “Well, do you have just a little change?”

I realized I did have some outside in my car, but I wasn’t about to announce the fact. “No,” I lied, “I don’t have any. I’m sorry, Johnny.”

The incident disturbed me for the next 24 hours or so. I do not know a single person who would suggest to me that I should have done otherwise that night, and I didn’t necessarily think I had made the wrong decision to keep my door locked as “the least of these” stood outside in the cold (don’t worry, Mom!). Perhaps all I could have done that night was to turn Christ away in the form of a homeless man, but there was no way I could have felt good about it.

And now, as we prepare for Lent, I am remembering some words my rector’s wife shared with the women of my church last year. A healthy season of repentance is not only characterized by a time of fasting, she explained to us: the Church has historically understood the discipline of repentance in terms of fasting, prayer, and alms-giving.

As I prepare for Lent and think about ways to include fasting, prayer, and alms-giving into my lifestyle, I am remembering that night with Johnny. We do indeed live in a time that generosity is plagued with the concern of enabling addictions and unhealthy lifestyles (not to mention personal danger). Indeed we do. So did the people to whom Christ initially spoke the radical words from the Sermon on the Mount.

Remembering that night with Johnny outside my locked door, I plan at least over the course of Lent to have cash on me, and to be prepared to “give to the one who begs from you,” as Christ commands us. I rather hope Johnny comes back (during the day!); I hope to be ready for Christ when he does.

With both lungs

I learned once that Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. had been good friends, and that they had originally thought of going into ministry together. For whatever reason, whether for disagreements or mere differences in vocational leanings, they did not. “You stay in the stadiums, Billy,” King (or “Mike,” as Billy called him) wrote to Graham, “because you will have far more impact on the white establishment there than you would if you marched in the streets.” Perhaps he did. Perhaps.

But their divergence was not only strategic; it was certainly somewhat ideological. Graham was unsure of King’s methods of civil disobedience, saying that “No matter what the law may be—it may be an unjust law—I believe we have a Christian responsibility to obey it. Otherwise you have anarchy.” King responded with the words of St. Augustine: “an unjust law is no law at all.” Over time as King began to speak out against the Vietnam war and poverty in a time when Communism was a looming threat, the divergence between him and his old friend became more pronounced.

Nevertheless, their friendship remained intact, and Graham took some radical stances for desegregation at his crusades. He invited King to join him on the pulpit and paid his bail to have him released from jail, and King’s famous declaration that “Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America” is actually a quotation from an article of Graham’s.

Years later Graham confided to some Civil Rights leaders that he wondered what would have happened if he had taken to the streets with his friend, and I suppose we cannot know the answers to questions like that. What indeed might have happened if the iconic figures of liberal and conservative Christianity, figures whom both sides respect even if they disagree, had found a way to share their ministry? What kind of ministry would it have been? It might of course have been a loss to the great good that both of their ministries accomplished, but I cannot help but wonder if it might have muddled some of the sharp distinctions between liberal and conservative Christianity that I have grown up among.

Pope John Paul II, when calling for reconciliation between the eastern and western divisions of Christianity, spoke of the need for the Church to “breathe with both lungs.” Here in America, I am reminded of our lop-sided breathing in every walk from my poor neighborhood to my rich university, every transition from conversations with my Mennonite friends to my Catholic, every Sunday morning stroll by a white church to a black.

I’ve been told many times that Church unity is something we will not see “until heaven” (as if “heaven” were so ephemeral as to be identified by a time rather than a physical place). Today on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which happens to come the day before the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity begins, it seems as good a time as any to remember that our Lord has taught us to pray that his Kingdom come and his will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Amen. Come Lord Jesus!

The Nativitie of Christ

A Christmas-Eve word from Robert Southwell, the sixteenth-century English poet, Jesuit priest, and martyr under Queen Elizabeth I:

Beholde the father, is his daughters sonne:
The bird that built the nest, is hatched therein:
The olde of yeares, an houre hath not out runne:
Eternall life, to live doth now beginne.
The word is dunne: the mirth of heaven doth weepe:
Might feeble is: and force doth faintly creepe.

O dying soules, beholde your living spring:
O dasled eyes, behold your sonne of grace:
Dull eares, attend what word this word doth bring:
Up heavie hartes: with joye your joye embrace.
From death, from darke, from deafenesse, from dispaires:
This life, this light, this word, this joy repaires.

Gift better then himselfe, God doth not know:
Gift better then his God, no man can see:
This gift doth here the gever geven bestow:
Gift to this gift let each receiver bee.
God is my gift, himselfe he freely gave me:
Gods gift am I, and none but God shall have me.

Man altered was by sinne from man to beast:
Beastes foode is haye, haye is all mortall flesh:
Now God is flesh, and lies in Manger prest:
As haye, the brutest sinner to refresh.
O happie fielde wherein this fodder grew,
Whose tast, doth us from beasts to men renew.

-Robert Southwell

Waiting in the Middle Voice

As another partial repeat to keep this blog active through to the end of finals, I'm posting another article I wrote for my church's Advent devotional last year. This is partially derived from a discussion on this blog the previous summer that compared faith to the Greek middle voice, but since that was one of my most popular entries I thought you wouldn't mind the thematic repeat.

* * *

I spent the past summer in a brutal Classical Greek boot camp, fighting in the trenches of grammar complexities like the infamous middle voice (not active, like “the boy at the banana,” or passive, like “the boy was eaten by the banana,” but somehow between the two in a way that English cannot articulate). In that dismal struggle, classmates became trench buddies, and I found myself soliciting their aid for difficulties that went beyond grammar.

I remember one particular conversation I had with a seminarian. It had begun with a minor theological point and had moved into the realm of the very nature of faith. After months of doubting God’s attentiveness to redeem a particularly dark situation in a friend’s life, this was a sensitive topic for me.

“What do you mean by faith?” I asked him. “What does faith mean when you can’t understand?”

“Well,” he puzzled, “faith is not at all an intellectual exercise. Sometimes faith involves seeing your doubt and despair as your own deficiencies and trusting other Christians to get your bearings.”

“But then what is faith?” I repeated. “Is it a feeling?”

“No, it certainly not a feeling,” he quickly asserted. “Feelings come and go, and I don’t think they would commend or condemn you. Your faith can’t rest on feeling good about God anymore than it would be hindered by feeling frustrated with him.”

“So is faith simply action?” I asked, feeling like we were running out of options. “Is faith acting as though God were good even when you don’t feel that he is or understand how he is?”

My friend pondered a bit as if we were trying to articulate ideas in slightly different languages. “No,” he struggled, “I think faith is different from all these things because it is not something we do at all. Faith is a gift; it is something God does. Faith is something we receive.”

“So faith is passive?” I asked, a bit surprised and unhappy with that answer.

“Well, it looks that way...” he struggled. “But it’s active as well because we have to receive it. It’s more like...” he glanced down at his textbook as he tried to articulate his response...

“The middle voice!” he suddenly exclaimed. “Just like in Greek: it looks passive, even though it’s meaning comes across as active. It is somehow neither and both.”

And on the off-chance that there are other people with the ability to find comfort in complex grammatical points, or on the far-more-likely chance that there are other people who struggle to maintain faith when understanding and feelings and actions all fall short, I thought I would share this conversation. If my friend is right that faith is the middle voice, then perhaps all I can do in times of doubt and despair is to prepare places for it, to dust out the corners where Faith would be living if it were there and wait for it to arrive.

Indeed, perhaps Advent embodies the entire posture of faith: the posture of preparation and waiting. Perhaps faith in the midst of doubt and despair, or even in the midst of simultaneously mundane and busy lives, is the act of creating the places for it and waiting for it to arrive. That may involve carving out places for prayer. That may involve holding out in the lives of those we cannot save but can only love. One way or another, it certainly involves preparation and waiting, and perhaps a little hospitality when it arrives.

“I am going there to prepare a place for you,” Christ said to his disciples on the night he was handed over to suffering and death. And as we are left wading through our fluctuating emotions and ideas and disasters, perhaps faith is the posture of preparing places for him. Take heart, then: faith can neither be conjured nor killed; it can only be welcomed.

Veni, redemptor gentium

Today in celebration of the feast of St. Ambrose, my Latin professor had us translate a fourth-century Ambrosian hymn. My Latin is far from expert, but I thought in the spirit of Advent (and because I'm doing a poor job posting anything for you this semester) I'd give you my best shot at a translation. Better Latinists out there are welcome to correct me for the benefit of all.

* * *

Intende, qui regis Israel,
Hark, King of Israel,
super Cherubim qui sedes,
who sits above the Cheribum,
appare Ephraem coram, excita
who appeared to Ephraim, stir up
potentiam tuam et ueni.
your power and come!

Veni, redemptor gentium,
Come, redeemer of nations,
ostende partum uirginis;
show forth your virgin birth;
miretur omne saeculum:
let all the ages rejoice:
talis decet partus Deo.
for such befits the birth of God.

Non ex virili semine,
Not out of the seed of man,
sed mystico spiramine
but out of the Holy Spirit
uerbum Dei factum est caro
the word of God is made flesh
fructusque uentris floruit.
and the fruit of the womb blossoms.

Alvus tumescit uirginis,
The womb of the virgin swells,
claustrum pudoris permanet,
the seal of chastity remains,
uexilla uirtutum micant:
the standards of virtue shine:
uersatur in templo Deus.
God is turned within his temple.

Procedat e thalamo suo,
Let him advance from his chamber,
pudoris aula regia,
from the royal courtyard of chastity,
geminae gigas substantiae
the giant with twin substances
alacris ut currant uiam.
keen to hasten on his course.

Egressus eius a Patre,
Going out from the Father,
regressus eius ad Patrem;
returning to the Father;
excursus usque ad inferos,
going out even to Hell,
recursus ad sedem Dei.
returning to the seat of God.

Aequalis aeterno Patri,
You who are equal to the eternal Father,
carnis tropheo cingere,
gird yourself with a trophy of flesh,
infirma nostri corporis
strengthening the weaknesses of our body
uirtute firmans perpeti.
with your eternal virtue.

Praesepe iam fulget tuum,
Now your stable gleams,
lumenque nox spirat nouum,
and a new light shines forth,
quod nulla nox interpolet
where no night corrupts
fidesque iugi luceat.
may perpetual faith shine forth.

The Long Wait

I don't expect the semester to lighten for a bit, so rather than leave my blog untouched I thought I would post an article I had written for my church's Advent devotional two years ago, which is itself an adaptation of a post I had written here the previous summer. Long-term readers may receive my apologies for the partial repeat, and I hope to return to the land of the musing soon.

* * *

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
-T. S. Eliot

This past summer, I went with some friends kayaking and camping on an island off the coast of North Carolina. It sounded like a great idea.

Among the many well-conceived, ill-executed adventures, the camping escapade is the primary reason we classify the trip as a great experience we would never repeat again, nor wish upon our worst enemies. We all drifted off to sleep sometime around 10 or 11, the four of us in sleeping bags lying side-by-side on a tarp we placed over the cacti and other prickly brush that carpeted the island. The stars were brilliant, satellites and meteors moved, and the Milky Way shone in its full splendor.

I don’t know how long I slept, but eventually I woke to stings of pain piercing my face. I rubbed my skin with my sandy hands, but whatever manner of carnivorous insect inhabited the island remained. I tried to suffocate myself inside my sleeping bag to find refuge, but to no avail. I told myself that perhaps if I didn’t think about the pain it would prove only a minor annoyance, but my skin kept twitching with startling stings. There was no going back to sleep.

I finally got on my tired feet (blistered from a previous ill-executed adventure) and walked along the shore. I found that if I kept moving quickly enough, the bugs would not bite me. Through the long night we wandered the beach for an ambiguous number of dark hours, waiting for the sun to bring relief, feeling like we were in purgatory.

And though we expected the waiting to end with the dawn, the knight faded into a murky glow from a thick shield of fog. By the time the longed-for sunrise would have come, we could only guess its existence from the dim light that finally allowed us to see the red welts that covered our skin as the tiny gnats continued to torture us. The sun had risen, but we were still waiting.

The entire Christian journey is a long narrative of waiting. Job waits for a hearing. Abraham waits for a son. The Hebrew slaves wait for deliverance from slavery. Suicidal prophets wait for God’s presence. And by the time Advent rolls around, we stand with captive Israel waiting for a Messiah.

But the waiting is not exceptionally Christian. Even pagan mythology bears themes of the Fall in the decline from the golden to the silver to the bronze ages, and nearly every tale is infused with grief, sorrow and loss. David’s cries of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are not unique to the Christian story, even if they are fundamental to it. We stand among the company of all creation “groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”

Beyond that, we as Christians tend to forget that the story of waiting is still our story. When the Messiah comes, after all, he is only a baby, and we are left waiting. When he begins his ministry, he does not bring the deliverance we have been longing for, and we are left waiting. When he reaches the climax of his ministry he dies, and we are left waiting. After he trumps death and rises again as the first fruit of the New Creation, he ascends to heaven and tells us he will return, and we are still left here waiting.

Let us take heart as we wander the shore; the sun has risen, and the fog is not forever. Sometimes faith is not a glorious adventure; it is a long walk that we wouldn’t have the option of quitting if we tried. Let us remember that the posture of waiting, through often excruciating difficult, is also fundamentally Christian. We would do well to practice it.

Rejoice the Lord is King!

As I’ve had the chance in recent years to participate in the Church calendar, I’ve appreciated the profundity of living into the Gospel story year after year, experiencing the same traditions that Christians have been practicing for century upon century.

Christ the King Sunday, incidentally, is not one of those. On the contrary, it only began in 1925, the period l’entre deux guerres, between World War I and II, when Pope Pius XI was concerned about the growing threats of nationalism and secularism that Christians were swept up in.

And so here at the end of Ordinary Time, we remember that it is Christ who is King, not our party politics of choice, and that he reigns now over our oblivion. And unlike the forces that tore through Europe during the 20th century, Christ enters his glory as he is lifted up on a cross; and though James and John had campaigned to be on his right and left as he entered his kingdom, those places were reserved for two criminals. The Kingdom has come as the King is lifted up, and we are welcome to follow.

Your kingdom come, Lord, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Come to the waters

I ate a lot of popcorn before bed last night and woke up quite parched in the middle of the night. I got up to get a drink of water, watching eagerly as the cup filled and gulping the water down with great fervor.

However, I realized with every gulp that my thirst was strangely untouched by the water, and as soon as the glass was empty I began filling it up again, hoping a second glass would do the trick.

This process was repeated several times before I began to put the pieces together and figured out that I must be dreaming. Annoyed that I was spending my few precious hours of sleep so miserably, I tried to wake myself up to no avail. Quite a bit miffed, I filled up another glass of water.

And as Christ told the woman at the well “Whoever drinks the water I give him shall never thirst” and cried out within the temple in Jerusalem “If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink” just as God said through the prophet Isaiah “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters,” there is quite a lot of room for a Christian analogy here. Indeed, Christ did promise that “Whoever believes of me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Streams of living water will flow from within him.’” We have passed through the waters, we have entered into that rest, and he has met our thirst.

But there is another way that I am still guzzling water like I was in my dream, still carrying a thirst that water is meant to fill, still drinking the memories of water or the hope of water, still waiting for the fullness of the ultimate water. To whatever extent I can say that, it seems dangerous to me to emphasize the thirst-quenching nature of Christianity without an acknowledgment that we are still waiting for the eschatological fulfillment of our longings, still waiting for the full quenching of the thirst that has already been met in a preliminary way.

As we approach Advent, we remember that we are lonely, longing, wandering, expectant people. How could we not be? We have tasted the beginning of a fulfillment that is still in progress.

Feast of the Transfiguration

The Pentateuch ends rather anticlimactically. As a cohesive narrative, the five books of the law could be read as the life of Moses rather than the history of Israel: after Genesis sets the background for the nation and how they got into Egypt, Exodus begins with the birth of Moses and Deuteronomy ends with his death.

Moses reluctantly accepts his calling to lead the people out of slavery, brings them out of Egypt with many wonders, enters the cloud of smoke on Sinai to receive the books of the law, leads the people to the Promised Land only to have them rebel, intercedes for them when God wants to wipe them out, and wanders through the wilderness with them for forty years. Then in Deuteronomy he delivers his farewell speech as they prepare to enter, walks Mt Nebo to look on the land, dies there, and is buried by the Lord in an unknown grave.

Though we know that the people do enter the land in the book of Joshua, as far as Moses is concerned (and as far as the Pentateuch is concerned), it ends there. The great work is left unfinished, unaccomplished, and the people are never at rest—not after Joshua conquers the land, not under the judges, certainly not under Saul, not even under David himself. The land is never at peace, though prophets continue to call out:

Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, “They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.”
As I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.” (Psalm 95)

Today, however, is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Christ takes his disciples up a mountain like the one on which Moses died with his work unaccomplished, on which Elijah hid ingloriously as he was hunted like a criminal after his victory over the prophets of Baal. Mountains are a place where God appears to prophets, but they are also a place of refuge in defeat.

And there on that mountain in the presence of Christ, Moses enters the Promised Land. The long awaited time of rest has come in the arrival of the Messiah who would proclaim from the height of his apparent defeat, “It is finished,” before he himself rested in the tomb on the Sabbath day. Christ reveals today what remained unfinished after 40 years in the wilderness, the elusive kingdom that brings rest for the people of God.

For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. (Hebrews 4:8-10

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest...

The path to sainthood

Today is the feast day of (among other people) St. Thomas More, the patron saint of my master’s thesis. I’m not thinking much about martyrdom today, nor, despite the fact that Ireland always reminds me of the tragedy of Church division, about unity. Instead, remembering his prayer scroll that he read from the Tower of London as he awaited execution, I am thinking about the ultimate vocation of the Christian: Love.

Those who are the most holy, from what I can tell, do not get there by trying to be holy. They most certainly do not get there by hammering out whatever imperfections linger with them, nor by striving to be better people. The holiest people I’ve met, at any rate, radiate not perfection but love. Love for God and for ones brother does, after all, sum up the law and the prophets, and we are able to love only because he has first loved us, as John reminds us in his first epistle. The path to sainthood, as it turns out, is a path of receiving the love of God.

I don’t have a clear idea of why that seems to come easier to some folks than to others, how I (for example) could have tried to follow Christ for decades without a sense that he loved me. I don’t know how much love (and then sainthood by extension) is a gift we receive passively or actively (the middle voice, as a friend once speculated). But I do know that a call to holiness, a call to sainthood, is a call to receive God’s lavish Grace.

On that note, on the feast of the good St. Thomas More, I will end with the poem the saint read 475 years ago today as he watched John Fisher marched to the scaffold where he would follow two weeks later. We are called like More not as much to martyrdom as to love; in the light of love, martyrdom almost becomes incidental.

Rede distinctely
pray deuoutly
syghe depely
suffer pacyently
meke youe lowly
giue no sentenc hastely
speke but rathe and that truly
preuent youre spech discretely
do all your dedes in charytye
temtacyon resyst strongly
breke his heade shortly
wepe bytterly
haue compassion tenderly
do good workes busyly
loue perseuerently
loue hertely
loue faythfully
loue god all only
and all other for hym charitably
loue in aduersytye
loue in prosperyty
thinke alway of loue for loue ys non other but god hymselfe. Thus to loue bringeth the louer to loue without ende.

The gospel we profess

Today in the Divine Office, in my prayers before heading out to navigate the interesting world of Irish Sunday mornings, I read this:

God our Father,
we rejoice in the faith that draws us together,
aware that selfishness can drive us apart.
Let your encouragement be our constant strength.
Keep us one in the love that has sealed our lives,
help us to live as one family
the gospel we profess.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Hear us Lord, between the lovely charismatic and hurt Protestants who will greet me warmly as they declare the impossibility of being Catholic and Christian in Ireland, between the dry but faithful Catholics who will mumble their way through a mass they do not understand, between the late mornings of the hung-over Saturday night revelers who will not be joining me at either church this morning. In your mercy, hear our prayer.

Pentecost, 2010

Find rest my soul; the work is done,
And you may simply keep the feast.
There's time to rest just as to run
And to receive and pass the peace.
The calling is revealed a grace: the choice
To follow where you're fashioned to rejoice.

The Spirit hovers on the deep
That 'til today had groaned in pain,
And those who sewed in tears will reap
The New Creation green from rain.
You entered fractured, but you found the whole;
So rest, O weary Pilgrim — rest my soul.

The Season of Pentecost

The very long, six-month season between Pentecost and Advent is known as Ordinary Time. For those who get excited about the seasons of the Church calendar as I do, this is the boring time, when after six months of walking through the story of Christ’s work in the cosmic story of salvation, we simply go about our business as usual with few major celebrations.

This dull picture of Ordinary Time was indeed consistent with my dull picture of our era in the cosmic story of salvation. Christ came, lived, died, rose again, and ascended to the Father, and now we are left in this awkward time between the climax and the ultimate resolution.

But this year I remember that it is also called the season of Pentecost, a season where the Church colors are green because creation is being reborn (not simply waiting for rebirth in the Second Coming). Christ has already been raised from the dead, “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep”— the Resurrection has begun! The Spirit has already been poured out upon us “who have the firstfruits of the Spirit,” just has he had hovered over the waters in the first creation. As the Orthodox liturgy states quite clearly, the sign of the Spirit’s coming demonstrates that the Fall has already been reversed, as those who have been cursed with confusion of language are brought together as the Gospel is proclaimed in all languages at Pentecost:

The arrogance of building the tower in the days of old
led to the confusion of tongues.
Now the glory of the knowledge of God brings them wisdom.
There God condemned the impious for their transgression.
Here Christ has enlightened the fishermen by the Spirit.
There disharmony was brought about for punishment.//
Now harmony is renewed for the salvation of our souls.

So be encouraged, my friends. Creation is being restored, and we the Church already have the firstfruits of the Spirit, who, Psalm 104 reminds us, created and renews the face of the earth. Though we may indeed be living in the “already but not yet,” we are much, much closer to the “already” than I had realized.

And by chance a friend reminded me of Wendell Berry on Pentecost Sunday, a scene from Jayber Crow when the protagonist looks out a flood and is reminded of the Spirit's work in creation. For any Wendell Berry fans out there or those who should be, I will let him end this:

As soon as I shut my eyes, I could see the river again, only now I seemed to see it up and down its whole length. Where just a little while before people had been breathing and eating and going about their old everyday lives, now I could see the currents come riding in, at first picking up straws and dead leaves and little sticks, and then boards and pieces of firewood and whole logs, and then maybe the henhouse or the barn or the house itself. As if the mountains had melted and were flowing to the sea, the water rose and filled all the airy spaces of rooms and stalls and fields and woods, carrying away everything that would float, casting up the people and scattering them, scattering or drowning their animals and poultry flocks. The whole world, it seemed, was cast adrift, riding the currents, whirled about in eddies, the old life submerged and gone, the new not yet come.

And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape. The Spirit that had made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a muddy horse, and letting the pieces fly.
--from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry