Christmas greetings from Tom and Christine Sine in Australia.
The peace of God of rest on you,
The love of God shine through you,
Let Christ be birthed afresh in you
This day and every day.
From Pixabay.com (Click Photo for original)
Once upon a time (just last night – Christmas Eve, 2015), in a land far, far away (about 35 miles from my home) … I saw God!
It started out like many holiday gatherings; one that has it’s usual assortment of aunts and uncles and cousins and, in our case, a healthy smattering of friends who may not share our “blood line,” but who never the less belong with us – and to us.
Our clan has grown seemingly over night, with several of us now elevated to “greatness,” as in great-grandmother and great-aunt. The children showed off their children, who in turn showed off their new husbands and boyfriends. Babies bounced from lap to lap and toddlers were given free reign to run and explore.
Little boys who were just children a minute ago somehow became teenagers when we weren’t looking. Little girls who once huddled together in their own cliques away from the adults were now adults themselves, sharing stories of their careers and goals, their successes and struggles, seeing each other with the new eyes of maturity. And of course a “new” crop of little girls are waiting in the wings to take up where the now 20-something cousins left off.
We had other guests this year as well; uninvited guests who profoundly made their presence known. Illness, absence, traumatic events, our limited mortality all sat right down at the table as if they belonged. You know you can’t avoid these “party crashers,” so you may as well scoot over and make room for them. They are, after all, the harbingers of what the circle brings – life, death, then life again as we make our way through.
They can truly be harsh, but as strange as it may sound, for once I saw that they’d brought an incredibly special gift with them. Their “present” was the present ..clearly understanding how now – in this present moment we have the chance to hug and kiss and laugh and joke and eat and drink together – knowing full well we won’t look the same next year. It’s not that we don’t “want” to, but because it just doesn’t work that way.
We can never re-create the special moment of right now. Nothing stands in freeze-frame except photographs. Life will undulate; its pitch will increase and decrease without a care of what we want – how much we want things to stay the way they are and never ever change. Perhaps it’s my age. Perhaps it’s because I’m further down the road which gives one a unique perspective (if one “chooses” to see) that made me realize that as I embraced my family, both in
welcome – then in goodbye, it was actually “God” hugging me.
It was God’s warmth radiating to me and through me, extending to such a depth of love that it had to be a much more numinous exchange than I could ever conjure up on my own. Yes, that was surely “God-with-us” this Christmas Eve. That was surely what this holiday is all about – what all the church services, and Christmas carols and nativity scenes and other gestures of affection try to convey – but so often miss the mark.
Recognizing this present in the present is surely the only way we can ever end the story with:
“…and they all lived happily ever after.”
Emmanuel
(Breviary, O Antiphons)
“You have come near, God-with us.
Not only made your home among us,
You have come to dwell within us,
Making of our heart a habitat of divinity.”
This post is part of our reflections for Advent 2016.
by Lynn Domina
Photo by Lynn Domina All Rights Reserved.
How Long, O Lord: A Seeker’s Litany
We’ve searched for you in forests and meadows, on beaches and hilltops, beside rivers and gorges,
But we’ve seen only trees and grass, sand and flowers, currents and stones;
We’ve searched for you at midnight and at noon,
But we’ve seen only darkness too dark to comprehend and light so bright it stung our eyes;
We’ve searched for you through blizzards and hailstorms, mudslides and drought,
But we’ve felt only cold and fear and pain and thirst;
We’ve looked for burning bushes and listened for whirlwinds and asked for a sign,
But we’ve seen just our ordinary world and heard only daily noise;
We’ve hurried through crowded streets and wandered into deserted alleys,
Until we could not distinguish between stranger and friend;
We’ve noticed the famous and the nameless,
And still we could not find you.
Tell us where you are; tell us who you are;
Restore our faith; revive our hope;
For we seek you still, and we believe we will find you;
We call to you still, and we long to know you are near.
This post is part of our reflections for Advent 2016.
I wonder what it was really like, that day the Prince of Peace was born? Mary and Joseph must have been churning with emotion. As new parents, there would have been joy and amazement as this delicate child emerged from the womb and gave out his first cry.
In the back of their minds though, what must they have been thinking? They had received those strange messages from God about this baby, and Joseph knew he was not the natural father. I imagine their joy was mixed with large portions of wonder, fear, anticipation, and confusion. How could they begin to take it all in?
Then the shepherds arrived with their unbelievable story about a host of angels announcing to them the birth of Mary and Joseph’s little child. Mary “pondered” all these things in her heart. What a tame word for all the swirling emotions she must have been experiencing!
We all have images of these events in our minds. From years of stories, Christmas pageants, and carols, our ideas of Jesus’ birth have been shaped. We have images of “three kings” journeying from the east to worship the newborn King of the Jews, yet the number of Magi is never mentioned. Similarly our minds may conjure images of Mary and Joseph turned away from some kind of local hotel, finding shelter in a barn or a cave with the animals.
But the words used to describe the “inn” actually refer to a kind of upper family room, a guest room, that was already full, so they had to stay in the lower part of the home where the animals were brought in during the evening. It’s highly unlikely that they were alone in the room. Mary was almost certainly attended to by various female family members as she gave birth. (For more see Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth E. Bailey.)
The power of story can shape our understanding of the birth of Jesus. More often than not these pretty stories downplay the radical nature of what God was up to in this miraculous birth.
We know the shepherds were there, welcomed into the room with Jesus. We’ve heard how radical it was for these shepherds to be present, to be the first to hear the Good News. But I also wonder what it must have been like for Joseph’s extended family. They also were required to journey to Bethlehem for the census.
- What must have been going through their minds?
- Was this all still a disgrace for the family, or had they somehow reconciled themselves to the scandal?
- Were Mary and Joseph staying with family there, or had they been shunned?
- If you were one of the extended family there for the census, how would you get your head around the news from the shepherds? Could you accept it?
We don’t know the answers to these questions; all we can do is guess. We don’t even know if Joseph’s parents were still alive. But what if they were? Can you imagine what it would be like to be Joseph’s father in this situation? What would you be feeling if you were Joseph’s mother? Was the scandal made more palatable because their social status was already rather low? Did they hold onto family, in spite of the embarrassment, embracing this child as one of their own?
I wonder…
Was this Jesus’ first act of reconciliation, of “drawing all things to himself”, to bring this family which had been fractured by scandal, back together? Or was this instead part of the fulfillment of Jesus’ more difficult words:
Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. Luke 12:51-53
With Mary, I ponder.
Filled with wonder and awe, with anticipation tinged with confusion, I ponder.
As we live into our faith as best we can, the flaws in our own assumptions are revealed. We wrestle, knowing in whom we trust, in whom we believe, yet also aware how often this same faith, “as through a glass darkly”, has manifested with both love and hate, reconciliation and division, hope and despair.
Even as we celebrate Emmanuel, God-with-us, we’re stuck admitting we don’t have all the answers, and some of the “answers” we have are more problematic than helpful. Yet we continue to believe,
to wrestle,
to hope,
to sit in wonder, and ponder all these things in our hearts.
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9:6
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.Izumi Shikibu (974?-1034?)
Jane Hirshfield/Mariko Aratani
Jesus sat down to chat, to eat, and to sleep in a wide variety of houses. He invited the strangest mix of society to join him. I can imagine the dismay of many of his hosts at the steady influx and invasion of unknown people, not dressed for the occasion, smelling rather ripe and rank, with dirt on their clothes and mud on their sandals. A mix of people who were associated with radical religious movements, social extremists, and political agitators might well cause severe anxiety to a host who feared for their reputation and association.
But this is what Jesus calls hospitality – hospitality to others and hospitality to ourselves. No one is to be shut out.
At present I cannot offer anyone a meal or a home, since illness often prevents me socialising in the way I would like, and I have no home at the moment to invite others into. What I can do from my bed is work on my own prejudices, those attitudes that would stop me in the future from even seeing the presence of someone who might be in need of the kind of hospitality I could offer. As Pete Grieg reminds me:
People tell me they have the gift of hospitality by which they mean that they like dinner parties … This is not the gift of hospitality. This is the gift of a box of chocolates.
Biblical hospitality starts in the heart and not the ikea catalogue. It is sacrificial and thoughtful, familial and flexible, patient and consistent, humble and imaginative. It allows for interruption, goes the second mile and gives space.
Above all else, hospitality means listening. “Listening is the highest form of hospitality,” says Henri Nouwen, aiming “not to change people but offering them space where change can take place.”
Listening to those who come sit at the end of my bed is something I can do. The vision that my ‘sick room’ could become a temple of transfigurative encounter gives me real hope.
But will I be ready when the world comes to me? Am I prepared to hear the hard stuff, or am I so ground down by the fogged vision of depression and illness that I am unwilling to hear anyone else’s sadness or joy?
I am still learning that in order to provide exquisite hospitality to those who come to me, I need to bestow the same precious gift on my inner political agitator Kate, the one who gets cross and shouty; on the really awkward, angular Kate who hasn’t grown up from a gawky introspective teenager yet; on the flamboyant, arrogant Kate who flaunts her superior learning in everyone’s face; on the seductress Kate, who enacts dark shadowy fantasies that entrap and deplete all vital energies… These are the Kates I really don’t want to admit even exist within me, let alone spend any time with them listening to them. But that is what Jesus asks me to do at the start of another year on the Way of Wisdom.
And I will not be alone. For the advent of Jesus into the world is all about this one central fact: God is with me. God is with us.
So there is no need to slam the door and shun who I fear will be harmful company within myself.
I recently re-read Psalm 31.22 and heard the psalmist’s panic attack echo in my own fears that arise from believing the lie of isolation
I had said in my alarm, “I am driven far from your sight.” But you heard my supplications when I cried out to you for help.
In the midst of depression it feels like I am completely alone, cut off from God, from others, even from myself. But part of extending Jesus’s model of hospitality even to myself, is to remember that this is the opposite of true reality. All I need do is listen to those who cry out in me, and join in with their cry to God for help.
Can I open enough doors in myself today so that the cries of the wounded in the world join the cries of the wounded within myself? Can we who weep come together to God to receive the wholeness of being heard?
This is the Good News of Great Joy that we await expectantly together through this longest night.
This post is part of our reflections for Advent 2016.
As we enter this last week of Advent, I find myself thinking a lot about the incredible love of God, not the crucifixion but the incarnation, not the death of Christ but rather the birth. I am awed today as I think about this ultimate act of love.
God never comes to us in obtrusive, aggressive, judgmental ways but always like a vulnerable infant a newborn child who beckons to us with an offer of love that seeks to be loved in return. In the birth of Jesus we see the childlike God who comes to us and to all the world as an infant to be loved, and cherished, an infant who does not seek to control but rather to shape and change through the sharing of love.
The birth of Jesus teaches us that loving others means entering their world and being willing to meet them where they are at, listening to them, accepting them, allowing their attitudes to shape us. Jesus did not expect those around him to immediately enter his world – the kingdom of God world where love and peace and generosity reigned. He did not condemn them for not living by God’s loving ways. Jesus teaches us to offer love that is patient, kind, generous and forgiving as God, in Christ offered us.
What was the ultimate act of God’s love and how do we grapple with that as we live our lives in God’s world?
God’s ultimate act of love, I think, was not giving Jesus up on the cross but giving Jesus to be born amongst us. God not only allowed him to be born as a vulnerable infant but rejoiced at his birth. God willingly let go of control aware that this loving act would ultimately end in suffering and death. Yet through that act of God’s love a new world, a world of love was birthed into ours.
Surely the birth of Jesus teaches us that love means vulnerability. Love means giving our lives so that new expressions of God’s love can be birthed in the world around us. The infant Jesus, the childlike God is here in our midst, begging to be loved, and to be nurtured into wholeness.
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