Friday five: longing in our hearts

A big thank you to Sally of the RevGals for this opportunity to ponder things deeply in our hearts. She writes:

"Imagine a complex, multi-cultural society that annually holds an elaborate winter festival, one that lasts not simply a few days, but several weeks. This great festival celebrates the birth of the Lord and Saviour of the world, the prince of peace, a man who is divine. People mark the festival with great abundance- feasting, drinking and gift giving....." (Richard Horsley- The Liberation of Christmas)

The passage goes on, recounting the decorations that are hung, and the songs and dances that accompany the festival, how the economy booms and philanthropic acts abound....

But this is not Christmas- this is a Roman festival in celebration of the Emperor....This is the world that Jesus was born into! The world where the early Christians would ask "Who is your Saviour the Emperor or Christ?"

And yet our shops and stores and often our lives are caught up in a world that looks very much like the one of ancient Rome, where we worship at the shrine of consumerism....

Advent on the other hand calls us into the darkness, a time of quiet preparation, a time of waiting, and re-discovering the wonder of the knowledge that God is with us. Advent's call is to simplicity and not abundance, a time when we wait for glorious light of God to come again...

Christ is with us at this time of advent, in the darkness, and Christ is coming with his light- not the light of the shopping centre, but the light of love and truth and beauty.

What do you long for this advent? What are your hopes and dreams for the future? What is your prayer today?

In the vein of simplicity I ask you to list five advent longings...

1. I long for our country to steady itself...to stanch the financial bleeding; to rediscover its own moral compass; to do justice, feed the hungry, care for the sick, and innovate our way into a new energy (both in the inspirational sense and the make things go sense). I long for our new President to step calmly into the gap and start helping us clean up this mess.

2. I long for a global religious community that values humility, compassion and reason as much as it values dogma. That's the macrocosm...in micro, I imagine a world in which each of us could remember and take seriously the words of Wonderful Colleague: "...but I might be wrong about that." It'd be great if we could all stop grasping for the Moral High Ground, and instead reach out to each other. Not up, not down--across. I long for the wisdom and courage to live this myself.

3. I long to stay centered in gratitude, music and humor...whatever is around the next corner. The gifts of my life are remarkably abundant: Beloved, pups, friends, church community, music (choirs!), books, creativity, purpose, home, enough to eat...even in this increasingly unstable global picture, the home front is a remarkable gift.

4. That having been said, would a bag of money sufficient to pay off the credit cards be too wild a request? :-D

5. And on a practical note, I long for time. Time to walk the pups, to sit and read, to write, to sit with Beloved and just be. To get quiet enough to create and to be the catalyst for the things I listed above in my own little corner of the world. To ground myself in joyful hope, as the liturgy says.

Here, friends, is one of the great storytellers of our time, from a musical perspective, singing about longing:

Be not afrayed

It's always fascinated me that some clothes are sold "distressed," with holes ripped, collars and hems frayed, bleached-out spots, etc.--as if we were sitting around and wondering when we'd have time to make our clothes look worn.

Seriously?

That doesn't seem to be a worry for me. The fraying and spotting just, well, happen when I'm not looking...no extra effort required. It seems to me that my clothes actually conspire to look "lived in."

And so it goes with the dailiness of my life. A number of its finer points seem to dull in late November and December; e-mails go unanswered, clutter heaps in the kitchen, and by the time I get home in the evening, I'm too used up to do much about it. Cumulatively, I don't feel like I'm at the top of my game, but rather in a "put your head down and muscle through it" kind of period.

It leaves me feeling frayed at the edges of my self. The things that quiet me and mend me seem to be the only "optional" items on my agenda...reading, writing, family time, time to just be. (Hmmm...maybe I need to stop regarding them as "optional," no?) Music, which normally feeds me, is a substantial cause of the drain in this season--there's just so MUCH of it! Everything just ramps up, this time of year, for musicians and church geeks like me.

Add to it our context right now--the part of the lectionary cycle which depicts so clearly the darkness and the light of the world. Lamps go out and talents lie buried; God keeps promises, saves us from outer darkness and invites us again into relationship. Likewise, the news cycles of recent weeks tell of disasters all over the world...war and financial peril, blood and hunger and pain, set against a hopeful new chapter in American political leadership, arriving even as we're on the brink of our several potential disasters.

Pain and hope, death and renewal, darkness and light.

We're coming into Advent, my favorite liturgical season. Because it's a time (if we dare to keep it) in which we can acknowledge that, as temporal beings we're sometimes weary and lost...that we're frayed and even a-frayed. And that this is not The Final Answer. That kairos shines behind our smoky, cluttered chronos. That, even as we're the people who walk in darkness, we also live in the promise that we'll see a great Light. That, on hearing that promise repeated, we remember that we have seen it: a rip in the fabric of the chronos, through which Light pours, throwing everything into sharp relief, making sense of the layers of chaos around us and dispelling the cold dark.

As Tony Campolo often trumpets, "It's Friday...but Sunday's comin'!"

Be not afrayed, friends.

Yes, we CAN!

Like so many others, I have waited my whole life to hear that speech, from that man. He's a real leader...and a grownup.

I am awed, grateful and full of hope. America is finding herself again. Thank God.

Hope, at last

I felt it as an American last night for the first time in eight years, as I listened to Senator Obama's speech. It was visionary, specific, tough and--I think--the corrective that just might galvanize a fragmented, crabby electorate into positive action and unity. I'm too tired to be eloquent about it today, but Andrew Sullivan has done it already. Go and see!

It was an historic moment, in part because of the famous anniversary on which the speech was given; in part because of the long-overdue nomination of an African-American. That's a lovely moment of fruition. However, after about sixteen years of increasingly bitter political discourse, and eight of wincing almost every time I turn on the radio, it was a breath of fresh air to hear this intelligent, lucid man articulate such a compelling vision. I also loved the "regular folks' " speeches and cried during Hillary's speech on Tuesday. I think she would have made a very fine president, and I'm sorry we won't see that--at least this time around. However, I'm ready to enthusiastically get behind Obama. The man is smart and compelling. I'm also interested in seeing what Michelle will make out of the First Ladyship.

Maybe--just maybe--there's a way out of some of the mess we're in as a result of Bush's disastrous presidency.

I hope.