Monthly Archives: December 2019

Farewell to a Decade. And then?

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Raphael, The Agony in the Garden (c. 1504). “Keep a fire burning in your eye, and pay attention to the open sky: you never know what will be coming down” (Jackson Browne, “For a Dancer”).

On New Year’s Eve, 1969, I was twenty-five years old. I had begun the Sixties as a high school sophomore, and was ending it as a freshly-ordained minister in the Episcopal Church. A decade marked by so much historical drama and cultural transformation deserved a memorable farewell, but I found myself stuck at a tedious party with strangers and small talk in a Los Angeles suburb.

I slipped away and drove to the sea, arriving at the edge of the continent an hour before midnight. The big parking lot for Santa Monica’s popular public beach was deserted. I pulled up close to the sand, about a hundred yards from the surf. A “baptismal” immersion at the turning of time was my plan. But first, in the decade’s last hour, I would list in my journal the personal highlights for each of the last ten years: 

Three graduations and one ordination, my first guitar, my first romance, my first grand tour of Europe, an apartment fire consuming my theological library, two mystical experiences, one miracle, and the death of my father. And, a month before decade’s end, rolling over six times at sixty miles an hour in a Volkswagen bus––and walking away unbroken, intensely aware of the gift of futurity. I had been given more time to do whatever I was here to do. It was like being born again into a world glowing with possibility and presence. 

As I was writing these things down, a police car pulled up next to me. A young man parked by himself in an empty lot late at night was an object of suspicion under any circumstances, but the authorities at the time were on the lookout for the Zodiac Killer, who had been terrorizing California with a series of ghastly murders. Could this be the policeman’s lucky night?

He got out of his car and walked over to mine. I rolled down my window. When he asked what I was doing, I told him I was remembering the Sixties in my journal. He wondered if I would let him see what I was writing. It was very first draftish, but I handed it over willingly. My first reader! He scanned the pages, mumbling aloud my poor words along with a few inserted quotes:

“There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief…” (Bob Dylan)

“The world of the past is gone. Behold, I make all things new.” (Revelation 21)

Fortunately, this did not strike him as serial killer material, so he wished me a Happy New Year and bid me goodnight. I walked down the sea in time to make ritual welcome to the 1970s.

The 2010s will depart less dramatically. There will be a backward glance with photos and stories­­––gratitude for the gifts, lament for the losses­­––along with expressions of astonishment at the accelerating speed of our allotted span in these latter days. At midnight we will stand on our porch blowing kazoos and train whistles, banging gongs and beating drums, to drive away the spirits of gloom. Then we’ll return inside to greet the New with dancing and champagne by the Christmas tree.

As the American Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861, Henry David Thoreau, known for his outspoken opposition to slavery, wrote nothing about the conflict in his Journal. Rather, he continued to record his curiosity and delight over specimens and experiences of the natural world. A friend asked him how he could ignore “the Leviathan of Slavery” threatening to swallow the country like Jonah. Thoreau replied that refusing to let our attention be consumed by the hypnotic gaze of chaos “is just the most fatal, and indeed the only fatal, weapon you can direct against evil.” [i]

I know people who will spend this evening in prayer and vigil, aware that we are on the verge of an apocalyptic year, when the fate of this country and the fate of the planet are at stake as at no other time in living memory. 2020 promises an immense struggle requiring the best of us, and I am grateful for those who plan to welcome the New Year with their most prayerful attention, keeping their eye on the Light rather than being transfixed by the dark abyss of malevolence. 

I will join the fight on the morrow. But for tonight, by dancing and making merry, I will continue to remember and affirm a future beyond the battle, the new heaven and new earth where the tears are wiped from every eye and God’s beloved people rejoice once more in the light of hope and human flourishing. 

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Thank you, as always, dear reader, for the gift of your attentive reading and generous sharing of what I post here. Time is a precious commodity, and I appreciate your choice of spending some of it with The Religious Imagineer. I wish you a most happy––and redemptive––New Year. 

I began this blog halfway through this decade, and have posted a reflection on time, memory and hope every New Year’s Eve since 2014. You can find those writings at the following links:

The Angel of Possibility (2014)

Tick, Tock: Thoughts for New Year’s Eve (2015)

Foolishness and Hope on the Eve of 2017 (2016)

At the Mercy of the Future (2017)

On New Year’s Eve, My Inner Clown is Full of Hope (2018)

[i] Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 479-80. I commend this book highly. It is a beautifully written, richly informative, and quite moving narrative of one of America’s most remarkable figures. 

Christmas as Poetry

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Gerrit van Honthorst, Adoration of the Child (c. 1620).

Christmas is a poetic argument against the prosaic flattening of the world into a place without depth or mystery. For a few days or weeks, it interrupts the social imaginary where God is absent, ignored, or simply unthinkable, inviting us to consider––and adore––the mystery of a world saturated with the divine. 

“This is the irrational season,” says Madeleine L’Engle, “when love blooms bright and wild. / Had Mary been filled with reason / there’d have been no room for the child.”

The Feast of the Incarnation not only accepts paradox, it revels in it:

Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut up in a span!
Summer in winter, day in night!
Heaven in earth, and God in man!
Great little One! whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth. 

–– Richard Crashaw, “In the Holy Nativity of our Lord”  (17th century)

Whether you spend the Twelve Days pondering these things in your heart, or caroling the wonders of everything heard and seen in the stable of new birth, may you be filled with peace, blessing, and endless praise. 

But enough prose. Here is some of my favorite poetry for the “irrational season.” These poems may all be found in Sarah Arthur’s marvelous and indispensable collection, Light upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. 

Salvation to all that will is nigh; 
That All, which always is all everywhere,
Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo! faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb; and though He there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He’ll wear,
Taken from thence, flesh which death’s force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created, thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother;
Whom thou conceiv’st, conceived; yea, thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother;
Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room 
Immensity cloister’d in thy dear womb.

–– John Donne, “Annunciation” (17th century)

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It wasn’t that long ago
that he’d spoken these stars
into being
and this woman’s life
was just a thought in his mind.
He’d smiled down on her birth
and entered her name in her pages
perhaps with an asterisk
denoting plans too sacred to be spoken
but pondered in his heart.
Now, newborn,
in wide-eyed wonder
he gazes up at his creation.
His hand that hurled the world
holds tight his mother’s finger.
Holy light
spills across her face
and she weeps
silently wondering tears
to know she holds the One
who has so long held her. 

–– Joan Rae Mills, “Mary” (21st century)

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. . . Now
I in him surrender
to the crush and cry of birth.
Because eternity
was closeted in time
he is my open door
to forever.
From his imprisonment my freedoms grow,
find wings.
Part of his body, I transcend this flesh.
From his sweet silence my mouth sings.
Out of his dark I glow.
My life, as his,
slips through death’s mesh,
time’s bars, j
oins hands with heaven,
speaks with stars.

–– Lucy Shaw, “Made Flesh” (20th century)

Christmas Day, 2019

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Simone di Filippi, Nativity (c. 1380, Uffizi Gallery, Florence).

Now make we mirth, all and several,
for Christmas now has come,
that hath no peer;
sing we all together,
now joy and bliss
they shall not miss
who make good cheer.

                        –– 15th century English carol

Marry Christmas, dear reader!
Joy, health, love and peace be upon you and yours.

Holy Night

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Fra Angelico, The Annunciation (detail, c. 1438-1443, Convent of San Marco, Florence).

Today the virgin is on her way to the cave where she will give birth in a manner beyond understanding to the Word who is, in all eternity. Rejoice, therefore, universe, when you hear it heralded: with the angels and the shepherds, glorify the One who chose to be seen as a new-born babe, while remaining God in all eternity.

                                                          ––– Preparation of the Nativity, Orthodox Liturgy

O Emmanuel (Dec. 23)

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Climate March, Seattle (Eastertide, 2017).

O Emmanuel, 
you show us the face of divinity,
you reveal the fullness of our humanity.
Come: enable us to become who we are.

As Advent draws to a close, we speak the most impossible of divine names: Emmanuel––God with us. “How can this be?” wondered the young woman chosen to be the Mother of God. How can human flesh contain the Infinite? It is the profoundest of mysteries, and the how of it is beyond our grasp. But this much we are meant to know: Incarnation doesn’t just happen to God. It happens to us as well. 

In the Nativity, our humanity became a place where God chooses to dwell. We may still be works in progress, but we are bound for glory. As St. Paul put it, “all of us, with our unveiled faces like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory” (II Cor. 3:18). Imagine that!

“It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race,” said Thomas Merton, “though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many mistakes: yet, with all that, [God’s own self] glorified in becoming a member of the human race. 

“I have the immense joy of being [a human person],” he continued, “a member of a race in which [God’s own self] became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Confirmands at Saint-Sulpice (Paris, Eve of Pentecost, 2012).

O Rex Gentium (Dec. 22)

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Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi (detail, c. 1481-2, Uffizi Gallery, Florence).

O Desire 
of all nations and people,
you are the strong force
that draws us toward you,
the pattern which choreographs creation
to Love’s bright music.

Come: teach us the steps
that we may dance with you.

The sixth Antiphon goes to the heart of the Advent mystery: we are made of longing, born with a core of desire, an unquenchable thirst, for something we lack. Advent invites us to remember our longing and identify our deepest desire.

Some people think that Christianity is about the eradication of desire. Not so. Faith is the education of desire, weaning it from false objects and inadequate attainments, and directing it toward its true and ultimate end, the divine communion of the holy and undivided Trinity, the ceaseless dance of love which we are invited to share. 

Thomas Traherne, 17th-century Anglican poet, said, “Be sensible of your wants, that you may be sensible of your treasures.” What he meant was, if we want to know who we are, and why we are here, we need to pay attention to our deepest hunger, our deepest longing. What do we really want? What do we long for above all else?

When you figure that out––that is where you’ll find God: in the place where your desire is strongest. It doesn’t matter what name it goes by. Pay attention. Dig deeper. God is there.

Projections of Picasso’s art on the surfaces of a limestone cave (Carrieres des Lumieres, Les Baux de Provence, 2018).

O Oriens (Dec. 21)

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Dawn on the Camino de Santiago (Maundy Thursday, 2014).

O Rising Dawn, 
bright splendor of the light eternal,
illumining all things with Love’s radiance.

Come: enlighten those who sit in darkness,
who dwell in the shadow of death.

At the beginning of the longest night, this antiphon is preoccupied with light: the eternal radiance of God and the way it penetrates the darkest shadows of history and the human soul. What else is Advent but waiting for the dawn? 

For mystics and theologians, the image of God as light is more than an analogy drawn from physical experience. Splendor and glory are inherent to the very essence of divinity. But for those who sit in darkness––and who has not, at one time or another?––the light of heaven may be eclipsed: hidden from our eyes, absent from our hearts. As songwriter Bruce Cockburn testifies, “Sometimes you have to kick the darkness until it bleeds daylight.”

The poet Kathleen Raine describes the time of trial when “the curtain is down, the veil drawn” over the world’s deep radiance. “Nothing means or is,” she says. But that is not where God leaves her:

Yet I saw once
The woven light of which all [things] are made . . .
To have seen
Is to know always.

The Bainbridge Island ferry sails into the dawn (Puget Sound, 2014).

O Clavis David (Dec. 20)

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Chiharu Shiota, Keys in the Hand (Venice Biennale 2015).

O Key of David, 
you open, and none can shut;
you shut, and none can open.

Come, lead us out of the prisons
that oppress body, mind and soul;
welcome us into the open space of possibility;
let us breathe again.

This antiphon begins, O Clavis David (“O key of David). The Latin word for “key” was a favorite pun among medieval preachers. Clavis means “key,” but clavus means “nail.” The key that opens the door for us is the nail of Calvary, where Christ died to conquer death and sin.

Jesus, and the divine way of self-diffusive love which he embodied, is the key that unlocks every human prison, from the metal cages on our southern border to the oppressive interior confines of fear, guilt, sin, despair. 

Has you ever been in some kind of prison? Do you remember what you felt when you found the key? What was it like when the door swung open and you walked through it? Perhaps some who read this are still waiting for this key. 

O Clavis, come and lead those who sit in darkness, who live in the shadow of death––or grief, or fear, or addiction. Deliver us all into the place of light and joy and freedom.

Be the key that sets us free.
Open the door and welcome us home.

In Brighton, UK, an alternative worship group, Beyond, turned 24 beach huts into an Advent calendar. Every evening a different hut was opened to reveal an art installation about the coming of Christ. This hut was opened on Christmas Eve, radiating “love’s pure light” into the December night.

O Radix Jesse (Dec. 19)

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Gil de Siloé, Tree of Jesse (detail) on the altar retablo in the Chapel of St. Anne, Burgos Cathedral, Spain (c. 1498). The family tree of Jesus grows from the body of King David’s father.

O Root of Jesse, 
coming to flower in Jesus,
who in turn bears fruit
in all who are grafted
into the royal line of God’s family.

Come: let us never be severed
from the roots and branches
that nourish us in every moment.

The “Tree of Jesse,” a frequent motif in Christian art since the 11th century, is Jesus’ family tree, linking him to the Davidic line (Jesse of Bethlehem was David’s father). The genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke span 28 and 43 generations respectively, but the number of figures shown on the tree is usually far less due to spatial constraints. 

The prophet Isaiah wrote, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots” (Isaiah 11:1), and most artists have provided a literal version of that image. The Tree of Jesse thus affirms Jesus’ pedigree as the heir of divine promises given to David, as well as Abraham and others before him. 

But the larger meaning of the root and branch image is that Jesus did not come out of nowhere, disconnected from the long course of human history. He was rooted in an ongoing spiritual evolution of humanity since the dawn of consciousness. His appearance, the product of nature and culture as instruments of the Holy Spirit, was the first flowering of creation’s immense journey toward union with its Creator. 

The New Testament says that Jesus is “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith”
(Hebrews 12:2). In the 20th century, the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin expressed this developmental image in terms of a cosmic evolution: “the presence of something greater than ourselves moving forward within us and in our midst.” We are all destined to be blossoms and fruit on the Jesse Tree.

If we are all truly grafted into the royal line of God’s family, how shall we then live––and grow––accordingly? Let us never be severed from the roots and branches that nourish us in every moment. 

This is the third of seven in a daily series on the O Antiphons for the last week of Advent.

O Adonai (Dec. 18)

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Christ in Majesty, Basilica of Saint-Sernin, Toulouse, France (12th century).

O Adonai, 
ruler of time and history,
manifestation of divine dominion
to your chosen people,
may your presence be our burning bush.

Come: bring justice to the poor,
food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless
protection to the vulnerable,
freedom to the prisoner.

For the ancient Jews, the divine name revealed to Moses at the burning bush was too holy to be spoken, so they substituted the word Adonai (“my Lord”) when addressing God in their worship. This became Kyrios in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. We still pray Kyrie eleison (“Lord have mercy”) in Christian ritual.

Will Campbell, the Baptist preacher who wrote The Cotton Patch Gospels, once asked, “What’s the biggest lie told in America?” The answer he gave was: “Jesus is Lord.” What would our lives––and our neighborhoods, our nation, our economy, our politics––look like if we really believed that the Lord of love and justice, the divine defender of the poor and vulnerable, is in fact the ultimate ruler of time and history? 

Adonai, bring that day closer!

Christ as Pantocrator (ruler of the universe) on the dome of the Katholikon, Hosios Loukas monastery, Greece.