"Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my savior and my God."
- Psalm 42: 5-6a
Here we are in Advent, and the world goes on around us. Things are the same, but we want to feel different. We celebrate God breaking into Creation's history, and yet God seems to not be working nearly as fast as we need. This first week of Advent, the A.M. Project has been thinking about how we long for God, and why we need God's presence. But during this, "most wonderful time of the year," how do we balance the equation of God's good intentions for the world with the mess things are now?
The National's music steeps itself in this delicate mathematics/acrobatics of paradox: the crumbling grandeur of Matt Berninger's voice, lyrics and orchestration often belie the emptiness and desperation of some of the stories. Despite the bleakness, there is beauty in the world of these songs, or what passes for it this side of heaven. We may live 'half awake in a fake empire' but if "hope" isn't the word to use, then maybe it's the awareness of our yearning for something more: beauty, happiness, fulfillment...
Our yearnings for More, for Different, for Better do not always get answered in a way that makes sense to us. Sometimes we just have to live in the terrifying gorgeous mess of the world as it IS, knowing its discordance with God's promise of what it is BECOMING. Our vision doesn't reach far enough, and so we stand between the places of hurt and the places of promise, trying to hold them together and speak honestly about things as they are:
The good news (thank God) is that we're ultimately not the ones in charge of holding it together. The paradox has been around since before we were born and will carry on until all things are wrapped back into Godself. Until then, God is the one who holds the paradox for us, and Jesus' ministry of reconciliation through solidarity and even suffering shows us that God lives into that paradox right along with us.
"By day the LORD directs his love,
at night her song is with me--
a prayer to the God of my life."
Psalm 42:8
Where do we feel God in the paradox with us in these coming days?
As we work and wait with hope in the paradox for God's work to be fulfilled on earth, may we feel God working with and for us always.
- Anna
Thank you for this project, for a bold attempt to address troubling matters from viewpoints often not our own, for grabbing our shoulders and shaking us and saying, "Wake up. Look around you." Maybe people are turned off by church because it's too nice and calm and orderly -- it's simply not real. Never thought about that before.
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