The Hardest Part (Mogwai)

image courtesy of gudjhong (sxc.hu)

This is a song I don't really want to post. Not because it isn't a great song - because it hooked me the first time I listened to it. And not because I don't think it doesn't reveal something true about Advent - because I think it does. The problem is that this song, especially for the season of Advent, makes me uncomfortable.

I work as a chaplain resident at a university hospital. This means that I spend my days walking from a room with new possibilities to a room where a family stands around the body of their dead loved one and has no idea, no idea at all, what to do now. And Advent changes nothing about their situation.

Enter this song. Mogwai's Christmas Steps is full of angsty distorted guitars and minor chords - not very Advent-y. And yet, I'm going to ask that we all just listen to this shorter, live version all the way through. Why? Because we owe it to those for whom this Advent season is immeasurably painful. We also owe it to ourselves to remember the year(s) when it was the same for us.

There's a poem by the Sufi mystic, Rumi, about a man who praises Allah all day long until a cynic challenges him, asking if he's ever heard a response. The man goes home, dejected, but dreams that night of the spiritual guide, Khidr, who reminds him:

"This longing you express

is the return message."

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness

that wants help

is the secret cup.

If we turn our backs on the sadness Advent can bring too quickly, or ignore the grief and rage we can carry around in our own lives, calling it by other names (stress, depression, disappointment, lethargy, apathy, overcommittment), we risk pushing the secret cup of God's love away, our lips still dry.

You will probably not "like" this song. 

Note your disquiet, but listen for the full arc of the story it tells.

Christmas Steps by Mogwai

The secret cup of Advent, the miracle of the incarnation, is the place where our deepest lament becomes music, and our grief becomes song. Christmas Steps may refer to a street in Bristol, but it's also a way of walking into Advent - sometimes on our knees. The 'grief we cry out from' isn't pretty. It certainly isn't grammatically correct. But it has a shape, a form, a release, as we surrender our illusions to a God we can barely name aloud.

A true experience of God's grace is not for the faint of heart. Yet for a pearl of great price, might we not risk our discomfort with the disjointed side of our Advent longings?

There are deep currents in our hearts, prayers and longings written along the lines of our bones which only the promise of incarnation in Advent can answer. Fear ye not: there will yet be time for cookie baking and carols, for comfort and good cheer. Our music project will bend again toward songs of joy and hope. Yet for Advent to really take hold in us, there needs to be a moment for the fierce grace of God to break over us like waves of sound, cascades of light. A moment when we allow the hardest part of Advent to usher us straight into the center of it's incredible mystery: that the pain is never, never the final word. Against all statistics and expectations, against all reason and logic, Christ's peace is born into this chaos, this need, this 'grief we cry out from.'

Alleluia. Alleluia, indeed.

What uncomfortable emotions do you carry into this Advent season?

May you stay with your disquiet, even for a moment, and allow it to draw you fully into the arms of God.

- Anna