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                                    

Tues Dec. 6 - A Time to Speak (Eliza Gilkyson)

      

            Sometimes the beginning of an answer to our deepest needs is someone's invitation to name them, to speak them out, without fear or judgment. This kind of naming, this kind of speaking, this lamenting is a faithful, necessary model given by our ancestors of faith. Beyond that, it is an inherent human need.  But as someone who was raised in a culture devoted to self-sufficiency, stony strength and rationality, I am not prone to the kind of lament modeled for us in the Psalms or even in today’s song. As a young person, I observed people like my father (whose emotions still reside right under his skin, perhaps some around his very strong vocal chords, too), those who couldn’t restrict their emotions to the cultural box of reserve and control, dismissed, "dealt with" or boxed out by others. Message received, social/communal circles of my youth: weeping is for funerals, and anger, raised voices are not for us.

            So, now as an adult, I am on the LONG road to reclaiming this powerful gift that I’ve abdicated to the social status quo.  Most days I still feel severely limited in my capacity for public emotion sharing.  I have, however, learned to recognize and cherish those few blessed saints who, full of grace, invite, question and prod me, to pull out my laments; those who encourage hollering and even the occasional curse word (when the situation calls for it); and those who wait in the moments when I can not word my emotion, but can only sigh.

            There is an added burden that gets piled on top of our sadness, longing, or pain when we are unable to name them. Likewise there is some kind of release, easing, healing even, when our burden may be shared with another. In the church I come from part of our confessions claim that God helps us to hear the voices of people long silenced.  This confession points to the great sin of the silencing that happened/is happening to many people groups across history; it also affirms, for me, the great power of voice and the sacred gift of being heard. This advent perhaps we could take up this very important justice practice for ourselves, as well as those around us.

Word of God, give to us those who will listen us into our own language, releasing our laments, our frustrations and our confusions; Easing us out of the bondage of silence, into the blessedness of a shared journey.

                                    -Lindsey

**Today I offer a prayer of thankgiving and blessing for those who invite our voices and hear our laments. You are invited to add a comment with the names of those for whom you are thankful as a litany.

Thurs Dec 1 - Pearls (Antje Duvekot)

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!

…I wait for the Lord, my soul waits and in God’s word I hope;

my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,

more than those who watch for the morning.

                                     -Psalm 130:1-2, 5-6

                                                       

Pearls by Antje Duvekot **ADVISORY: Some profanity present.

          This is not my song. Its raw, aching emotion pulls at my heart and my spirit rises in lament with the words: “I've been expecting you forever, waiting here for you…” But the essence of this song, the story that it tells does not belong to me, a child of the church, who cannot claim:

              
                   “I tried to find a church that I could walk in

                   they tried to nail me on original sin.

                  So when you gonna' come for me, Lord?”

                                                               

            Don’t get me wrong, I have many times in my life felt that God is too slow in coming. I have known the pain of seemingly endless waiting; I have even, more than once, wondered not when but if God was coming for me at all. But that fear has never been confirmed by someone claiming that God, in fact, is not coming for me.

           Yet, so many brothers and sisters - young old GAY lesbian transgendered questioning  DOUBTING differently-abled  faithful seeking - have been ‘nailed’ on something when they tried to find a church that they could walk into.  More to the point, they have been told that the church is not for them to walk into. I hear in this song the heartbreak of those who feel disconnected, of the disenfranchised, of the outcast. And my heart's response is a lament more along the lines of “Church, what we have done?!”

  [  *Brief aside: Today, on World AIDS Day, let us not be negligent in acknowledging the ways that many in the church have broken our relationships with brothers and sisters victimized by this hateful disease; causing a lament to rise from many who have been made to feel they are beyond the embrace of God’s family.  ]

            No, this is not my song, but it is so precious to me. It reminds me of the psalmist, laid bare with raw longing and the gritty struggle of life. There is more honest emotion in this song, than many of the poetically worded, ‘F-bomb’-free prayers I have spoken in church services.  But, most importantly, this song reminds me of the worthiness of that for which we wait in this season, the greatness of this longed-for Redemption that will make our world new; for the LoveLight is coming, and it is coming for us ALL.

Give us ears to hear the lament of those around us, that we may better know the One who answers all of our longings.

                                                          -Lindsey

Mon Nov 28 - All We Can See Is... (Black Star)

Maybe Advent is best understood at night, sitting with the streetlit world, hearing ambulance sirens as we watch and pray. Likewise, maybe the story of Advent is best understood starting not with the promises of Isaiah, but with its anguished cries to God:

"Your sacred cities have become a desert... and all we treasure lies in ruins.  
After this, O LORD, will you hold yourself back?

Will you keep silent and punish us beyond measure?"        

Isaiah 64:10-12

'Respiration' by Black Star feat. Common:        (lyrics: here)

**Advisory: Some strong language. Clean version and pretty sweet orig. music video HERE

'Respiration'  is about telling the truth from your corner of the world.  I especially love its intro about taggers (graffiti-ers) talking about their aerosol work: on two cars they've written,

"ALL YOU CAN SEE IS... CRIME IN THE CITY."

On this end of Advent, our job is to tell the truth about the world and cry out to God about a Creation gone terribly awry.  As Kara Root, preacher at Lake Nokomis Presbyterian, stated this week: "Advent begins with a great cry of disappointment."  Disappointment in ourselves, certainly, but also in the world and even in God.  

During Advent we boldly name our disappointment and pain, knowing that God is NOT ultimately absent or unmoved.  God is here - even as God is still coming.  Because of this, as Kara stated, we can "stand bravely with our broken hearts and the broken hearts of the world... waiting to be mended."

How do we speak our broken hearts in these coming days?  What do you see even from your limited perspective that still needs voice and naming?

In the darkness of a very real night, may we boldly tell the truth about our world and hold out our lives to God.

                                                 - Anna