What Turns Up (The New Pornographers)

image courtesy aphotoshooter (Flikr)

"What's love, 
what's love, 
what's love,
but what turns up in the dark?"

In these days closing in on the winter solstice, what I want to do is grow meditative with the darkness, but I often catch myself just resenting the long nights, like I'm racing to complete as much as possible before the last blue seeps from the sky.

Fact is, everything about how I live (cell phone, work schedule, holiday list) resists a meaningful way to move in harmony with the rhythms of light and dark, life and death, at this time of year. I know this, and yet I can't always stop myself. My cultural training is to think of the darkness as ending, as loss, as emptiness. After all, when people say, "she's carrying a lot of darkness in her" they usually don't mean that as a good thing.

"Up in the Dark" feels like a song about this sort of negative darkness: secrets and hiding. Fear and deception. And yet in the midst of all these "dark" emotions, love shows up. Not what I expected from an Indie pop song. 'Desire,' maybe, 'hopelessness,' possibly, but in fact, the refrain suggests that love, by definition, is 'what turns up in the dark'. 

First question: When has Love shown up for you "in the dark?"


Up in the Dark from The New Pornographers on Myspace.

Yet as much as the prevailing culture around me has taught me to understand darkness in only one way, I have also learned that darkness is where the roots grow. Even during this dark season, as the plants and trees sleep, a greening energy is moving deep within the heart of things. Life is stripped to its core so that it may return renewed. Darkness deepens life.

"What turns up in the dark?
What turns up in the dark?"

Second question: When have you discovered Love waiting for you in the shelter of darkness?

Could it be true that not only does Love not abandon us to the darkness, 
but a sheltering and peaceful darkness is what can help Love grow strongest? Could it be true that befriending the darkness, where it doesn't threaten to engulf us, could be a way to understand our belovedness more fully, to understand God as our Ground-of-All-Being more totally? Could it be true that in the dark all the exhausting running and hiding and games can end, the veil can be dropped, and we can encounter our vulnerability and truth within community and with God?

You who live in the shelter of the Most High,

    who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,

will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress;

    my God, in whom I trust.” 

- Psalm 91: 1-2

So as we dwell in the shadows of some of the darkest days of the year, may we hold the paradox of this space well: the possibility and the difficulty, the life and the death. May we remember that in this solstice darkness we are invited to die to old ways of clinging and lying, hiding and fearing, while also inviting our deepest wholeness and renewal in that very same darkness. May we remember that Christ dwells in this Advent space, in this almost-Christmas space, ready to be born in darkness, ready to be encountered in darkness, ready to be fully revealed in light.

All we need is this time in the dark.

Shine on.

                                                                                    -- Anna

Focusing on the Questions (The Suburbs)

image courtesy Jeremiah Peterson

                         "Well I was walking through the middle of town
                         and I said to myself, 'What's going on?'

                         People breaking the law just to make ends meet,
                         people breaking their hearts just to stay off the street

                         And written on the wall for everyone to see
                         was 'Love is the Law'  - right there on the street"

Sometimes Advent is easy to find, but hard to hold on to. In the same way that I quickly forget to mindfully open Advent calendars or light candles, obvious Advent truths can slip away from me when I don't pay attention. This song by The Surburbs is a case in point: of course I agree that Love is the Law, the underpinning of all Creation, Love-made-Flesh at Christmas, Love-made-Future in Advent. Of course.

But honestly, have I really thought it out fully? Do I agree that Love is the Law even when it comes to my ideas about justice? Do I agree even when it comes to what will deeply inconvenience me or make me profoundly uncomfortable? Even when it comes to experiencing risk or loss, for myself or those I love?

How far does Love take us?

These lyrics don't answer. They aren't a theological treatise, or an ethical essay. Like any great pop song, they rely on musical hooks (and a splash of horns). But in the midst of this catchiness, repeated over and over, until it becomes a declaration, an admonition, maybe even a prophetic exhortation is this: 

                                      "Love is the, Love is the
                                        Love is the, Love is the
                                        Love is the, Love is the Law."

Love is the Law, The Suburbs, 1984

The suspense of waiting to hear what "Love", in fact, "is," might remind me this Advent, of what Love isn't: 

because 

Love 

isn't 

The

Polite Suggestion 

or Occasional Luxury 

or Foolhardy Wish 

or Inevitable Command

it is 

Law

breakable or choose-able

but bound deep within us,

written into the marrow of Creation.

So this Advent I choose to keep wrestling with the questions this song won't just answer for me: 

How far will I let Love take me? How will this Love change me, again and again?

May it be so for you as well.

Shine On.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

- Jeremiah 31:31-34

                                                                                                -- Anna

A Love that Shines (Blitzen Trapper)

“There ain’t no love like a love that shines/ There ain't no tie like the tie that binds/ There ain’t no way like the way divine...”

In past years, our themes for the A.M.P. have felt like a gradual contemplative pilgrimage toward the dawning light of Christmas - as well as anticipating the final making-whole of all things in Christ. This year, our theme feels a little more like an imperative - driving us toward both the deepest solstice shadows and the coming light: Shine On. 

To "Shine On" during Advent is a bit of a defiant move. It's Advent, but with a little more sass and funk. It's Advent "waiting" with some attitude. 

When we Shine On we don't let "contemplation of the mystery" become an excuse for passivity, but we also don't just let our righteous anger or desire for action pour forth unchecked. When we Shine On, we tell the truth... but in a way that just might make others want to clap along.

  

"There ain't no love like a love that's blind/ 
that loves in spite of the loveless kind / 
a light that burns with an endless shine..."

Blitzen Trapper is a band I've followed for a while, and their new single had been on the radio for a while before I really heard the final bridge: 

"Baby don't let your lamp run dry..."

I'm a sucker for an interesting Biblical allusion in pop culture. But I'm really a sucker for an allusion that turns Biblical images or stories that are often heard only one way (as a threat from Jesus, maybe, or as a 'traditional spiritual' about which people in white U.S. culture often miss the full, powerful meaning)... into an idea we could imagine in a whole other light. 

“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, 'Truly I tell you, I do no know you.' Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour."

- Matthew 25: 1-12

This song turns that line, "don't let your lamp run dry" into an invitation - even a celebration. It's a call from Christ to Shine On, "to be wise," as the Sufi poet Hafez once stated, "and cast all your votes for dancing!"

                                      ... to be wise, and cast all our votes for Love. 

May your lamps stay lit this season by the fires of your passion for Christ, by the flame of your hope, always in the most audacious defiance of all that would extinguish your thirst for God's love.

Shine On, friends, shine on.

                                                                   -- Anna

Love Song (Jars of Clay)

 

 

 

Love Came Down at Christmas is one of the songs that I find myself singing throughout the season.  For me it is a reminder when I get overwhelmed with the preparations of advent or when I look up in the days after Christmas and think what was that all for, really? This song cuts right to the heart of it: love. Love. Love was born. Love shall be our token, Love be yours and Love be mine.

 

 

 

 

This version of the song by Jars of Clay is, well...whimsical, but what can I say, it's our last saturday. Bring on the giraff-icorn.

 

 
 

May Love cling to you, may Love hold you fast and may Love be the light you carry forward into the New Year.

 

 

-Lindsey

All We Can Say (Tracy Chapman)

While they were there, the time came for Mary to have her baby.  She gave birth to her firstborn child, a son, wrapped him snugly, and laid him in a manger... 

 -Luke 2

Here they are, the usual characters, ushered into our consciousness on this day, as we hear once more the story of travel-weary parents-to-be, lowly shepherds, glorious angels, kings, wise ones, various farm animals and, of course, the babyGod. They remind us that God comes, once more, to be born among us; among the weak, the powerful, the ordinary, the violent, the fearful, the cynical, the innocent… among us.

In the stables of our lives- the lowly and cold places, the messy, chaotic places, the unsuitable and unexpected places-God emerges.  Through the voices of these familiar characters God proclaims, into our time, hope that makes us unafraid, peace and joy that reach out across creation, and Love that has come to save us all.

What can we do on Christmas Eve, but agree?  In today’s song, Tracy Chapman infuses the familiar Christmas hymn with the beautiful and gentle refrain of “Mmmhmm.” What more can we say as we stare again into the manger’s soft light, as again we are embraced by a love that is bigger than we understand? What is left but our awe and a quiet “Yes,” “Let it be so,” or “Mmhmm”?

The wondrous answer to our broken Advent cries of “Come, Lord Jesus,” God’s answer of Love, rushes with possibility all around us. As Shawna Bowman, pastor at Friendship Community Church, writes, “God’s expansive love bellows ‘yes’ through eternity… and it joins us where we are. It is magnified by our own yes – our willingness to love in the same way God loved - to live hard into love in the midst of our messy human god-filled lives.”

So, this Christmas Eve may our spirits answer back "yes." As we spiral again around the luminous mystery, may we dwell in the wonder of the moment when God, in whom all things hold together, became a small baby and reached out to embrace all things in the hold of grace. Yes, we say together, Love has come. Mmhmm, Love has come for us all.

Holy One, let us meet you tonight, in wonder that unfolds and opens our souls and in Love that sounds our depths and echoes through our very being.

-Lindsey

Just Breathing (the Cinematic Orchestra ft. Fontella Bass)

Oh that song is singin,' singin' into me.
Over everything I used to be.
Oh, that song is singin,' singin' into me.
Slow and sweet, it carries me...

...Breathe into me
Breathe out through me
Breathe into me. (Cinematic Orchestra)

The giggly excitement of the shepherds and kings quieted, as one little angel stood up to deliver her carefully memorized lines.  I noticed, as I watched her, that I was holding my breath; perhaps in anticipation of what would surely be the cutest thing I’d seen all year, or perhaps remembering the nerve-wrecking pageant performances of my own childhood.  

There are many moments, in this season, when we might hold our breath: walking into a room full of strangers at a Christmas party, Uncle Joe starting a political debate over turkey dinner, turning around at the Christmas eve service to see everyone’s faces lighted only by candles, hearing that strange song on the radio that grandma loved so much when she was alive…

Today’s song offers us an important reminder in these last days before Christmas: Breathe.  Just breathe, in and out. Whether in a state of anxiety, stress, fatigue, wonder, the reminder of this song is that in all of these moments there is space for us, grace for us, to just be, to dwell in each moment, to breathe. 

 

In the varied moments and emotions of these days, in the rushing and in the quiet, there is a steady grace singing over us, reminding us that Love has come for us, just as we are. Or as the angel sang “I bring good news of great joy for all the people,” not just for people who have it together, not only for those who are full of Christmas cheer, not only for those who identify as Christians, but good news for ALL people.  

At the root of this story (and of our faith) is this grace: Love came to be born among us, and seeks still to enter our lives, to be born in each of us, all of us, every day. When we are quieted from the rushing, the expectations, the judgments, when we take a moment to just dwell in this grace, what song will we hear singin’ over us?

May it be a song of love, a breath of grace, carrying us, breathing into us and out through us.

-Lindsey

As swimmers dare

to lie face to the sky

and water bears them

as hawks rest upon air

and air sustains them,

so would I learn to attain

freefall, and float

into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,

knowing no effort earns

that all-surrounding grace.

-Denise Levertov, The Avowal

We Really Must Insist (The Lumineers)

 

Remember, Lord, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old. 

-Psalm 25:6

I wish I was more stubborn. It runs in my family. I had a couple famously stubborn grandparents, and then there’s my stubborn mother/father (according to my father/mother), and certain other relatives bearing this particular resemblance.  But not me; I guess, because there had to be at least one compromiser in the family, or it's an unfortunate symptom of my need to people please. At any rate, stubbornness has been something I’ve had to cultivate.  

 But there are just some things upon which we must insist. I learned this lesson from my stubborn mother, who her kids along to union rallies and public protests at the capitol building: upon the rights and dignity of workers, we must insist. I learned this lesson from my stubborn father, whom I watched step into the middle of conflict, big or small, employing integrity and honesty to mediate: upon peace and reconciliation we must insist. I do not laud stubbornness for stubbornness sake, not for insisting on its own way or on frivolous preferences, but when it comes to the well-being of others, issues of justice, showing mercy and love to our neighbors, we must insist. Stubbornly insist.

Sometimes the right response to the needs that are uncovered, heard, spoken in the spirit of Advent, is to join our voices in saying the need, join our wills in the insistence that these needs (ours and others’) be addressed. Sometimes all our hope has to feed on is sheer stubbornness; a refusal to give up, a refusal to forget, a refusal to go to sleep.

Stubborn Love by The Lumineers

Do you ever wonder how God experiences waiting? What is waiting like for the God who first desired to wipe out violence among the first people populating the earth; the God who has longed for a family since the first promise of descendants as numerous as the stars? Traditionally, during advent we remember the waiting of the people of God, across centuries, their longing for a Messiah to come. But we also remember that they did not wait in a Divinity void. Generation after generation God dwelt, spoke, provided, called, delivered, and lead her people. Stubborn God so longed for us, that eventually God became the message of Love: breathing, walking, and giving Loveself to the world.

This Love echoes in our song today; a song about love that in spite of pain, and in opposition to indifference, remains; screaming out, refusing to leave, it can’t be told otherwise. This stubborn love is the path of the followers of God. As the birth of the babe in Bethlehem (and his life, death and resurrection) teach us, it is love above all, upon which we must insist.

What is the God of Stubborn Love calling you to insist upon today? On whose behalf is the God of Insistent Love inviting you to stubborn today?

Divine Love, make us stubborn in our concern for one another, empower us to insist on behalf of the vulnerable among us, and hold us all together with a love that refuses to let us go.



-Lindsey

**This week, we'll take YOUR suggestions for what songs help you Seed the Hope or Resist the Sleep. Post a YouTube link with your thoughts and we'll re-post them all on our Saturday post.**

Un-Boxed (Ben Howard)

 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

- Matthew 6: 27 

So here's the flip side of our theme this week: sometimes speaking our needs during Advent can make us brood. And more than brood: worry. 

This isn't just the high-strung holiday worries of 'did I remember all the gifts?' or 'will we need more stuffing?," it's the BIG STUFF worry, like "that I'm losing the ones that I hold dear." 

Taking time to wonder about the big stuff can be productive, but when it turns into worry, running around in the same tight mental loops, then it can make us feel so small: "just a blade in the grass, spoke unto the wheel." Worse, we can convince ourselves that everything we've ever done is wrong and that we'll "become what [we] deserve."

This feeling may be more familiar to some of us than others. Some of us mask these doubts and worries with constant activity or with ego-blustering that hides our groundlessness. Nonetheless, we've almost all had that moment when we recognize the true depth of our brokenness and neediness and think: I really am a terrible mess. Maybe this is what I deserve.

The Fear by Ben Howard. Lyrics HERE.

Fear of our own unworthiness is much different than knowing that we do nothing to 'merit' God's love and grace. Fear of our unworthiness is a small room with peeling walls, a life lived with worry keeping us intdoors. Most critically, fear of our unworthiness is un-Christian, even though so many of our theologies and churches use this as a tactic to convince us of other things: that we must act a certain way, say certain things, or believe in just the right balance... otherwise God's love will be revoked.

The truth is that Christ came to hang out with the screw ups. He surrounded himself with good but flawed friends, loved them past their betrayal, and hasn't given up on this crazy world since. We have been promised that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and yet we live our days acting like it might not be true.

Luckily, during Advent, we are called back to ourselves. Not the ego-self of "I'm just fine, okay!" and not the shame-self of "I'm unworthy." We are called to the true Self, which God created and loves, which is already whole and free. The fierce glow of that Christmas star cast a new light on all who sought it out: it revealed that life should not be lived in the confines of fear, and that our worries can't change the beautiful intentions which God has for Creation.

How will you say your need, trusting that even in your brokenness and neediness you are also beloved and whole?

May you enter Advent remembering that, individually and communally, we are freed from the stiff confines of fear, doubt, worry and shame by a God who lavishes us with love beyond our imaginings.

                                                                                                                        - Anna

Thurs Jan. 5 - Love, Love, Love (The Mountain Goats)

One of the more popular of recent years' holiday films has been Love Actually, with its celebrations and reflections on the bitter and the sweet of earthly love in all its forms: family, romantic, friendship and more.  The general message, neatly packaged, is this: earthly love is messy, beautiful, complicated, painful, risky, self-contradicting- deeply imperfect, but somehow, sometimes, worth it.

Today's song takes the same idea, but to a much darker place.  As this song points out, the melody we're singing might be 'love, love, love,' but some terrible, brutal things are done in the twisted forms of love we foster in our lives, and the echoing of those actions can haunt us.

This could just be some morose anti-Christmas cheer reflection on human fallenness and depravity, but I hear something else: I hear God's pity and God's grace, too.  I hear Jesus coming as an infant, acting and speaking as a man about 'love, love, love' (echoing Dave Matthews 'love is all around' refrain from our Christmas Eve post) and having all of us so woefully, tragically, and almost willfully misunderstand him for two thousand years -- and yet and still offering us a love which is so wildly boundless, so graciously vulnerable, so passionately freedom-seeking that we can barely turn toward and believe it.

I received an emailed image tonight that sums up pretty well where I think we as Christians have twisted and mangled the idea of love, and especially Christ's love, back in on itself in so many ways (HERE).  How can we hear this song as not only as a call to own our own broken witness to Jesus' love, but as an invitation to remember the Source of that love and the ways in which, as the song reminds us, 'now we see this / as in a mirror dimly, / then we shall see each other / face to face' ?

Love, Love, Love by The Mountain Goats (lyrics HERE)

The line about seeing 'in a mirror dimly' is borrowed from 1 Corinthians 13, slightly after the famous passage on love popular at marriages, which, if we read carefully, is less about romantic love and more about the kind of love which Jesus modeled in his relations with us: the love of enemy and outcast, neighbor and friend, sinner and saint alike.

If I speak in the tongues of humans or angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  

Love never ends.

                                        - 1 Corinthians 13: 1-8a

May we continue to hear God's 'Christmas' song of 'love, love, love' in ways that bring life and wholeness, but also remember God's pity and grace for where we have erred.

Wed Dec. 21 - Coming Home (Alexi Murdoch)

For I am convinced that neither life nor death,
neither angels nor demons,
neither the present nor the future,
nor any powers,
neither height nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

                 - Romans 8:38-39



Sometimes less words are better; in the case of talking about dwelling in to God's love made manifest at Christmas, maybe too many words just flatten the mystery.  So just a handful:

It's possible that Alexi Murdoch's Orange Sky is a song about romantic love or love for a parent, but the language is almost confessional in tone -- 'in your love, my salvation lies, in your love.'  No matter the subject, this is not an individualistic, self-interested love - but rather a love that wraps into an entire system, a community.  It is salvation that includes the brother and sister standing by, that allows the speaker to find hope and strength and recognize a home place.

Alexi Murdoch, Home

It's 'a long road we've been walking on,' and sometimes it's easier to let our 'strong minds' carry on in the belief that we are alone, that our broken hearts are fractured too completely... but we know better.

Here is what I know now:

The Love that comes at Christmas comes something like in this song, both intensely personal and yet wholly communal.  The love of Christ's birth isn't inward-facing, but saves us to be with others and the world.  This love saves us not just by some feat of "substitutionary atonement" or sacrificial suffering, but also simply by being what it is: the love of God made so real and immediate that it needed to take on flesh in order to look us truly and fully in the eyes.  

This is what I know now: we are loved beyond our imaging, beyond height and depth and all powers, and that this is love that has power and force to free and save us - even from ourselves.  In this end, this love is where I live; this love is my home that doesn't save me or take me from the earth, but roots me more fully in the here and the now of things, alongside my sisters and brothers, creatively, openly, communally loving and being loved into the world that is sill being born this season.

May we dwell in the knowledge that our salvation lies in the love God which is so elemental, so radical, that it became human and dwelt among us.

                      - Anna

Mon Dec. 19 - Making it Through (Over the Rhine)

We've been reckless, we've been good,
doin' most of the things we should --
but the picture is much bigger than we knew...
               - Over the Rhine

Here's what I like about Advent: it puts things in perspective.  At all times of the year people get sick, have surgeries, fight with family or spouses, break up with girl or boyfriends, lose jobs, get great news, give birth, feel lonely or frustrated or lost... but it all seems to matter more with the backdrop of Advent and Christmas.  Things take on a weight and a poignancy that rarely gets equaled elsewhere in the year.

In this final week of Advent, the Advent Music Project is considering, How do we dwell into this Christmas-tide?  My first instinctive response: We dwell into Christmas by dwelling into everything else - especially the difficult stuff -, too.


In our church communities we often have this urge to leave the unruly, disquieting issues of world affairs, broken relationships, and scattered hopes back at the beginning of Advent when in fact, that is exactly what we should bring right into the center of the quiet manger scene.  As somebody was observing the other day, that "peaceful" manger-scene we carry in our collective imagination is really a moment of quiet in what's truly been a chaotic, stressful story involving an unexpected pregnancy, discernment in a marriage, travel, overbooked lodgings, and then... labor.

We usually politely ignore this last part of the story, maybe because it's disconcerting to think of Mary not looking perpetually calm and beatific, but I'm pretty sure that was not the expression she wore when Jesus was, you know... "about to emerge."  I actually find this rather helpful, since I can get panic and confusion, dismay and even a little fear (let's remember Mary was likely between 13 and 15 years old, after all) ... it's the peacefulness that I sometimes have a hard time embodying.

Last December I worked every single day between Thanksgiving and Christmas managing a book store.  There was no "Advent," there was CHRISTMAS... yelled in my ear for almost a month.  So I can tell you, my physical and emotional fatigue walking into a late-night Christmas Eve service (the first time I'd been to church that season) was extreme.  I had literally been forcing myself to not think about how miserable this month was making me, and suddenly I was in a dark room with people who wanted to sing and think about Jesus... and proceeded to surprise myself by crying during the whole service.

Maybe this sounds crazy to you.  Maybe you've yet to experience a really terrible Christmas season, and God bless you if so. Or maybe you know exactly what I'm talking about, only much worse.  I've talked to people who were sitting in inpatient behavioral health units during Christmas, people who were undergoing surprise chemotherapy at Christmas.  It happens.  All. The. Time.

What I love about We're Gonna' Pull Through is that because the issue they need to "pull through" never gets identified, it can become all of our issues.  I love that there's some humor in here, there's some solidarity, there's some small admission of hope:

maybe, sorta', kinda'

if I really had to say,

something good is on its way...

We're Gonna Pull Through - Over the Rhine (lyrics HERE)

This is the permission we need: to dwell into the difficult places we can't just leave behind in Advent, we can't just stop feeling and we can't just fix.  Life isn't that simple, and the picture is always 'bigger than we knew.'  Instead, what we can do is give ourselves some space to deal with what we're ignoring without trying to solve it, and then... lay it in the stable door.

In the end, this is where the fabled peace of that manger-scene comes from: from a mother who lays aside her pain and her fear for the future to look into the eyes of new and marvelous life.  From a father who lets down his guard and dwells into the moment with them.  From a child who carries all the hopes of a thousand generations as if it were weightless because it is carried in love.  This is where we lay down our hearts and realize that it is this releasing, even for a moment, that allows us to make it through.  This simple act gives us the grace of perspective - a reminder that these things do matter, and that there's hope for it all.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.
                      - John 14: 27

May we remember that the manger scene isn't a place to keep out our real lives, but a place to fearlessly invite the mess of the world that we may receive healing, peace, and grace from the God of Love.

                           - Anna

Sun Dec. 18 - Stake a Claim (Ryan Adams and the Cardinals)

Names are important to me. I am named after two of my great-grandmothers, one from Syria, one from Mexico. One a proud Orthodox Catholic, the other a proud Presbyterian. One who braved emigration and raised her family in New York, the other who raised a family on a farm in northern Mexico. Both strong.  Both women of faith.

These two names from my great-grandmothers make up what is traditionally called my "Christian" name, but there's another part to what I consider my true Christian name. At my home church, when a baby, child, or adult gets baptized, they say, for instance, "Anna Marina, child of the covenant, I baptize you..."

This is my second name. I am a Child of the Covenant which stretches from a man asked to count the stars in Genesis, has a twist in the middle, and picks up in my tradition with Jesus of Nazareth. I am a Child of the Covenant since before I knew what it was, before I claimed it back, before I did anything to deserve it.

Why is this important? Because generally I don't do anything to deserve it.  Because mostly I spend my days screwing things up, getting things wrong, and making a mess. This is no self-loathing; I'm just a human, and that's what we do: we make a spectacular mess of things. Life is hard on us, we're hard on ourselves, and at the end of the day sometimes all we can say is: wow, that's not what I wanted to do at all.

Born into a Light - Ryan Adams and the Cardinals ( approx. lyrics HERE)

What I try to remember during Advent is that I've been caught up in a story that began before I was born, and which will carry on after me. That my mistakes matter, but they're not the end of the world.  That my "worthiness" has nothing to do with my belovedness. That I was born into a Light, and am therefore both known for all my shortcomings and also surrounded by the glow of grace. That my name is 'Anna Marina, Child of the Covenant,' and that is a name and a bond that will not let me go, no matter what.

It's a rich, amazing inheritance, but it's also one that I sometimes hide from because it's a little embarrassing. Jesus? Well, yes, but...

So I also challenge myself: if I've been given this gift of a name and an inheritance of grace, how can I take courage and claim that tradition back? To be bold and say again, "Yes, I believe in all the slightly strange but wonder-inspiring stories in this ancient book. Yes, I believe that God's Spirit is at work here, in this Bible, in this broken Church, in my patched-together, imperfect life. Yes, I believe that this little baby who grew into a flinty, challenging, grace-filled man was God. Yes, I claim this wonderful, foolish, backward truth, because it claimed me, and because it names me."

May we remember our claiming, our naming, in our Advent walk and gather our spirits and voices to claim the story and the name of Christ in return.

                                 -Anna

Wed Dec. 14 Casting Out (Eastmountainsouth)

No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us…There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.   

-I John 4:12 & 18

    …yet, we still run. Even in this time of preparation, of promise, in this time when we remember an event held up as one of the greatest proofs of a loving gracious Deity, I am still afraid. There is something about the Christian concept of Divine Love that is both wondrous and unnerving; something so intimate, so knowingly gracious, that it unearths all of my insecurities, my fears, my scars and the brokenness of my heart. For me, sometimes the unearthing is relieving, but frequently it is a painful process.

Which is what I think of when I hear the lyric:

Once in Israel, Love came - and we were all afraid.

Not trying to generalize in the least, this is just how I make sense of what it means to be afraid in the presence of love. Be it the radical tendencies, the searching-and-knowing nature or just the unfathomable-ness of the Love of God, I do not think I am the only one who is unnerved (try explaining to Uncle Larry just how deeply God loves him over the Christmas ham this year, don’t forget the part about how deeply God loves Larry’s enemies, too). Maybe that’s just my Uncle Larry, maybe that’s just me. But I wonder if part of preparing for the coming Love, is recognizing our fear, our unnerved responses (of whatever variety) examining them, and learning to hold them in our advent waiting.

Having lived through several cycles of reflection on the Love that came down at Christmas, I was at first a little disheartened to be confessing, yet again, that familiar fear that keeps me running. But as I reflected on the Bible verse above, I found myself wondering about just how it is that fear is ‘cast out’ of us. What if the casting out of fear is not always a single, powerful moment, as I had previously imagined (perhaps because of the demon possession imagery that frequently accompanies the verb ‘to cast out’)? What if it, instead, is a slow drain or a steady tide that deposits more and more love in us until our fear and pain are pushed out by that love?

Because, luckily for us, Love didn’t just come once in Israel, but Love comes to us again and again, born in our midst daily. So, perhaps for now it is enough just to be able to hold our fears and as we let love wash over us again and again, to find that the fears shrink in our grasp and little by little are washed away.  

Divine Love, return again to us.

                                         -Lindsey