The year is old. Maybe we're feeling a little "old" too, with all the cares and regrets, all the changes and worries of the past year weighing on us. There's been a share of tragedy in this past year for some of us, individually and collectively.
There have been good things, too. Maybe it's been a Red Letter Year for us. Either way, what has been, has been.
Maybe it's time to have more fun. Today's song reminds us to just "let it go." Not as a judgment or as a way of denying the past or the difficulties, but as a way of admitting that "when morning comes" we recognize that all things transform in time, and that with the new year, we are offered opportunities for renewal, for hope, for - dare we say it? - dancing.
As the year bends and turns toward renewal, may you remember the good things and the difficulties, letting go what can be released and welcoming renewal as the new year dawns.
Branding has become a huge deal in the last few years. Apple computers is a prime example of a company that has created a loyal base of users, mostly because of the excellence of their products, but also because of the consumer experience and "brand identity" they create. Buying Apple products says something about a person's good aesthetics, demand for quality, and uniqueness... or at least that's what Apple's marketing tells you.
We also have a Christmas "brand" in U.S. culture. Buying into Christmas (TM) says something about our basic goodwill towards others, our thoughtfulness, and even sometimes our faithfulness. Here's the problem with branding: it's mostly about surfaces.
What would it look like to take the "branding" out of Christmas? Stop doing the "shoulds" like parties and cookies, obligatory gifts and endless kitschy decorations. Not only leave Santa behind, but leave behind any smug "Christian" concepts like judging the 'Christmas and Easter' church crowds or getting miffed when people don't wish you a Merry Christmas. Open ourselves to the possibility that our agendas (our "Christmas (TM) brand-identities) are helping us skate across the surface of Christmastide without really being changed.
Somehow, for observant Christians, while there's a sense that Lent and Easter should be a transformational experience in our faith lives, we think of Christmas as a mirror that reflects back to us all the things we love most about ourselves and our lives... and when the mirror doesn't work, when things don't match, or are chaotic or discordant, we get upset.
This is no way to observe the birth of the Christ child. Most of us have already moved on into the preparations for the new year. Meantime, the Christ child asks to be born anew in us, asks to be allowed to go deeper, below the glitttery branding of Christmas (TM), and into our hearts.
What would it look like to really allow Christmas to dwell into us, to mean something significant in our lives this year?
May the mirror of these post-Christmas days become a doorway into a deeper experience of dwelling with the newborn Christ in this season of renewal and transformation.
Let's Make Christmas Mean Something This Year - James Brown
I want my life to make more sense, I want my life to make amends, I want my life to make more sense to me. - The Frames
I'm not a New Year's "resolver." I have never made a resolution to do something after the new year, similar to how I have only a very few times "given up" anything for Lent. It's not that I have anything against the original concept of these traditions; it's just that their everyday forms generally fail to inspire me. For instance, how much does giving up chocolate desserts for forty days really inspire me to think about my life or Christ's sufferings? Not that much, really.
It's not that I can't imagine a possible scenario where giving up something small for Lent could help me focus or practice self-discipline, or how a New Year's Resolution could inspire me to new depths of self-actualization and happiness... it just also seems a little unlikely.
What would it look like if our resolutions had a revolution (literally turned around) to become something that was a little less about ourselves and reached out to encompass a community, a family, a world?
Sure, let's still go to the gym, but also let's think about the mark we leave on the lives of others, how our acts create waves that we can't even see. Let's think about how we're making sense of our lives, how we are making amends, how we rightly choose to stay and fight or choose to find a fresh road forward...
Turns out, this ties right back into Christmas. In the usual December flurry of "Does the 'Christ' Still Matter in Christmas?" articles, my favorite was one in the Huffington Post that reminded us that 'the greatest attack on Christmas has come from within,' from Christians whose actions so little resembled the teachings of Christ.
It is galvanizing to remember that perhaps my resolutions might take a different form because of Christmas: one of honoring the baby born in Bethlehem and the man he grew to be by starting anew the revolution in my own life - the turning again towards the difficult task of trying to live with more grace and less judgement, with more understanding and less ignorance, with more compassion and and less need for control.
Making all things new is ultimately a process of grace through God's help, but it is also a process of time and desire -- and practice. We must want our actions to be transformed or we make God's work infinitely harder. So it begs the question: how are our resolutions at the new year, at the mid-year, and elsewhere opening us daily to this transformation both personally and communally?
And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
- 2 Cor 3: 18
May the work of the Spirit continue to be seen through even our small acts of courage, grace and peace in this coming year.
So then, if anyone is in Christ, that person is part of a new creation. The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived!
-2 Corinthians 5:17
As we enter the last week of the Advent Music Project and the first week of 2012, AMP is thinking about how all things are being made new. The glow of the manger still warms us and we linger for one more week in the path of Magi, in the stories that will ask us what we have to offer the newborn king. I must confess the metaphor only goes so far for me, as I have trouble conceiving what might be equivalent to frankincense in my spiritual life, but I don't think that is the point anyway. Rather, we encounter the baby of that manger, the embodiment of God's Love, as we are; and in that encounter we are invited to be changed, myrrh or not...
Amazing Grace
For my money, there is no better song to speak of being changed by Love than Amazing Grace. This week we will explore the theme of all things being made new, but I do believe that the work of making creation new starts in the hearts of women and men as we are made new by grace. So I quite like the verse that Cat Power sings, (though it is a little off script from the old standard), that says "Good people been here more than 10,000 years, every one bright as the shining sun, we've got no less days to sing God's praise from the time that we've begun, it will be grace that will bring us safe and home." There is something in those lines that evokes a sense God's renewing goodness: people shining across the ages, people called good, by the Source of Grace who is journeying us home. Whether it is the moment we first begin, or it seems thousands of years since we have begun our faith journey, there is something about Grace that invites us to be made new at each encounter. After all, as the poet Denise Levertov says, "But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope?- so much is in bud. How can desire fail? - we have only begun to imagine justice and mercy, only begun to envision," (Beginners).
... So what does it mean for you to come as you are to the manger? How might the baby in the manger invite you to be changed? What do you want to be made new in you?
God With Us, draw us into your grace, into the promise that you are making this world new; draw us in the wild hope that we, too, may be made new.
At the turn of the year when all hope seems to fade deep within the bleak chill icy cold comes a voice in our ear for to be unafraid and have faith all that's lost shall be found...
...no more dwell in sadness but do trust in our hearts that the New Year will right everything We do say with one voice we do pray with one heart for the promise that Christmas doth bring.
-Song of Forgetting
I am not one to laud people’s ability to affect their own
destiny, or suggest Oprah-style that one can order up a new life with the
universe (Not that I don’t believe in
self empowerment, I just frequently find a troubling lack of social analysis in
these claims). But I do believe that our
days are full of possibility.
I think of how many different people came into my life this
last year: a couple new friends, a whole staff of coworkers that seemed like
they’d be daily fixtures forever (until our store closed), and countless people
who I encountered only once. And that
was only my public life; how many schemes did I work on and abandon, plans did
I form and put in motion? Dreams, failures, redirection, losses of family
members, of a job, of a clear path toward my goal. The unpredicatbility of life
is what makes it rich with possibility.
This time of year reminds us that things change, the year
cycles and, though for some of us it might travel similar paths, each step is
ripe with the potential of our own choices and the power of our connected
nature.
The Song of Forgetting weaves together images of ending and
beginning with a sense of hope and possibility.
In the white hollow silence as a
new day is born and all the fair world lies asleep tied up with a prayer
for the promise that Christmas doth bring.
This is perhaps the promise the angel gave to Mary “nothing will be impossible
with God;” or the promise of Mary’s son, that God is with us; or the promise
that God, whose Love came to transform the world, is also interested in loving
us to newness.
This Christmas gift, this sense of hope and possibility, that comes more easily to us
at the New Year, is something that calls to us the whole year through, echoing in the birth of each new day. It beckons us again, when the first spring shoot polks out of the snow, when babies are born, when we begin a task again for the eighth time, and on
each day in between.
May we hear the call of possibility and the song of hope in each day of the coming year.
