Double Vision (Talib Kweli)

I've died enough by now I trust 
just what's imperfect or ruined.
...And a million others might be like me, our hopes
a kind of illegal entry, a belief in smashed windows...

- from God the Broken Lock
         by David Rivard



I believe in smashed windows. I believe in ruined bodies and limping minds. Not just in hope for their healing (sometimes), but with deep conviction in the preciousness of the bearers of brokenness themselves - which is all of us, in some regard. Brene Brown puts it this way, "what makes me vulnerable is what makes me beautiful."

Most of the time, though, I don't act like what is broken is beautiful - especially in myself or in the society in which I live.  I can have a gaze of such grace and loving-kindness for another, but forget to turn it on myself -- or harbor such anger about injustice or dysfunction in society that I forget to applaud the weeds and wildflowers that break through the concrete.

David Rivard's poem, excerpted above, reflects on himself as a young boy breaking into a concert hall with friends. Crawling around and then falling asleep, they awake to the sounds of a famous soul quartet warming up - not on their own hits, but on gospel songs about Jesus. Jesus, who spent his whole life turning his gaze not on the whole, the beautiful, the acclaimed, but on the ugly, humiliated, broken, and cast out.

Talib Kweli says it this way: "I approach it from another angle / I stay in the streets and notice the gutter rainbows." Gutter Rainbows of spilled oil and sunlight, even though "the pain that you will discover is making the angels shudder." Beauty doesn't take away the pain of our experiences, nor does it make them 'okay.' Beauty can be our survival mechanism, however, our way of looking with fresh eyes, and creating with a spirit of hope. Seeking beauty in the mess is our resistance to despair.

Gutter Rainbows by Talib Kweli. Lyrics HERE.

In our Advent waiting, it can be hard to keep this double vision of hard truth-telling about our brokenness and need, and also our belovedness and beauty. Our world was created good, and though we've invented a thousand sad ways to pervert it, the fundamental goodness remains. It can be vertigo-inducing to practice "seeing double" during Advent, but it's the most honest way to remember what we still can't see at all:

"For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known."      - 1 Cor 13: 12

Double vision, actually, is a difficult 'handicap.' It is tiring, requiring slow movement and frequent rest. It can cause headaches, nausea. In the end, it is supremely uncomfortable to see two views of the world at the same time. Yet the side-effects themselves teach us the fundamental truth of our own vision: we always see double, and it's our minds that condense the images into one. For a season, therefore, we seek more diligently for a double perspective so that we might carry forward the remembrance that we are hard-wired to see two things at the same time -- to hold the paradoxes of brokenness and beauty, pain and possibility, as one.

In the season of Advent, may your double vision grow stronger, may you discern silhouettes of grace and beauty in even the most craggy passes.

                                                                                              - Anna


**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.**

Sat Dec. 24 - Things Hold Together (Dave Matthews Band)

Joseph went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.              -Luke 2:5-7

(Anna) Maybe this isn't the most reverent thing to say on Christmas Eve, but babies often remind me of Cracker Jack boxes. They may not all look the same, but there's really no telling what they'll become. Reprobate, saint, mediocre wishy-washer... they all just start out as, well, babies - complete with personalities but not yet shaped by the marks of fate upon their skin. So pause the manger scene for a minute and flash forward thirty or so years: what do we see now? Does it even really matter on Christmas night?

Yes, it matters, because if I can't get it in my head that I'm welcoming a child who isn't just going to sit quietly in a crib forever, but will one day be the pushy, annoying, rabble-rouser that doesn't just implicate people I don't like but who pushes back on me as well, well then I might as well just open my gifts and be done with it. But, if even for a fleeting moment, I can hold on to the fact that there is both something real and pure about the lavish gift of love and peace offered in that silent night in the manger, AND that there is something complicated, messy and uncomfortable about this baby's birth that will (and already had) upset the order of the world -- then I've truly held Christmas in my hands. When it feels almost impossible to hold this paradox in mind, I just remember that the almost-impossible and the nearly-incredible are what lie at the heart of the Christian faith - as this night where God who comes as a human and showers us with 'love, love, love.. all around' so wonderfully proves.

(Lindsey) Every good story has a conflict. Great works of literature, Disney movies, the good story of a friend, they all have something with which the main character must contend: bad guys, hardship, or even her/himself. But this story, this baby, brings our literary preferences pretty close to home. It flips the script. Jesus (as baby, man, God)  is the conflict, the scandal, the sticking point upon which the world's way of being trips and topples - and is the conflict over which we still trip and tumble and are upended.

The story of this night unfolds into the life of Christ - among a long list of characters: 'less-informed authorities,' cynics, jeering neighbors, demanding family members, those who seek violence as a means to peace, people who love their traditions more than anything, and those who will not risk. I have at times inhabited many of those characters in the stories of my own life. But this story is not (only) a great literary work, a moralistic tale, or the story of a friend - this story is more. It is an axis of wonder, a place that we return to year after year, a mysterious truth that we spin round and round. The wonder of it is this: that the conflict and chaos, the resolution, the love, the frailty and the fear are all present as God's grace embraces the world. That in spite of (or, I believe, because of) this complexity, both present in the world and present in us, the Creator came to walk among these 'characters' -- and comes still to walk with us now: the uninformed, the violent, the cynical, the fearful.

And so we fall silent on this Christmas Eve in the face of a love that is bigger than we understand. And we dwell for a moment in the wonder that God, in whom all things hold together, became a small baby and reached out to embrace all things in the hold of grace.


May we be embraced by wonder as Grace is born again to us tonight.

                           - Anna and Lindsey

Fri Dec. 9 - Eyes Wide Open (Iron and Wine)

In [Jesus] all things were created... he is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
                            -- Colossians 1:16-17 selected

At a young age I realized this eternal truth about great pop music while listening to Paul Simon's Graceland album: a truly great song is one where I can mishear the lyrics and love both the true and false versions equally well. This is true of most Iron and Wine songs, and Walking Far From Home is one I particularly love precisely because there are so many delightful and thought-provoking things to mishear.

The delicious mystery is what keeps my eyes and ears open, not just to this song, but to the world.  I have no idea what the ultimate meaning of the song is, but I sense that it has something to do with awareness, loving the broken and the lost, and hope.  These are all ideas that remind me again of our theme for this week: what helps?  What helps with our longings and our brokenness?  What helps with the waiting?  Iron and Wine reminds me that what helps is keeping our eyes truly open to what's going on around us, taking in the grace and the grime.

Walking Far From Home is like a lullaby for the world as I'd want it written: sad and gorgeous, compassionate and hopeful, tragic, honest and humane.  For me, it speaks of our essential identity as wanderers in this world, and yet of the ways in which we are ultimately drawn back together in God's embrace.  It invites us to open our eyes and celebrate the beauty of Creation, even in its broken state.

The lyrics are worth reading HERE, but it's also good just to "mishear" the first time around... what do you hear?

This song invites us, in the words of Mary Oliver, to be "a bride married to amazement,/ ...the bridegroom, taking the world into [our] arms."  Or, to take the challenge further, as Mother Francis Dominica states, to remember that "Nothing in your life is so insignificant, so small, that God cannot be found at its center."  This song challenges me to look for beauty and meaning (manifestations of God) in all places, even the strange and painful, the outcast and despairing.  I may not see God immediately, or even at all, but at the end I will have looked with my whole eyes and my whole Spirit, and maybe in that way will have embodied God's presence in that space.

I like to think that Jesus' healing ministry began with his unflinching gaze upon the rejected, the sinners and the lost that acknowledged their deep humanity beyond their brokenness.  Conversely, any of us who have sat at the side of a stranger who was ill or dying, or a friend who had become lost in their own despair knows that sometimes the only possible response is to look, to look with love and grace and peace into the mystery of this one human life which touches all human life... and with that look acknowledge that life is more than just the meat of things; that there is an awe-ful beauty at the heart of our lives, and it is there, sometimes, where we are able to fall back into God's embrace.

Saw a wet road

form a circle

and it came like a call, came like a call

from the Lord.
                                 - Iron and Wine

May we allow ourselves to look fully and deeply at the things we love and the things that hurt in these days, seeking God at the center and knowing peace along the way.

                                           - Anna

Wed. Dec 7 - Telling Better Jokes (Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros)

Photo courtesy of Anand Balasubramaniam

In Spanish, one way of saying that someone is really funny or quick-witted is to say "tiene mucha gracia."  Gracia basically means "wit" or "quickness" in this context, but the same word also means and is used for what you'd guess: "grace," as in God's grace.  I love the way humor and God's work in the world are so intertwined in this one small word.

One thing that's been helping me a lot recently is thinking about how funny the Bible is, or at least, many parts of it. Sometimes I wonder if humanity doesn't realize that we're God's straight man, and God keeps cracking jokes we don't quite get.  Ever heard the one about the big fish?  What about the man who had a wrestling match with God?  Or what about the one where God walked around as a human and told jokes all day long about the amazing, backwards, looney grace of the Reign of God and no one understood?  That was a good one.

I'm not trying to be flippant.  All of these stories are ultimately deadly serious, having to do with forgiveness and death and struggle and fear and hope -- but so are all the best jokes.  The role of the jester in most Shakespeare plays, for instance, is often to tell truths in the form of jokes and riddles, not to be obtuse, but to reveal what's hidden by flipping it inside out.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have gained a huge following in my area, mostly based on the exuberance of their music and lyrics, but what I love most is their dual interest in celebrating wonderful things like connection and love, and also talking about terrible things like war and brokenness.  They even admit in their "manifesto"-style song, Janglin', that, 'once we were the jesters... and now we're out to be the masters/ for to set our spirits free.'

"We want to feel ya' 

(We don't mean to kill ya'!)

We come for to heal ya' janglin' soul..."

                     - Janglin' by E.S. and the M.Z.  (Full lyrics HERE) 

Janglin' by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

There's something freeing about recognizing that life's seriousness and pain has an edge of humor to it, that the grace of God sometimes comes in the form of a joke.  One of my favorite meditations on the resurrection, by H.A. Williams, compares Jesus' rising to a punch line: all the solemn important Powers that Be have put down the Man of Nonsense and are congratulating themselves... while not knowing that he has risen again and is gaining even more followers than ever before.  They were trying to stop the nonsense of Jesus' inside-out stories of radical love, and don't know they just helped him create the most inside-out one of them all: one that traveled all the way to the cross and back.  As Williams says, "if that isn't funny, nothing is."

What if Advent (and even Lent?) had more jokes in it?  What if our ultimate goal as Christians was to tell more jokes: with our lives, our priorities, our hopes?  What if we weren't so stuck on serious and were able to welcome God's promises with relief instead of angst?  What if we let the humorously "weak" powers of love and forgiveness do some powerful healing for us and others?  What if we recognized that the jokes themselves (wolves lying down with lambs, the meek inheriting the world) are the biggest threat to the Powers that Be because they use ammunition that no vest can stop: truth and a little bit of grace.


The wolf shall lie down with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them...
                                    - Isaiah 11: 6

May we tell better jokes and ease our hearts with laughter at the surprising Grace of God who, at Christmas, came as a baby instead of a regal King - not in spite of the difficulties of this world, but because of them.

                                 - Anna

Mon Dec. 5 - A Strange Grace (Mediaeval Baebes)

Ne had that apple taken been

That apple taken been,

Ne had never our ladie,

A'been heav'ne queen.*

Blessed be the time

That apple taken was,

Therefore we moun** singen

Deo gracias!

* Queen of Heaven    ** may

The first week of Advent, the A.M. Project thought about how we long and need our way into Advent.  This second week, we'll be thinking about: what helps?  What helps us not just get lost in the necessary crying out during Advent; all our rightful needing and longing?  


Adam Lay Ybounden is a medieval poem I learned in college, and it's one of those theologies that makes me squirm a little: it basically argues that the"Fall" in Eden (eating the forbidden fruit from the tree) was a good thing, because if it hadn't happened, Mary would never have borne Jesus Christ.  Given the traditional concept that humanity's Fall brought all sin, suffering and death into the world (though not exactly my view), this still sounds like a pretty bum deal -- all respect to Mary and Jesus, of course.

But listen again:  what I hear when I listen more carefully is PLAY.  The poet is playing with the stories of the Bible, turning things on their ear to see what shakes out, and saying, "See?  Look at it from this direction!"  You don't have to agree with the affirmation to see the benefit: it makes us look twice.  And maybe, if we dare to affirm that there's something wonderful about Jesus' story (virgin birth and all?) that's so meaningful, so beautiful, so valuable that it would move a poet so many hundreds of years ago to write "thanks be to God" to whatever set this story in motion... maybe it can amaze us, too.

Poem/Song Lyrics HERE

We should keep wrestling with our traditional theologies, especially noting the ways in which they have "gone wrong" in history, furthering bad practice, harmful attitudes or false justice in the world.  But maybe we shouldn't throw out our ability to play with these same ideas, upend and re-tell these same stories, filled with strange God-in-flesh babies and virgin births.  Maybe there's something in a slightly-embarrassing drawer of Church theology that might offer us a strange grace... an insight, a "huh!" of surprise or delight... that makes it worth another look.  In the end, maybe it's our ability to play that will save us from despair, not only in the Church, but in upending our views on the world, looking again, and playing with the myriad possibilities of change and Creation.

"Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly..."        
                                          - Colossians 3:16

May we wrestle and struggle and ponder our way through these days, calling out pitfalls and errors, but 'being not afraid' to play, to mine the richness of tradition and story for insight, truth and grace.

                                - Anna

Fri Dec. 2 - Living in the Paradox (The National/Simon & Garfunkel)

"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