"earth is white ground is cold its hard to see the seeds you've sown all our life and love buried beneath the snow days are short, the dark is deep move along on cautious feet..."
In these last days before Christmas, a song that is a simple prayer, a meditation, and a promise:
"be still, my love,
keep holding on
through the cold December gray
we will
have faith,
'cause there's a Savior on the --
a Savior on the way."
Savior on the Way (acoustic, 2012) by Danny Mitchell
"so turn your eyes dead east
and be the very first to see
the rising sun"
May your feet carry you forward with trust, may your eyes be open to the Light.
Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us. We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and the LORD's might, and the wonders that God has done. - Psalm 78:1-4
Anna: I love Bob Marley's Redemption Song, but what makes it an Advent song for me is the idea of carrying our histories that I hear in the line 'they're all I ever had...redemption songs.' It reminds me of the preciousness of redemptive stories, especially for displaced or struggling peoples. Bob Marley speaks from the experience of the African diaspora, and the prophets (and likely the psalmist of psalm 78) spoke for a scattered Jewish population. It is amazing to recognize that the promises of God have represented 'all some people have ever felt they had' to carry with them through their difficult journeys. As people who can frequently fool ourselves into forgetting our need and hunger for stories, how can we name the value of stories that name and claim us, that wrestle with us and change us, that bless us and set us free?
Lindsey: For me, there is something striking about the part of that same verse that says ‘Won't you help me sing / these songs of freedom?’ This request for joining voices in freedom songs speaks to me of a need for the community to sing the song together, to tell the story together. It reminds me that we are all keepers of those communal stories. We have a responsibility to remember the story of our community and to let it live through our voice as we pass it on. There is a collective ownership as we help each other to remember the songs and as each singer’s place in the song adds a new dimension to it. It's my experience, that when it comes to the stories of our communities, there's a way in which we hold the story and the story holds us…
Redemption Song (Bob Marley) sung by Lauryn Hill and Ziggy Marley
Anna: As you talk about everyone's contribution to the song, it sort of reminds me of a quilt, or the act of quilting. I actually don't have any idea how to quilt, but from what I understand, people often used pieces of their own lives - old discarded clothes worm for a special event, etc. - so the quilt became a pieced-together history of where they'd been. At times, the quilts would be worked on in groups, or would be heirlooms handed down to the next generation, so they were also communal. These gathered scraps of quilting cloth often became story-telling vehicles for a family, a community… How is this also true for our Bible, which is actually a beautiful patchwork of stories, histories, poems, prophecies and letters compiled over at least a thousand years of history and movement and change?
Lindsey: I think there is a way in which each of our stories inform and reform each other; shaped, combined, set apart, by the stories to which they are 'quilted.' This is true for the interplay of our own life stories and the stories of our ancestors - those handed down orally and those given in the Bible. The story gets handed down and then retold in different and creative ways. Connecting us to the stories, a place of identity and communal belonging, and connecting the story to us, singing wisdom or comfort or challenge into our lives: these redemption songs.
May we carry with us our redemption songs into these late Advent days; our hopes stitched, sung and scribed across cultures and times, trusting that they are answered by God's promises in Christ.
In this third week of Advent we are moving into a time of real anticipation: the Christmas and Advent carols are starting to feel more "right," the tinsel is glittering, and there's a feeling that the time is drawing near: we are truly making ready for the wonder and peace of Christ's birth to enter our lives once more. This week, the Advent Music Project explores: How do we make ready? What do we do (or not) to prepare for the Coming Light?
The Trumpet Child is one of my favorite Advent songs. The image of a young Jesus calling in the Reign of God with a jazz solo is an image that's hard to top, of course:
The trumpet child will riff on love
Thelonious notes from up above
He'll improvise a kingdom come... -- Over the Rhine
Nonetheless, the genius of this song's image is that it plays with the wonderful alchemy that is great jazz music: improvisational jazz is a musical style that is deceptively spontaneous and chaotic. It's true, the exact flow of notes are created on the spot, but always in a framework: the other musicians have their parts, know the cues to switch keys or let someone else lead, and know the structure to the song. The best improv musicians are the ones who know how to riff on a theme or a format - not just go off on their own. So in the end, improv is actually about mutuality, cooperation, and listening as much as it is about raw talent and creativity.
Improv is a great metaphor for God's power and intentions in the world: God is both sovereign and mutual, creative and cooperative. God's promises are the solid framework, God's actions switch the keys, but within that structure both we and God and the forces of the natural world are "improv-ing" the present together. The good news is that our reality is neither utter chaos nor set in stone: there's room for transformation, surprise, and even delight. True, creativity and freedom can be messy (all good artwork usually is) and sometimes the notes grow discordant, but in the end, God's promises accompany us, the stories of God help us imagine new notes, and the Holy Spirit constantly guides us.
"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." - Jeremiah 29:11
Maybe one way to anticipate and make ready for what God is revealing among us is to embrace our own creative and improvisational abilities. As someone was saying to me today: sometimes life give you exactly what you'd never want, but the trick is to figure out how to change the rules, transform the game, and make what seemed to give no life flourish. It's not easy - this is no cute "lemonade from lemons" proposition - but if God is transforming this world, may we not have faith that our own daily riffs and improvisations are a necessary part of the piece?
May we embrace our creativity and openness; our mutuality and listening; our dreams and curiosity in these days, preparing our hearts for the Advent of Christ - 'riffing on love' along with God and all of Creation.
"Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life...[and] the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. ... There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light..." - Revelation 22: 1-5
Let's talk about the Second Coming for a minute. (Stay with me!) As a progressive Christian, I have to admit that even writing these words makes me a little squeamish: there's WAY too much cultural baggage on this train. Yet abandoning any talk of God's ultimate promises because of those Christians who revel in gleeful violence and self-congratulation may actually be the bigger sin. So call it what you want: Christ's Return, the Final In-Gathering, Love-Made-Manifest-in-All-Creation... I'm going to take my faith and the pain of the world seriously enough to say that the power of God's love is in its tenacity: Love has ultimate hold of this world, and will not abandon or let us go.
Many of the Advent songs in our first week seem to hit a similar note: "we need you God because things are pretty messed up around here!" and maybe this feels too much like Lent. But while Advent isn't Lent, Advent isn't a big party, either. Advent lives in a very strange and wonderful in-between place: in-between hope and somber waiting, in-between already and not-quite-yet, in-between eager anticipation and humble thoughtfulness.
We'll Understand it Better acknowledges that we actually "live" Advent every day of our lives. In the trials of daily life and our unknowing about the future we grow uncomfortable, so we try to create explanations, tactics, rules, boundaries. We also try to take ecstatic prophetic visions like Daniel and Revelation and turn them into road maps and recipes. But maybe what we need to survive in an Advent world is less absolutist theology and more trust in God's intentions: In Advent we practice trusting the future instead of dissecting it.
"We'll Understand it Better By and By sung by The Davis Sisters -- full lyrics to traditional song HERE
Maybe the most revolutionary thing we can say as progressive Christians about God's final promises for the world is that WE DON'T KNOW what it will look like; but we do know what it will feel like. It will feel like the overshadowing of history by Love: scary and real and gorgeous (and deeply humility-inducing) - and ultimately... healing and grace-filled. The wait for this time is an ache of need and a humble remembrance of our own brokenness. The wait for this time is also full of humor and grace, love and peace-filled waiting because we trust the future, and live as though God's promises are already being revealed among us.
May we practice our trust in God's future, remembering that God's love in Christ is not a cold stone of violence but amazing song of wholeness. And one day it will reveal the honesty and glory of all Creation. Amen and amen.
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.
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.
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.
My ancestors knew how to sing songs that would heal people. The people, I am told, would call on the gods who would teach them the song that was needed to heal an ailment, the land, the community. I frequently mourn this missing piece of my heritage, lost to generations of slavery and forced relocation. I long for it most when I encounter brokenness for which I have no words - let alone songs - to mend.
When I hear today’s song selection, I think of my ancestors and am captured by the idea that God could teach us a song for redemption. And on days when I am waiting, when I am telling the truth about this world, my heart longs for such a song, to sing into the disappointed silence and the broken dissonance around us.
My mouth hungers for new words, my soul sighs for the release of a melody,
Lord, give me a song!
A song to tap the toes of the old, to sway the hips of the young.
A song for the darkness and one for the cold.
A song to hold the deep sorrows.
One to sing to the mama whose son never came home
and one to wrap round the teenager who sleeps at the train station.
Teach me the lyrics to ward off evil and those that soften the hardest of hearts. Sing me the harmony that obliterates the disease of greed and the one that roots out those internalized tentacles of inferiority.
Give me a rhythm that keeps the collective memory of the peoples’ strength and an accompaniment to nourish the tender sprouts of our dreams. It is too long since we have sung together, too long since we have sung for healing, too long since we have sung redemption.
"New Redemption Song" by Over the Rhine. Forgive the overshare at the beginning of the video, but I love her comment about this being a blessing song.
We long to sing Lord, give us the song.
The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; The Lord will rejoice over you with gladness, will renew you in love; God will exult over you with loud singing. -Zephaniah 3:17
