Keep it Simple (Burt Bacharach)

There's something so deeply corny about a lot of Christmas music. All this smarmy singing about Santa's sleigh and chestnuts roasting and  letting it snow... as if those were the most important wishes on our list.

Yet even for those who celebrate Christmas but wouldn't consider themselves terribly religious, we know that most holiday hopes go deeper than that. And especially for those of us who observe Advent, we know that sometimes our hopes for the ourselves and the world can go so deep we don't even know how to say them.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

                                                                 - Romans 8:26

Despite the depth of our hopes, sometimes we look for the right words, and all we come up with is "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas." Or we want to talk about what we want Christmas to feel like, and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" just seems to sum it up. These songs can also wear on us after overplay in the mall, but sometimes it's good to just say the needs we have in simple language. It may be corny, but sometimes hoping for 'Santa' and love and peace is exactly what we're trying to say.

"Corny" pretty much sums up my perception of this song by Burt Bacharach. I first encountered this song in the kitchy film Austin Powers, which is sticky-sweet nonsense from beginning to end. Then, I heard the song on a retro-weekend on the radio the other day, and suddenly recognized Advent: is there any more sweetly cloying and totally true to say during Advent than "what the world needs now, is love, sweet love? No, not just for some, but for everyone."

May favorite part of this song is when it kicks into high gear with the uptempo psychedelic guitars. It's saying, yeah, this wish is true, but we're gonna' have a little fun with it, too! This is helpful, because I often forget the power of having fun and keeping it simple when it comes to saying our needs during Advent. But fancy words don't beat the plaintive power of being straightforward... as any of us could tell you who've yelled along to a pop song about love or good times in the car.

There's a certain virtue to corny. Isn't there something weirdly corny about our insistence on mangers and babies and fluffy lambs and stars on Christmas? This is the SON OF GOD we're talking about here, and we turn it into a story reenacted by eight year-olds. Yet as any of us know who've retold this corny story of God's birth among us, there's an incredible power in the simplicity and symbolism of the manger story, just as there's a majesty about John 1. 

My vote this year, as I say my needs and set out my hopes this first week of Advent is for BOTH: both the corny and the profound, the sweet and the bitter, the soothing night shadows and the bright light of a star. I choose Over the Rhine and Eliza Gilkyson who remind me of the yearning, aching, and profundity of this season. I also choose Burt Bacharach and Brenda Lee... and all the other corny songs that remind me that our hopes are simple and joyful and filled with hopefulness.

What corny hopes do you carry into this season, and how can you claim them without apologizing for their simplicity?

May you find the effervescence and delight of this season of Advent, the anticipation and the hopefulness, the playfulness that allows both our deepest and our most simple hopes to be named to God.

                                                                                               - Anna

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                                    

Say the Need (Mavis Staples)

This year, the Advent Music Project is thinking about how we "do" Advent in our lives. How does Advent become more than a description of a season, and become a verb that we use to move, grow, and shape not just this moment, but our way forward as well? If Advent and Christmas don't transform us, bit by bit, through the years, we're missing out on their biggest power.



This first week of the Advent Music Project, we'll think about how we SAY THE NEED. How is Advent a time for "pausing in life's pleasures and counting its many tears?"

As we've said before, Advent isn't Lent. Yet both of these seasons are about telling the truth about our lives and the world. As Jan Richardson says,

"Advent beckons us to remember that even as we anticipate birth, we are challenged to let go; to make way for what is coming, we give up whatever would hinder us from receiving it. Sounds a lot like Lent. And sounds a lot like our whole lives. One of the gifts of the liturgical seasons is that they invite us to give particular focus to the stuff that surfaces all along our path."

So even though there are times in this season when our "voice would be merry, but 'tis sighing all the day," we can hold both realities in tandem: our struggle with what IS, and our hopes and longing for what COMES.

Mavis Staples, perf. Hard Times Come Again No More. Lyrics HERE.

A sign that Advent is growing among us is when the truth of our lives meets our trust in God's salvation.

So,"Hard times come again no more," we say. We say our need, and we hold our yearnings in our hands as we live deeply into this season of flickering light, long nights, and rising hope.

May you hunger for the newness of this season, and may hope and honesty meet one another in your life, and kiss. May patience and longing meet; may your focus and your faith kiss one another; and may you enjoy the rich feast of reflection and renewal they offer.

- Anna            

Sun Dec. 12 - Trusting the Future (The Davis Sisters)

"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.

                                   - 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