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

Q & A (Raphael Saadiq)




photo courtesy David Pham

"Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you."  Matthew 7:7

We need good questions. Questions that help us name our needs and desires, questions that elicit our voice and create space for us to know ourselves better, questions that identify the dissonance and brokenness in life, questions that open us up to dream of something different.

In his book, Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes to a young man who is troubled by questions to which he cannot find the answers. Rilke says. “Love the questions themselves; as if they are locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language…live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live you way into the answers.”

In this Advent season one of our needs is time and space to question, and to sit with the questions; to be, to wait, to speak and to listen. There is some grace here, some breathing room to pause, some relief to be had in calling out the disjointed places in this season and in our lives.

                                     

Our song today reminds us, however, that we cannot stop there. As much as we need the space and the practice of questioning, we also need answers. We cannot stop pursuing, hoping for, demanding answers to some of our most important questions.  The catch of Advent is that we tell the truth, and name our needs and ask our questions and we wait and we dwell and we observe; but we do so with expectation, with hope - we need to.

 So we look for answers. We expect answers for questions like Saadiq’s, who will “help that child whose only 4 years old?” We demand answers when we confront injustices in our communities and brokenness in our institutions. We work toward answers for questions that echo across the nations, “How can peace become a reality on our streets and in our world?” And we hope for answers to the questions whispering within us: “Can I be transformed?”

So we come, needy, to this Advent season. We bring the questions that we must ask and the answers that we already have, in the hope that they will talk to each other, sparking among us better questions and deeper answers, for these, we need in every season.

As we enter this Advent season, may we hear, in community, the voices around us and the voice within. May we listen for the deepening questions, and seek together the strength to press on for their answers.

                                                                                                                                              -Lindsey