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.
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.
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.
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.
Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you. -Galatians 5:1 (The Message)
This song, and the music of Florence and the Machine in general, I find to be rich in imagery and emotion. Every time I listen it resonates with me and sparks some different thought, question or memory. Today I offer them, patchwork style, hoping that these words and this music will create some sparks in you, too.
Florence and the Machine: Shake it Out
**Some strong language
I'm always dragging that horse around
All of his questions, such a mournful sound
Tonight I'm gonna bury that horse in the ground I like to keep my issues drawn
cause it's always darkest before the dawn
Is this theme too late, we are four days in. People've started over already, haven't they? Begun already out-withed the old and in-withed the new? Have I begun already? Yep, begun and begun again.
Beginning as one point of time somehow isn't working for me. The newness of this year feels blunted by my sameness; perhaps I didn't really intend to be changed, or did that step of beginning unearth some old pieces of my self that I didn't know were down there?
and I am done with my graceless heart
so tonight I'm gonna cut it out and restart
How can I still be holding that fear? anger? expectation? I let it go so many times.
A friend wisely said to me once, we should take a hint from our bodies. When there is something in there that is not good, the body does what it has to expell it. Some times we need to take our issues out and disect them or analyze them, sometimes we just need to know its bad for us and get it out, let it go.
That which we cling to, shapes us. Teach us to chose wisely what we hold to ourselves and that which we release to spiral away into the world.
Shake it out, shake it out, oh woah
and it's hard to dance with the devil on your back
so shake him off
"Shake therapy" is Kate's favorite thing. My friend didn't patent the idea but she may be it's greatest evangelist. When she finds herself carrying the detriments of stress in her body or when she is frustrated or angry, she will literally shake all of her limbs as hard as she can to release the stress that is harmful to her spirit and her muscles. When I have been present this shaking has transformed our frustration into riotous laughter (my favorite kind of release) on both our parts, and I believe there is something to it.
I release you, fear... I give you back.... You are not my shadow any longer. I won’t hold you in my hands. You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice my belly, or in my heart -Joy Harjo
(inspired I say) I release you, my fear and my self protection. I shake you off, lies of inferiority and I unwrap tight fingers from you, bitterness. Then I prepare myself to do this again tomorrow.
Cause looking for heaven, for the devil in me Looking for heaven, for the devil in me Well what the hell I'm gonna let it happen to me
There is a kind of grace that we need in letting go, it is hard. And there is a kind of grace that we receive in letting go - the free-fall kind, the just-be kind, that grace where we don't have to work as hard as we think we do, where we can be who we are, where we can chose to let something go over and over and over, trusting God each time to move, further and further from our grasping hands that which is harmful and to place in them, instead, something new.
So, as Florence says, "what the hell, I'm gonna let it happen to me."
Gentle God, uncover in us that which needs release, strengthen our hands to open, to let go and to receive.
