First Week of Advent from the Underside: How Will You Prepare?

If you live in the US, you celebrate Christmas, even if you aren’t religious, or a Jewish or are Buddhist or are Whatever. Given our national obsession with making money at of the Birth of Jesus, even if you cover at work so your Christian friends can be with their families or eat Chinese food and go to the movies, your life here in the US is different in some way on the 25^th of December.

We are currently in the season of preparation for Christmas. If you follow the recommendations of the merchants, you are making shopping and gift lists and checking them twice and probably not caring a whit who’s been naughty or nice.

In the Christian Church this season of preparation and waiting for Christmas is called the Advent Season. During the four weeks preceding Christmas, Christians wait in hopeful expectation, prepare spiritually for the birth of Jesus. It is common for Christians to mark the days with spiritual practices intended to help them open their hearts and minds in new ways to receive the gifts of new life, hope, and salvation born into the world in the Holy Child of Bethlehem.

Whether or not you self-identify as religious or claim Christianity as your own,  you can still spend some time in this season of preparation for Christmas to prepare spiritually for the celebration on the 25^th.

 The birth of Jesus celebrates hope, love and joy born anew into the world.                                                           

                                                           

Preparing for Love: Identify and act on a concrete way you can increase love in your life this week. Or, perhaps you can reconnect with  friend you haven’t talked with in a while, give an extra dollar in the Salvation Army kettle, or try to be understanding in a relationship where you feel not all that understood….

Preparing for hope: Think back over your life to a time when you were faced with overwhelming odds that you overcame over time. What did you learn about own strength and resilience that you hadn’t know before. Now, spend some time  thinking about a difficulty you’re currently facing, recommit to that struggle with renewed hope in the reaffirmation of the depths and grace of your own resilience.  

Preparing for salvation: Think about the Holy, the Divine, God as you have come to know the Sacred in your life. Call to your mind’s eye an image that speaks to you of this reality. And, breathe. Relax into the Presence of grace and compassion, safety and peace. Breathe. Relax. Feel at home and be grateful. Be grateful for your day, for the big and little thing, for the people and pets, for the blessing of the good and the wisdom gained from the bad. Think about the Holy, the Divine, God as you have come to know the Sacred in your life. Be grateful and say, Amen.

Reminder from yesterday: People often think, “I’ve put that (traumatic event/loss) behind me.” Or, “I  saw a counselor (or talked with my pastor) about that at the time.” All the while they are wondering why certain present time events or encounters keep bother them or bring up the long ago pain or struggle. What folks don’t take  into consideration is that: they have changes, their lives have changed. The meanings they constructed in the past (on their own, with a pastor or therapist)  may no longer fit.

We often need to go back later and form new meaning from old, long past struggles. It is simply a part of our human condition. If you think about it, look how long the followers of Jesus have been trying to live into the meaning of his death and resurrection…

Meeting Jesus: Black Friday Shopping with a Buddhist Monk: Preparing for Advent on the Underside

This year, sister and brother Christians, evangelical, conservaive, liberal, progressive… have been bemoaning the cultural sacrilege of stores being open on Thanksgiving and the social-political-personal doom this portends. I did not shop yesterday and today’s shopping totaled $23 at the resale store (which was quite empty and offering 30%off). My friend Tyler took a Buddhist Monk Black Friday shopping and reflects on the experience here. What strikes me is how Jesusy he managed to make Black Friday Shopping with at Buddhist Monk. http://postsfromthepath.com/2013/11/29/a-spirit-filled-black-friday-survival-guide/


The thing I know best about Jesus is that he wasn’t so much about the rule book or ideas about how people should behave, rather Jesus was about meeting people right where they are in their deepest point of need and offering grace. While not ignoring the obvious really, really bad behavior of many, this grace is something Tyler seems to be able to notice, the grace of stores being open on Thanksgiving in the lives of people who sorely need the extra day of work and the double time holiday pay or the deep, deep discounts offered to afford some of the basics of life.

He leaves me feeling a bit convicted, in that old, old evangelical sense of my own sin (that which separates me from Christ). I was struggling with these ideas in abstract in a group of other Christian women a few weeks ago who were speaking in a very “spiritual”, quite self-satisfiedly way about all this. I said nothing because I didn’t want to make a “problem.” So I came home and wrote this blog post to assuage my guilt.  http://listeningasthosewhoaretaught.blogspot.com/2013/11/approaching-advent-from-underside.html

Thanks, Tyler, the Word is flesh and blood, meeting real human lives in their points of deepest need. On this Black Friday, thanks, for giving life and breath to the baby whose birth we who struggle to be Christian await.

Bring People Back To Church

I've known this truth a long time, however this week it seems to be all I've done: the church is not losing people because it does not have rock bands, visibly tattooed preachers, Disney-esque youth pavilions. It is not failing to attract people because it has strayed from orthodoxy or because every sermon is not focused on our dependence on substitutionary atonement. 

I can tell you from

 my group room that the church is failing to attract the very people it is called into being to serve because it is not meeting them at the point of their greatest need. Honestly, the road to Emmaus is a true story, one that is not contained in the Gospel of Luke, but one that is lived out every day, a thousand/million times. I think that when we in the church can open ourselves to the real grace of our risen Lord, alive and well, touching our deepest needs, deepest pains and fears, sufferings and despair then we can live a church which will do the same for God’s hurting, suffering, longing people.

Image to the right is "Dinner at Emmaus," Mondrian.

Jesus is Out of The Church

Here is what I learned today: 

The old Haitian woman is brown, and bent and slight as her walking stick. I was so glad to see her. I had worried in all this heat. In the past, she has told me that she has many years since made peace with the voices in her head and her need for Jesus. With Jesus, she told me, she has a happy life off her meds which often seemed to make things worse. It was not always thus; a jagged life she is glad she is long past.

She came to join us today carrying a bouquet of wild flowers, all green and yellow and sienna and orange. They were beautiful. Finding no vase, she took a can out of the recycling and left them for everyone to enjoy.

She told me, through long missing teeth, to go to the local village fest. It features the music from many cultures, it is important for all of us to try to increase our understanding of other people if we are going to live well with one another. I must go too because they have a gospel tent. They are bringing Jesus to the people.

Jesus, she says, is locked up these days in the churches. It wasn’t always thus. She tells me of  her childhood in a poor mountain town where the RC church was so far away that they could only go twice a year. The Pentecostals were out among all the small villages. All the Catholic parents would send their children to the Pentecostal bible school and worship services held in tents so they could learn about Jesus. All carried strict instructions no to go down to the Alter Call. Many did, though, and later brought their parents.

The people need Jesus today, she tells, me. He needs to be brought out of the churches and back to the poor, hurting, struggling people.

Thinking about Jesse and the Children

"Yesus Memberkati Anak-anak," Artist: Komang Wahu,Indonesia

Tuesday I attended the Illinois Faith-Based Emergency Preparedness Initiative sponsored by the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) and the Broadcast Minster’s Alliance of Chicago, Inc. Speakers of note were the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Carl C. Bell, MD, Dir. Of the Institute for Juvenile Research and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Public Health at University of Illinois at Chicago.

Rev. Jackson caught my attention my final year at college his Operation PUSH was encouraging reading and studying among inner city youth as a step towards changing their lives. My four years at Converse College in Spartanburg SC had so changed the direction of my life that all I could think when I read about what he was doing was, “yes, of course, open their minds and they might be able to change their lives!” Later, in seminary, I had a chance to work more closely with Rev. Jackson’s vision when I worked for Harold Washington’s mayoral challenge to the Daley Machine out of PUSH headquarters. Mostly, I registered voters and must have done a fairly good job of it as I had my own right to vote challenged three times—for voter registrations to be legal the person doing the registering must be a legally registered voter. With each challenge, I had to present myself at the Board of Election Commissioners with attorneys supplied by the campaign and proof of my legal residence so that the voters I registered would be legally registered. I also pole watched for Mayor Washington on Election Day.

Rev. Jackson caught my attention yesterday when he talked about the normalization of trauma in the lives of our children. He told a chilling story of a drive by shooting at a school across the street from the PUSH headquarters. The children all dove for cover and then went back to playing like nothing happened. The threat to their young lives all too familiar an occurrence. I got to thinking about the children from our local high school who have died at their own hands lately. I do not think that the normalization of trauma in the lives of our children is an experience limited to children who suffer at the threat of urban gang and drug violence.

Children who live in highly affluent areas like ours are victims of normalized violence as well. It is harder to recognize and easier to minimize but it exists none the less. Many of our children dive for cover from emotional violence just as deftly as those who dive from bullets and they too then go on about the normal business of their childhoods.

The thing that makes me so very sad is that we ignore the children of color in the city because they are children of color of the urban poor and we ignore the children of privilege in affluent suburbs because they are affluent children of the privileged. We ignore our traumatized, hurting children all the while extolling our cultural commitment to family which seems often timed to me to skirt the boarders of idolatry. As we ignore our children they seek their own solace. They seek solace in gangs, sex, drugs, alcohol, violence, and they seek it in taking their own lives.

Jesus asks us to let them come to him and not to hinder them (Luke 18:15-17). Yet, in our ignorance we do. In ignoring the culture of trauma in which they are forced to somehow, daily, make normal regular threats against their physical and emotional wellbeing, we hinder them, daily, from encounter at the points of their deepest needs with the welcoming safety of Jesus’ healing embrace of their weary and hurting souls.

Please, Jesus, do not let us hinder your children from drawing near to you. Open our eyes, and hearts and minds to the needs of the gentle, tender, hurting souls we are trusted to keep in your name. Amen.

A Gift Named Wanda

"Old Woman Sitting," Rembrant

Thirty-six Roman Catholic patients received communion from Wanda whose tortoise skin hangs lose over a right mandible clearly misshapen. Cancer of the tongue spread to the jaw. Saving her life meant disfiguring her appearance and her speech. It has taken me years to train myself to understand her; even now, I smile and nod, not infrequently, through my miscomprehension. She keeps Jesus in her pocket (in a pyxis, of course), that smells faintly like mothballs and is light coated with cat hair. Wanda brings me cat toys for my cat and homemade pie and rabbit cakes at Easter, religious costume jewelry from old, dead nuns and worn prayer cards to dead saints I have never heard of. Wanda tells how she does not believe in gossiping and then proceeds to for far too long. And she tells me about what a bad patient her husband Joe is since his stroke; she herself has been a patient through enough surgery and chemo and radiation and rehabilitation to know a good patient when she sees one. Joe is not. But he is a man she says, he cannot help it. She loves him as he is. She loves me.

I try to make a point of sitting in the office when she volunteers to bring Roman Catholic communion the first three Fridays of every month so that I can listen as she talks to me. She seems to need someone to listen. On the forth, she drives to her childhood home parish, St. Boleslaw’s, or the like, bringing Jesus to the elderly homebound there who speak only Polish. I wonder if their ears, perhaps a bit more muted, but certainly more patient then mine can understand her better in her parent’s tongue. I imagine they do not care so much. They are grateful for her companionship, for the familiar guttural cadences of their youth, for presence, for the Jesus that she brings.

Lately, it seems as though Wanda’s walk is becoming misshapen too. Her gait lists to and fro; every step a seeming victory over pain. After serving thirty-six patients she seems exhausted. I invite her to sit in the other office chair used by my colleague for our talk. Always, the talk. There is her neighbor who she dose not care for but wants to help but who will not let her help… Joe has been particularly difficult not following doctor’s orders. We drift, for the first time, into stories of the other young men who wanted to marry her before she met Joe. There were two of them during World War II. One turned out to have a drinking problem and a violent streak. She left him at the first hint of danger. The other, even his mother thought would turn out to be no good. She told Wanda so and begged her not waste her life on him. She was smart, she did not. Then she met Joe. He was a keeper. “But,” she continued, “it turned out I couldn’t have any children, the fibroids,” whispering and pointing to locus of her shame.

Wanda really never wanted to get married, she confides. She was smart in school and wanted to be a doctor to heal people. She thought her mother secretly encouraged her. Her father, though, would hear nothing of it. To have a good life in this good new country of theirs his daughter needed a husband. “But I’m smart,” she told me, “I would have been a good doctor. I care about people. ”

My colleague has been waiting impatiently for his chair to do his charting. I want to listen further to her stories. She is growing older and frailer and more misshapen by the day. She knows what is coming. She is hard to understand. People have a hard time listening. She is smart. She has no children’s children to leave her stories with. I am honored. She loves me. Jesus is not in her pocket.