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.