Refractions

Caesar has never wanted us to know anything but the grinding juggernaut of inevitability, of just the way things are. Caesar has never wanted us to know that there is an alternative to Caesar, another way, another kind of power and a different kind of future. Caesar has only ever offered the extension of current arrangements to create a known, predictable, imposed future. “Resistance is futile.”  Mostly we accommodate ourselves to this, deliberately or by default. We argue realpolitik and “It could be worse.” Some choose to make a deal, to become agents of Caesar, entrenching his power ever more deeply in the fabric of communities and the lives of households and persons, shoring up its claim to permanence and inevitability. Some retreat – to private and ahistorical spiritualities, to addictions, to one or more of the “isms” that embody our penchant for idolatry. Some are destroyed by the greed and violence of Caesar, Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar. Some rise up violently to overthrow (an...

For Isaiah, in the context of twenty-three verses of Chapter 7, from which we tear seven (10-16) for the fourth Sunday in Advent (A) the problem is idolatry, and the consequence is ruin. The people will be reduced to eating curds and honey while their land is swarmed, as if by flies, by a foreign army. And in the midst of that ruin, a child will be born. His name, the promise of his birth, Immanuel – “God-is-with-us”.  In the midst of great devastation, God's great "nevertheless". Immanuel! The context in which Isaiah gives this testimony is a struggle for Jerusalem (described in 2 Kings 16), first in an attack on Jerusalem by the alliance of Israel and Syria, then in a new alliance between Judah (King Ahaz) and Assyria (King Tiglathpile). Judah becomes, in many ways, Assyria's client state. Ahaz sends gold and silver from the temple as a “present” to Tiglathpile, and reorganizes the temple to feature altars that follow the pagan designs of Damascus. As usual, the...

“Their birth-songs are battle-songs, the women we love,” Joseph says to Elkanah. Elkanah thinks of Hannah, mocked by Penninah for what seems her weakness, her childlessness. Joseph considers Mary, pregnant without (apparently) the (biological) involvement of a male. “The women we love sing the mighty from their thrones, the empty-handed rich, the broken bows of the mighty and the wealthy hiring themselves out for minimum wage. They sing the humble exalted, the poor raised up from dust and the needy lifted from the ash-heap to sit with princes”. “Yes, they do, Elkanah says to Joseph. "They most certainly do.”  Joseph and Elkanah cannot speak for Mary and Hannah. But they can consider them, the women they love, and wonder what these birth-and-battle songs might mean. Elkanah knows the gossip that shrouds the soul of the woman he loves, that Penninah provokes Hannah to weeping and hunger. Joseph knows that he can foster or ruin the thriving of his expectant betrothed, whose expect...

God knows something and shares that knowledge through Isaiah: There will be a peaceable realm where the infant is safe with the adder, the lamb with the wolf, the kid with the leopard, the cow with the bear, where the lion’s a herbivore, with the whole unlikely menagerie led by a child.  It’s easy to make a connection between the peaceable realm and a child who, as an adult, will make that realm the heart of his own purpose and proclamation. It’s also easy to see in it a prediction that favours “our” part of the story as denouement, that predicts “our” Messiah. I wonder if we might rather catch, in the peaceable realm, a sense of how “the knowledge of the Lord” functions as a subversion of certainties – including religious certainties – throughout the Hebrew and Apostolic scriptures. “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord.”   Having lived all my adult life in a church fighting – hurting and destroy...

       The beautiful future: You can’t get there from here As we set our first foot into the Advent landscape, we hear Isaiah utter God’s promise of the beautiful future, the future in which “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” In the promised future, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” But when we look around, that beautiful future is not what we see. We see violence and idolatry, hot wars and cold peace, and abuse of our planet host. Frayed nerves and soft bodies and what the late John Prine called “a crooked piece of time”.  We find ourselves, that is to say, standing inside the story, standing beside Isaiah, who utters the promise of the beautiful future even as he begins a sustained account of the anger of God over the idolatry, greed, dishonesty, injustice and violence of Jerusalem, and of the approaching fury that God will level against “all that is proud a...

Where do you start, with the shadow or the sun? Is one better, or do they need each other like YHWH and the Adversary locked in something like love, something like hate,  but like nothing so cold a thing  as indifference? Is there a whole story without loss, without betrayal that follows desire, that tracks what makes you alive, what makes me alive, though far from perfect or right? Do we really believe that the frantic hunger of humans can so distort the dream of God that it fails?   Please say, “No.” So as we wait for what they call “the fullness of time”, we ask, Can we trust? Can you trust me? Can I trust you? and perhaps, to break  (or make)  the deal  (or the heart), Can you trust you,  and can I trust me? So. The question that haunts our hearts.

How did you trust the life of one just born, and let that be what makes you end with hope? How did you know the moment,  how did you recognize this advent as strong enough to bear the weight  of your own failing, falling life? Were you visited by light, enough light for a whole world, and did it come from those two eyes, seeing you so brightly against the gloom of age? Is what you sawso clearly,  through dim eyes and temple smoke the not-so-distant moment when this baby’s arms will carry you home?

Do you ever, on the first day of September, as you walk into the wind,  warm from exertion, feel the freshness of the breeze bathe you with cool? Do you turn left at the corner, feel  the warmth of sun on your back and notice the light has changed, is somehow thinner –   do you think to yourself, “Ahhh, I’d forgotten that”? Do you mostly forget  what winter days feel like until yours are the first footsteps in the snow in the park, and you see what early light can do with all that whiteness and the long shadows of trees? And does the smell of mud blossoming out of melting snow,  still, somehow, surprise you, though you’ve known it every year since who knows when? – and does thin ice  on shallow puddles seem like grace  as you break it with your boot heel? Do you smell ozone one summer afternoon after rain has settled the dust  on the street of a prairie town,  a scent forgotten, now remembered, now familiar? Do you still, sometimes, pull...

What is the point of this journey, with its tiresome food  and its wearying wilderness sameness, (I have a map of Egypt in my wallet) with its thirst and nostalgia (I see you have one too),  its uncertain horizon,   its lacking of any sense of where or when?  Where did the time go? It rode in our packs and our pockets, through the sea, under the mountain, across the desert a vagrant doxology  from “in the beginning” to “world without end”,  until it arrived at this very nanosecond we call now. This time being threshold –  all there is, infinitely thin and containing all worlds. There is no hook I can sling  to recapture yesterday, or to grapple my way back to it. There is no line I can cast  to reel in the future, no tightrope of time I can cross to tomorrow. Suspended between voids on this threshold of now that I never cross. We say this is our story (I say this is my story): Inundating and subsiding water,  an ark, falling from qu...

  Where is the robust Story? Where is the robust Story, strong enough  to bear the weight of bodies and of souls, to touch millennia of wounds and scars softly, with healing, and to feel billions of muscles strain towards life? Where are the benedictions that we crave  when blessings seem in short supply? Will we, like Jacob, smelling like the hunters we are not and wearing the skins of deception,  steal from an unseeing one  the blessing for which we thirst? Or will we live our un-narrated lives, and say, as Esau says, “I have enough”, set out for the margin, known from that moment on   not as ourselves but as our children? Where is the story that will catch us as we plummet from the brink,  pushed off the page  by our own bare adequacy, by our having enough and no more? Will we wrestle  with a Stranger in our dream, and seize our blessing and receive our limp? Will we fall and rise again like Joseph, trafficked by his brothers –  ...

Visitors’ Day  We didn’t know then  there wouldn’t always be more time.   We didn’t know we would waken one day  to the absence who alone could tell us what we, too late, longed to know. There are so many absences, these days, so many orphaned questions, that I could welcome, even, “so little time”. You wonder why there’s not a day, one day a year, when a gone one could fill  one of those empty chairs,  and spend the day – so little time – with you. Would it be someone  So suddenly absent, so hastily gone, there was no closing time? (I’m thinking of one now.) Or one who knows the family stories, like “How did they meet?”  or the feuds –   “What really happened?” I might choose one of those.  I’d love to know what I could know now,  had it mattered then. Or “Do you remember learning to ride… a horse? a bike? a wave?” Or some event or thing or fact that would surprise them now: for my grandmother (who made cookbooks)  a...

Flaming Sword This moment, with its teasing hint of summer rain, this sultry day and this languorous self I am so unbusily being, this is the slow-moving forward edge of the flowing rivers  of time and choosing. There is a story to begin and a promise at the end, our ancestors taking in the fruit, taking in the difference,  the apartness from god, from world, and from each other,  naïve bonds now broken that held the otherness at bay. Do you remember summer days with Kool-Aid, bologna, badminton, sand-piles,  swimming, sand-piles, cousins, and naps?  We didn’t look behind the curtain, didn’t see or hear the wizards –  parents, uncles, aunts –  who in the midst of who-knows-what? held the Oz-world open for us, who knows how? Between then and now is the bramble of adolescence, confusions and hurts, of growing up, of aging and of death. There are scars, we all have scars;  we make them on each other, and tend them on each other, too. Long after the c...

  How she loves Just a hundred heartbeats after his birth, he lies on his mother’s skin. He is wet with newness. They warm each other. His mother has already  forgotten the pain. One day his mother will not even remember forgetting the pain. She will forget a lot of pain. Forgetting pain is how she loves.

 Just as sparks fly upward Trouble, hard as flint, and sharp, intrudes itself into every heart. We ache for loss, for shame, for wounds, we ache for knowing what we know. This is the fruit of the knowing we desired,  as the voice from our shadow  promised agency without grace, warmth without fire. Trouble is near, greedy for ruin, for death, this stalking violence we hope to deflect  with our wealth with our power,  with our prayers… …with our prayers! – what makes us think that your friendship exempts us from loss, from shame, from wounds, from knowing what we know? The sin of the world, is it the entropy of goodness,  wholeness, safety, life? Is it the trouble we’re always in, born to it just as sparks fly upward? How does the violent death of that young rabbi, in that place, at that hour,  take away this sin, free us from this trouble? I’m asking for a friend.

  Affirmation  We inhabit this truth: That God in love  created all that is, fashioned our first ancestors from earth and from each other; walked with them, brokenhearted, from the garden; befriended Abraham and Sarah,  Hagar and Ishmael, Isaac and Rebekah, Esau and Jacob and Rachel and Leah,   and in this moment seeks us as friends. We hold dear this truth: That God's child enters our midst - by the trust of Mary and the constancy of Joseph; by birth at the edge of empire, sung by the angels to shepherds; by witness of John, by baptism and desert; by healing and teaching, by a table hosting all. We trust in this truth: That the rabbi's cross is victory, and empties every grave; that the risen One speaks Mary's name, heals Peter's shame, and bears the wounds of love; that lifted beyond us yet present among us,  and promising Breath from heaven,  Jesus lives. We wait eagerly with all creation to catch a glimpse of the truth to come. Into this myste...