Advent 2019: When Bamboozlement and Conformity Assault the Senses

It is so easy to lapse into thinking that everything is mist. That it's all a subtle long-lived lie. The way things are, they way we are, it's just all laid out and waiting. And we more or less stray within these borders of acceptable tolerance. From trailer parks to Beverly Hills. From career-homelessness to real estate developer. The addict to the accountant.

And maybe it is just a plague some of us endure. Some tribulation of the mind like sleepwalking. Sleepliving? The curse of the conscious, or the overly aware. Sensitive to things like repetition and command, expectation and culture. We might not push back on these if they weren’t forced.

We rub up against the normalcy of life and recoil at its redundancy. It's nothing against tradition or familiarity. And practice makes perfect. But that cuts both ways. We can perfect becoming inhuman.

And for some, there’s a visceral response to the omnipresent expectation of conformity.

I say conformity, not similarity. Conformity is sameness for the sake of efficiency. Similarity is a flourish of expression given the same means.

So conformity is death to the free mind and spirit, and assimilation serves no great purpose other than production.

And I often wonder if this is the mist. The need to be the same, to be efficient, so that someone else can reap profit and power.

Maybe this is the root cause of a dreamlike wandering through a tepid and absurd world where people take life away for things like new shoes or fossil fuel. Where entire systems exist to preserve stratification. Invisible and also visible bondage.

Do the colors seem faded? Or is it simply that they are familiar, and therefore no longer brilliant to us? Washed away by pixels and fiber optics, living inside a screensaver. Real like a projection is real. A rendering of something, but not the actual thing.

Is the candle burning? I smell the ozone and smoke from a match struck. I feel the heat when my hand is closed around the flame. It feels real. Like maybe I should wrap my whole self around this small burning thing that looks like a promise. If I listen closely I can hear the flame whip the air.

If I lean in, I can almost taste emancipation.

Advent 2019: When We Burn the Tide and Outshine the Sun

The lighthouse was swept away years ago. Tide and turbulence gnashing at the granite, jawing at the stone seat. Gulls, restless and pitching on drafts around the sentry.

And why were we there? To watch, no doubt. Watching the watcher.

The grass and thatch atop the small island overrun by the waters. Steel sea. Steel sky. The deep surging against this monolith. Wave by wave. Her lamp, the pulsing glow, exhaling in bursts of light between crests and crashes. The gasping brilliant beam, shot across a breaking expanse. An ember and glow, a patch of illumination fading below a boiling frothing tide.

For what it’s worth, she never sank. The sea simply took her.

And now, holding the same light, that same burning, we survey the same waters. The very darkness meaning to hold us under.

Those same dark waters often covering us. Roiling. Breakers slapping at bare skin. Faces streaked with salt and spray.

We lift our arms. Lamps high. Water rising. Mouths shut. Eyes ahead.

If faith is a flame still breathing in the damp heavy tempest of time,

If love is a beacon still jubilant amidst the surging sea of loss,

If trust is a triumph in the diaspora of the not yet,

Then the lamp is still burning, regardless of our depth.

We'll turn the ocean into fire and rend the world with its light, outshine the sun, burn the tide.

Advent 2019: When Hope Looks Ragged and Raw

This is some ragged hope.

Still breathing by some miracle. Dragged through hell. Clawed it's way back from the grave more times than we care to remember. Up through earth and root and stone. Through social anxiety, failed marriages, lost children. Trips to the ER. Envelopes stamped with "Past-due". Through riots and brutality. Through violence. Loss. Incineration.

This is no wished-upon star. This is no delicate murmured prayer.

This is the flogged hope that comes to us, rises to us, that is us, that is the spirit of the somehow-I'm-still-alive.

This is prophetic hope with a spine rubbed raw from all the carried crosses. Broken backs from carrying the truth to power. From marching to be seen, yelling to be heard, bleeding to be known. Blood the color of royalty.

This is the buried hope that was beneath all things. That was planted deeply. The darkness of the earth pressing it into a new thing. A burning thing. Compressed fear, rage, and promise.

Ignition.

This hope is the flare and flame. Refusal to go quietly into the night.

Some rebel, this hope. Some specter of what should have been extinguished. Buried alive. Returned. Ignited. A burning thing.

Sister, don't you know that resurrections and revolutions are heat and fire - the same light?

Brother, don't you know that saviors and rebels are buried and broken - the same indignation?

This burning breathing hope comes swaddled in grave clothes. Reborn. Rebuking the reaper. Refusing the sentence. Rebelling. Reclaiming.

This is the rising hope.

No candle, are we. No flickering flame. No spark.

We are the bright fiery tide.

Advent Week 4: Light

“When the sun shall dawn upon us”

Crowning the horizon, chasing dark shapes from the valley, it comes. Slow. Defiant over the night.

We who sat hushed and holding hands, holding breath, holding embers, exhale.

Strips of light brush skin, spilling through dusty window panes. Refracted on the wall through the forested limbs, it dapples and drapes the world in newness.

We breathe again.

Shadows recede.

The light is come.

As if to say, did you think I would forget?

To which a few say through their tears, yes.

And still others, no, but the night was long.

and yet, “Because of mercy…”

…the light is come.

Mercy drags light into the valleys of death and the dark rooms where we shut our eyes and pray for morning.

Daylight breaks over the weary.

“To guide our feet into the way of peace.”

What other way is there? We learned in the dark the terror of power, of struggle, of unseen hushed words, whispers, stolen names, and we rise from the valley to walk.

Nobody rises for another grave.

Peace. The absence of chaos, or a shield despite it. Peace is a high calling but we’ve all seen the dark. Felt it. Hate it. But peace whispers of something different.

Peace whispers something about a cradle, a cross, and a crown. Peace whispers something about another king. Another way.

Nobody rises for another grave.

Mercy brings light.

Light brings peace.

Peace brings us home.

Advent Week 3: Presence

The journal was removed from its leather sleeve and casually tucked in a corner of the workshop, beneath flakes of dried pipe tobacco and sawdust.

The card stock cover provided no context so opening to an entry from Christmas a few years ago was a surprise. It wasn't much writing. A few lines. Words scrawled hastily across a cramped page. A confession.

Too many gifts.

Not enough presence.

A time for reflection becomes a mad dash of color and light; a feeding frenzy for consumers of trivial things. Consideration and celebration are exchanged for a cheap plastic cradle and we move the star from above the stable to dangle it over a sack of toys like a carrot.

But the gifts are good. Giving is good.

Only, not at the expense of the gift.

The hope and promise.

I don’t want to see shreds of wrapping paper like breadcrumbs tracing back to when we should have bathed ourselves in the hope of a newborn king. To miss the grace is too great a risk. To enter Advent as dusty sojourners and not come out the end as light-bringers is a tragedy.

This is our chance to reclaim the glitzy warp-speed world for the manger. This is our chance to remember how the darkness froze in terror at the sounds of birthing from a stable. Mary’s groaning. First cries of life.

While people inside the inn ate, or argued, slept, or worried, on the other side of the wall, the king came unto us.

The stable is where you find us, the ones who pine for mercy. In the quiet corner, on the silent night, when hope came unto us.

Here we are, Lord. No lights but the stars. No sounds but our feet shifting on the hay.

Nothing but the presence.

And that is the gift.

Advent Week 2: Promises

There is no cradle without the cross.

This is the tension in which we exist. what is and what could be. Life today and the promise of tomorrow. The true Christmas celebration cannot be whole without its fulfillment in the cross of Easter.

There is no light without shadow.

And I’ve wondered about this weariness I feel when we enter this season. With so many lights, how can something feel so wrong? Why is there such an ache?

Sink below the haze of the holiday frenzy to street level. Outside the proverbial inn are the dark corners of the holidays. Here we find the God we sing about. Here in the languid streets. Among the people.

We, the broken.

And this is the whole point, and why there is tension beneath the glowing lights: a season of hope is for the hopeless. A season of promise is for those who need to believe in something real. In a world gone mad with distrust, this is our gift. The deepest heart of Christmas is found in the hope of the cradle and the promise of the cross.

Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.

The irony of the hope we celebrate this season is that we keep it tucked within our homes and under our trees while our brothers and sisters around the world face harsh realities, a darkness the glow of our Christmas lights won’t reach; a cold the warmth of out fires can’t thaw.

For all the people.

And we remember. Hope does not thrive indoors. This news was never meant to be tucked and shuttered in our hearts. This is a season of good news. A season of promise.

Of cradles and crosses.

Of freedom.

For we, the broken.

For all.

Advent Week 1: Darkness

We begin Advent in the dark. The kind of dark you can touch. The kind of dark that has substance.

Before the first candle. Before we ignite in the heavy silence there is only darkness and it is here we must begin.

Before the light, is the dark.

In the terrible dark is the weight that sits heavy on our chests, ribs cracking under pressure, lungs gasping for air. Eyes open wide even in the blackness. Even though we know we will see nothing. In this dark is every fear.

It is loss. It is war. It is addiction. It is sickness. It is loneliness. Anxiety. Desperation.

The breaking point.

And the ache.

The wrenching of the heart. The jaw-grinding, body-shaking thirst for dawn.

And sometimes - listen to me - to ache is enough.

It’s okay to not be the strong one, for a while. It’s okay.

Just to know there’s more. To ache for it. To cry out for home. To know there are answers but to be unable to hold them for a while. Open hands.

To want something undefined, to want something defined, to want something because you don’t know what the hell else to do. Closed fists.

To ache for the world we know we can have but can’t seem to reach. To ache for the truth promised in all these holiday lights we cling to for a few short weeks. To ache for wholeness. To ache for touch. To ache for hope.

We can’t stay here, in the dark, but maybe you just need to know that, for now, to ache is enough.

Because to ache is to feel, to know, and to long for something beyond the dark. And sometimes, that is enough. For now, that is enough, because the light is coming.