Nothing to give – 21 December 2012

One level of Christmas awareness, the most prevalent one, understood by most, tells us that it is a time for giving gifts.  And so I watched a young mother at the supermarket, with a toddler and various items of food in her trolley, thoughtfully taking down from the high shelves two large parcels of exciting things for a child – hair brushes and mirrors, tea sets, dolls and other playthings – all pink, shiny and plastic under their clear plastic lids.  Gifts are compulsory, somehow, even if they can scarcely be afforded – and O O Henry wrote that classic short story, The Gift of the Magi, about a destitute young couple in New York.  He somehow managed to buy her a hair brush for her exquisite long hair, but she had sold her hair to pay for a gift for him. 

The Wise Men brought gold, frankincense and myrrh, not quite what you need for a young baby, but an absolute gift for Bible interpreters of symbolism, ever after.  I hardly imagine most people are thinking of gifts for the Baby Jesus.  It is more a matter of computations about how much to spend, what is appropriate, what is affordable, what would be welcomed, what the other person has given me.  Some give reckless gifts, knowing there will be a reckoning later.  What matters is the giving of gifts, and the response of appropriate gratitude.  Almost the entire commercial world is depending on people making generous decisions about gifts.

But Christmas is actually a Christian season for Christian believers.  It is a time of light and love because of God’s gift.  It is a time for treading softly in the awareness of mystery.  Something has happened we didn’t deserve, don’t understand, something we need to receive before it drowns in sentimentalism and activism – something which has no affinity whatever with the Santa Parade.  It is our season and our high feast.  It is above all a time for being still and receptive. 

And the extraordinary discovery is that we have no gifts.  C S Lewis coined the amazing phrase, Surprised by Joy.  He received a gift.  He felt that nothing in him was sufficient or appropriate for a gift in return.  We receive the gift, and we respond by quieted, softened and joyous hearts.  That is the point.  I think also it is a time in which, in stillness, we can bear part of the pain of the world, lift a bit of the load, in our hearts.  I can’t imagine what it is like at Christmas in those American homes with a child missing because of hate and violence.  The gift is a gift of peace and love.  Receive the gift.  

 

 

 

Our Warkworth Christian Meditation group is now in recess over Christmas and January.  We expect to resume on Friday 1 February, and the next blog entry will be then.  Good wishes...  Ross Miller

Protecting Advent from Christmas – 14 December 2012

Advent, it seems to me, brings to the fore those aspects of Christian faith people find unsettling, the problems many don’t want to think about.  Why doesn’t God make everything right?  Why do good people suffer?  Where was God at Auschwitz?  How come Christ’s church is so sinful, hypocritical and embarrassing?  Why doesn’t simple faith protect me from anxiety, at least, if it’s not going to protect me from disaster?  Well, at least in Advent we are encouraged to look up and say honestly, No, the questions are not answered for us.  Faith then becomes faith again – that is to say, the faith of Abraham who went out at the call of an invisible God, not knowing where he was going.  Abraham was at God’s beck and call, not the other way around.  You have not chosen me, I have chosen you, said Jesus.  Faith, says the writer to the Hebrews, is the conviction of things not seen. On Whitsunday 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations, wrote in his diary:  I don’t know Who – or what – put the question, I don’t know when it was put.  I don’t even remember answering.  But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

In December almost everyone is tearing around in a complex activity called Getting Ready For Christmas.  I think it illustrates how energetically we respond to familiar things that comfort and reassure us.  Family, for instance, and children.  Money, if we’ve got it and can spend it.  The sentimental carols and candlelight.  The memories of the past.  The comforting assurance of food and drink.  The prospect of sunshine and warmth.  Doing something for others in need.  The Christmas tree and all the lights, the nativity scene, the presents.  For some, the wonderful familiar gospel nativity stories.  So it’s a good time, and I have to be careful that I do not even seem to be critical of good things.  I keep my cool, even at the solemn recital in the supermarket of I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus.

Advent, after all, is hard to describe or sell, particularly to children.  It’s for grown-up people anyway.  Advent is when, with the Jews, we face our yearnings and hopes, and realize yet again what it is like to see through a glass, darkly.  For many there is actually nothing much they can see clearly.  Advent is when we reach out for a word spoken to us which tells us we are known, named, and loved.  It is when, if we don’t actually tear down our idols, we at any rate see them for what they are – and laugh a little bit.  Idols don’t like that very much. 

In the stillness and silence of our prayer Advent may enter, even if Christmas is clamouring all around us everywhere else.  So perhaps that is Advent at its best, in silence, mindfulness and attention. 

Becoming Jews again – 7 December 2012

One modern teacher comments that Advent is when we all become Jews again.  Partly, he is referring to the sense of waiting.  Down the centuries of Hebrew history, but particularly since the Return from exile in Babylon, successive conquerors marched across their promised land, and most recently in Jesus’ time the Romans.  Through it all, down to the present day, has flourished the hope of the Messiah, the Anointed One, who would usher in Israel's deliverance.  In our times, Israel, as usual surrounded by enemies, knows it is prudent not only to await the Messiah, but to equip itself to defend by all means available what they call Ha’Aretz, The Land. 

Many supposed messiahs have come and gone.  To faithful Jews, Jesus of Nazareth, however admirable, is not recognizable as their Messiah.  So to Judaism, faith remains very much a matter of waiting.  They have waited through dispersion to the ends of the earth, and through centuries of persecution culminating in Auschwitz.

Our secular culture has a very much reduced capacity for waiting.  We are increasingly conditioned for instant response and satisfaction.  People go hopelessly into debt because what they want they must have now.  And because what so many want so deeply is relief from anxiety and pain, and from the terrible fear of loneliness and need of reassurance, our culture constantly makes idols, deliverers, messiahs – whether it is Lifestyle, Money and the illusion of power, even Family or Race can become an idolatry, and so can fundamentalist religion.  But God informed Moses:  No gods before me.  Advent is a time in which, in our waiting, we stop and look at our gods and idolatries. 

Simple psychology informs us that our idols, one way or another, turn out to be reflections of ourselves.  We make idols to meet our needs, and the primary idol is our own ego – what I want, how I imagine myself to be.  But to be a Jew means forsaking all idols.  We are given sense and worth and identity, recognition and meaning, by the summons, the word, of God in our hearts. 

For instance – and this is one seminal example in our memories – we cannot make sense or in any way explain or domesticate the principal nightmare of our lifetime, the Holocaust, and its relentless implacable choice of utter cruelty and injustice.  Christian folk and atheists keep asking, Where was God at Auschwitz?  But that is not the point.  A Jew does not expect such a thing to be capable of sense or explanation.  The point is to refuse comfort, to wait.  This was eventually clear to me one day at Auschwitz when we came upon an inscription in Hebrew.  It was a quotation from the Book of Job, and it said, Oh God, cover not my blood, and let my cry find no resting place.   Advent is about the courage, the faith, to stay with the pain in life and the unanswered questions, to refuse to make idols or adopt slick solutions, to be still, silent, consenting. 

If we want to be free from pain and anxiety, there are 101 ways to attempt that – and good luck with them all.  But the journey of faith entails knowing how to wait, how to take the rough with the smooth, how to set ego aside, how to make space for love and freedom.  And I think members of this group know that very well.