The “holiday season” is here. We all engage in the preparation and celebration of Christmas in different ways. The important factor is to get in touch with these questions: For what purpose did Jesus come into our world? What’s all the hoopla about? What’s the good news? Recently I learned about the work of the English poet and performance artist Jude Simpson. Her work is sharp, wide ranging and engaging. One of her poems, “Broken Open” has really helped me focus on those questions and at least for me, answer them. It has become a regular part of my own preparation for Christmas, and maybe it will add to yours as well.
Blessings to you this Advent and may your Christmas preparations and celebrations be rich indeed!
"The Bishop’s Wife" (1947) One of my all time favorites. A warm, lighthearted, and -- OK-- sentimental movie that manages to include all the ingredients that you are looking for at Christmas: ice skaters, snowball fights, boy choirs, snowflakes falling on city shoppers - oh those 1940’s hats! Even Cary Grant as an angel. The plot revolves around an harried Episcopal Bishop’s obsession with building a cathedral what what happens after he prays for guidance! The message is how easy it is to get so wrapped up in “current projects” or for that matter “life itself” that we miss the “big picture.” Can you spot some Biblical revisionism? With David Niven as the Bishop, and Loretta Young, as Julia, his wife. A remake, A Preacher’s Wife, was made in 1996 with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston.
"The Children of Men" (2006) This is an adult, R-rated movie. Not what you think of as a Christmas story! But it really is! No child has been born on earth for 18 years. Science is at loss to explain the reason and humankind is facing likelihood of extinction. Set in and around a dystopian London in 2027, the movie follows the discovery of a lone pregnant woman and the desperate journey to deliver her to safety and restore faith in a future.
Echoes of the Gospel both subtle and obvious, occur throughout the movie, reminding us that God gave us hope for the future by providing a vulnerable miraculous child to a dying, violent world. Children of Men is based on a story penned by famous mystery writer and professing Christian P.D. James. Wonderful cast including: Clive Owen, Julienne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Michael Caine **Two “Christmas” movies not named “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “White Christmas.”
In the last half of the nineteenth century, John Muir was our most intrepid and worshipful explorer of the Western extremities of our North American continent. For decades he tramped up and down through our God-created wonders, from the California Sierras to the Alaskan glaciers, observing, reporting, praising, and experiencing -- entering into whatever he found with childlike delight and mature reverence.
At one period during this time, in 1874, Muir visited a friend who had a cabin, snug in a valley of one of the tributaries of the Yuba River in the Sierra Mountains -- a place from which to venture into the wilderness and then return for a comforting cup of tea.
One December day a storm moved in from the Pacific -- a fierce storm that bent the junipers and pines, the fir trees as if they were so many blades of grass. It was for just such times this cabin had been built: cozy protection from the harsh elements. We easily imagine Muir and his host safe and secure in his tightly caulked cabin, a fire blazing against the cruel assault of the elements, wrapped in sheepskins, Muir meditatively rendering the wildness into his elegant prose. But our imaginations, not trained to cope with Muir, betray us. For Muir, instead of retreating into the coziness of the cabin, pulling the door tight, and throwing another stick of wood into the fire, strode out of the cabin into the storm, climbed a high ridge, picked a giant Douglas fir as the best perch for experiencing the kaleidoscope of color and sound, scent and motion, scrambled his way to the top, and rode out into the storm, lashed by the wind, holding on for dear life.
To me this episode is a metaphor of the Christian life both personal and as the Church. It is at the heart of Christian spirituality which is always and exclusively derived from God’s Holy Spirit. And “spirit” in the biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek, is the word “wind,” or “breath” -- an invisibility that has visible effects. This is the Wind/Spirit that created all the life we both see and can’t see; that created the life of Jesus; that created a church of worshipping men and woman; that creates each Christian. It is this Spirit that has created Christ Church. There is no accounting for life, any life, except by means of this Wind/Spirit:
“You send forth your Spirit, and they are created and so you renew the face of the earth.” Psalm 104: 31.
My hope and prayer for Christ Church as you enter the next phase of your common life and are lead by the Spirit/Wind of God, you will want to be out in the weather and not retreat to the cozy confines of the cabin! Breaking new ground is in the DNA of Christ Church and I hope it will continue!
I’m usually not a fan of fiction bestsellers, but this summer I read a book of this genre that really knocked my socks off. Written by Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See interweaves the lives of a blind French girl, Marie-Laure, and Werner Pfenning, a German. These separate lives collide in occupied France as both Marie-Laure and Warner try to survive the devastation of World War II.
Doerr writes brilliantly and tells an amazing masterfully tale, whose goal is to illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to do the right thing, and try to be good to one another. Highly recommended. I’m fairly sure that there is no overt Christian theology in this novel, but one of the things that intrigued me right away was the title.
Christianity believes very strongly in the assertion that our world is bathed in light we often do not see. Jesus is the light of the world. The earth is filled with the Glory of God on the most dreary of days. Just because we can’t see it, recognize it or even believe it, doesn’t mean that it isn’t there or doesn’t exist. Scripture is replete with references to God’s eternal light; for instance,
“If
I say, ‘Surely the darkness will cover me, and the light around me turn
to night,’ “darkness is not dark to you, O Lord; the night is as bright
as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike.” Psalm 129:10-11
There are wonderful prayers from our wonderful Book of Common Prayer that speak of the subject; many of these come from the service of Evening Prayer:
“Almighty God, we give you thanks for surrounding us, as daylight
fades, with the brightness of the vesper light; and we implore you of
your great mercy, as you enfold us with the radiance of this light,
so you would shine into our hearts the brightness of your Holy Spirit;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen."
And of course there is music which often helps us like “I want to walk as a child of the light, I want to follow Jesus.” Or two of my favorites, “Shine Jesus Shine" and "We are Walking in the Light of the Lord.” (The lyrics are great in all these hymns-look them up!) As we prepare to enter what I call the “dark season” of the year, a time of the year in which people can begin to feel blue, discouraged or even depressed, please remember the you are and I are bathed eternally, in All the Light We Cannot See.
Self-denial is not very greatly recognized or practiced as a virtue in our society. Of course we hear all the time that certain habits or the consumption of certain foods may impair health, but the reason for self-denial in those cases, is plainly self-interest and relates to material wellbeing. We exhort our children be careful about too much spending and not to become victims of the conspicuous consumption of our society but here, once again, the intention is not really moral or spiritual formation: it is to spare them the pain of subsequent debt -- the motive is practical. The lives of many of us are passed in a gentle self-indulgence which would have shocked our predecessors, and which stands, incidentally, in dreadful contrast to the massive privations of existence in large parts of our world. Our culture now contains little or nothing which suggests that self-denial may be virtuous for its own sake, and the religious teaching which once considered it an important aspect of the spiritual life has largely been abandoned even in Christian circles. The gospel of prosperity reigns. Many today regard themselves as entitled (the word of our decade!) to the good life. Rights, have a lot to do with it: the moral culture of rights, with with the catalogue of human rights at its center, is hardly likely to honor our personal privation, even when voluntarily entered into. Life today seems more and more arranged by social or economic or political need; it seems to be about not having what we want or deserve. Most of us would say that we want to be happy: freedom from illness, stable and secure relationships, personal comfort, and emotional satisfaction, for example. But what do they mean? What are the limits? I recently listened to an interview on NPR in which a woman argued that 10-year-olds should have the right to read books that showed different positions of the sex act! It seems to me we live in a world in which expectations of our happiness are forever extending and where satisfaction is more and more illusory. On the other hand, to seek self-discipline in the small aspects of personal living is to cultivate moral and spiritual awareness of the need for the same quality in larger matters; self-denial becomes a precursor of wisdom, of learning how to live wisely, a life not based on wants or rights, but on appreciation and gratitude; doing without helps one appreciate what one has. What we need is not more but less. However, it is almost impossible to declare this in a culture which denies itself nothing.
Christianity has always recognized the truth of self-denial. Jesus told his followers to take up their cross; truth was achieved by arranging individual lives so that the manner in which a person lives assists spiritual understanding. The world is a place where lessons are to be learned; it is not an interlude of hedonism before everlasting bliss. What we become through the accumulation of spiritual discipline here is what endures for eternity.
