Illuminating everything on the album even when the light is dim is Stevens’s Christian faith and his unerring musicality, which shines as brightly as it ever has in spite of — or maybe because of — how spare this music is. Mostly, it’s just the sound of a guitar and a beautifully tender voice grieving and trying to communicate with the mother he never really knew and also with us.
My favorite album of the year from 2015 is Sufjan Stevens’ intimate masterpiece, Carrie & Lowell. Not since Bon Iver’s devastatingly plaintive For Emma, Forever Ago have I heard an album bleed like this one.
For all its sadness, Carrie and Lowell is impossibly, almost unbearably beautiful. The music and arrangements are delicate, simple, and shimmering. Stevens sings in hushed tones, almost whispering in places. And this deliciously fragile texture supports a deeply personal story of family, pain, memory, and grief.
You have to be careful, listening to Sufjan Stevens’s new album. One minute, the finger-picked guitars and lullaby vocals blend pleasingly into the background. The next, you might catch a line of lyrics and realize he’s singing about his mom’s corpse. Or about heroin. Or about slitting his wrists, “cross hatch / warm bath / Holiday Inn after dark.”
The title characters, Carrie and Lowell, are Sufjan Stevens’ mother and stepfather. She abandoned her family when the singer was very young, and she suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and substance abuse. She died in 2012. For brief periods of time in his childhood, Stevens spent time with her and his stepdad in Oregon. Images of those days appear throughout this impressionistic effort to come to terms with her undeniable impact and ongoing ghostly presence in his life and emotions.
In an interview with Pitchfork (recommended reading to get a full understanding of the background of this album) Stevens said:
With this record, I needed to extract myself out of this environment of make-believe. It’s something that was necessary for me to do in the wake of my mother’s death—to pursue a sense of peace and serenity in spite of suffering. It’s not really trying to say anything new, or prove anything, or innovate. It feels artless, which is a good thing. This is not my art project; this is my life.”
It is a gift that Sufjan Stevens has shared his life with us with such raw transparency and beauty through this remarkable album. I’ll leave him the final word about how to listen to music like this.
Don’t listen to this record if you can’t digest the reality of it. I’m being explicit about really horrifying experiences in my life, but my hope has always been to be responsible as an artist and to avoid indulging in my misery, or to come off as an exhibitionist. I don’t want to make the listener complicit in my vulnerable prose poem of depression, I just want to honor the experience. I’m not the victim here, and I’m not seeking other peoples’ sympathy. I don’t blame my parents, they did the best they could.
At worst, these songs probably seem really indulgent. At their best, they should act as a testament to an experience that’s universal: Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes.
Here is the official audio from the opening song on the album, one of my favorites, “Death with Dignity” —
In it, she examines six scriptures that support Middleton’s contention that “the redemption and restoration described in Scripture is a holistic redemption of all of creation,” and that “Christians are not rescued from earth but saved along with heaven and earth.”
Here are the six texts (NRSV, with emphasized words in italics):
Acts 3:19-21 19 Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, 20 so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah 21 who must remain in heaven until the time of universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets.
Ephesians 1:9-10 9 he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
Colossians 1:19-20 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
Romans 8:19-23 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
2Peter 3:10-13 10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed. 11 Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, 12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? 13 But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.
Citing Middleton, RJS comments: “In all of these passages the saving activity of God is restorative, repairing what is wrong. The object of God’s saving activity is “comprehensive and holistic – God intends to redeem or restore “all things” in heaven and earth, including our bodies.” (p. 163)
Finally, she mentions Revelation 21-22, obviously too long to quote here. But this climactic passage involves a vision of heaven descending to earth, not of saints ascending to heaven, and includes this announcement:
3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them; 4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”
Just as the Garden in Eden, the Tabernacle, the Temple, the incarnate Jesus, and the Church filled with the Holy Spirit represent the locus of the presence of God’s glory on earth now, one day God’s glory will fill all the world and God will dwell among a renewed humanity on a new earth under a new heaven. The entire world will become a vast edenic garden, a King’s temple and palace, which corresponds with the imagery of Genesis 1-2.
Our future hope is not so much that we will go to be with God as that he will come to be with us, raised to life and made new in a new creation.
RJS tells us that Middleton’s book goes on in a subsequent chapter to discuss texts that seem to offer a different perspective on the future. We’ll look at those another time.
For now, as we prepare to face a new year, it is my contention, based on biblical texts like this, that our vocation in this world is to be in this world, fully engaged, planting seeds of faith, hope, and love that will be harvested one day in a new world. There is continuity as well as discontinuity between this world and the next.
A primary role for the Church in this age is to be a sign to all the world of the age to come, a revelation of God’s glory in the midst of this world’s corruption, just as the Temple was in Israel, as well as Jesus, the greater Temple. Ironically, we do that not by glorious means, but in the way Jesus and the apostles did — by means of the cross, where we lay down our lives that others might live.
The story of Jesus has no bite. A tame “baby Jesus” makes his annual, heart-warming appearance, and leaves us largely un-bothered and un-changed. Yet when I read the two Gospel accounts, I am struck by how strange these narratives are, unsettling and fantastical at every corner.
• W. David O. Taylor
• • •
Thank you, David O. Taylor, assistant professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, for putting it so bluntly.
In a piece in the Washington Post, Taylor calls the biblical Christmas stories “weird,” “incredible,” “bizarre,” “unsettling,” “fantastical,” “strange,” “disturbingly odd,” “decidedly troubling,” and “terrifying yet life-giving.”
And he criticizes the church and our cultural institutions for taming and sanitizing them.
One would scarcely know how bizarre these narratives are, in fact, by the activities of artists and advertisers, along with plenty of churches, during the Christmas holidays.
Artists will extract portions of the story, tidy them up, set them to pop or hip hop or classical music, then allow radio stations to play it to death. Grocery stores will play it to a second death. Gas stations will complete the cycle by turning the songs into dismissible clichés.
Sermons, for their part, will rehash the stock details of the gospels, with the hope that parishioners will feel the “magic” or “mystery” of Christ’s birth.
Church pageants will trot out the cute kids in bathrobes, a pretty girl will play Mary, while an awkward Joseph remains forgettable, and an angel-child will belt out the good news to shepherd boys dragging their broom-sticks, eyes wandering over to the cookie table, even as the violins reach their sentimental climax.
iPhones will record the whole business for posterity, so that parishioners will remember how cute and sweet the drama was, even if the actual birth narratives are decidedly troubling and incredible.
I find myself in the same position as he reports: “Year after year, then, I find myself desperate for the church to confront me with that strangeness.”
If the story were truly told, in all its bizarre glory, Taylor says, we might see that, in the coming of Jesus, God is offering us hope instead of good cheer, joy that accounts for suffering rather than mere happiness, and the kind of love “that bears all things, including death and the loss of privileges, so that the faithful might become agents of the kind of shalom that Jesus exhibits…”
He imagines how this might be so, suggesting that we might encourage artists to present us with images, literature, dramatic pieces, and music that show the true human pain revealed in the Christmas narratives: things like the agony of infertility, poverty and peasant life in the Middle East, shame, doubt and social stigma, injustice, political intrigue and persecution, human fascination with astrology and “foreign” beliefs, and the anguished questions of parents who lose innocent children to cruelty and violence.
What if churches, he asks, focused on characters like Simeon and Anna and presented the long-suffering and patience of the elderly whose hopes have been deferred for years?
What if worship leaders gave space in services for people to share their experiences of pain and doubt, travail and suffering?
What if artists were commissioned to create pieces that evoke the terrifying sight of angelic visitations instead of the prettified “Precious Moments” angels that “touch” us so gently?
David O. Taylor asks:
Might such artworks provide us the capacity to live more faithfully in the actual conditions and contexts of our lives? Might they enable the birth narratives of Christ to become fresh again with insight and sharp with tension, for the sake of a new kind of “Christmas in America”?
And might such a Christmas contribute to the healing of our broken world, a world marked by infertility, divorce, doubt, shame, violence, abandonment and strange dreams?
Last Sunday I preached in my home church using the ancient carol, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” I noted how we so often sell short the song’s repeated refrain: “O tidings of comfort and joy.” It usually evokes in me warm images and feelings of Victorian seasonal festivity, good cheer and contentment.
However, the true “tidings” that proclaim “comfort and joy” are the tidings of the gospel, the good news that — as the carol says — frees us all from Satan’s pow’r and creates a new world where God makes things right in Christ. These are the tidings of Mary’s Magnificat: casting down the powers that rule over and enslave us and raising the dead to life.
By domesticating the “tidings of comfort and joy” that this season proclaims, we rob ourselves — and our world — of what we need most.
David O. Taylor is absolutely right. The biblical birth narratives are weird and incredible. We can (and must) stop sanitizing them.
Very little of my faith has involved leaving and arriving. The vast majority of it has involved wrestling, meandering, stretching, struggling. As the saying goes, it’s a work in progress. My spiritual GPS has yet to chirp, “ You have arrived.”
The bottom line? It’s never as simple or cut-and-dried as that.
She writes:
I suspect all these claims of having left empty religion to find the true faith are ubiquitous in both evangelical and progressive Christian publishing culture precisely because they stem from the same illusion—that we are each a blank slate, that we have the ability to start over. But the idea that an American can just stop being an American, or that a Christian can just stop being religious, strikes me as naïve at best, arrogant at worst. It’s no better than the Bible reader who insists he’s not interpreting the text, just reading it, or the white male theologian who insists his theological views are the objective default, while those of women, African Americans, or Christians from the global South and East are contextual. It presumes that progressive Christians, unlike those conservative Christians, are totally unaffected by the trappings of American culture. If only it were that easy.
I certainly think there are aspects of American evangelicalism that people can outgrow, because of much of evangelicalism’s nature.
A person can outgrow youth group style worship.
A person can outgrow Sunday School level theology.
A person can outgrow historical ignorance and the lack of appreciation for tradition.
A person can outgrow a consumeristic approach to church.
A person can outgrow religious kitsch and the marketing of faith.
A person can outgrow simplistic forms of activism and a focus on soterian-style evangelism that ignores the fullness of what it means to love one’s neighbor.
A person can outgrow the kind of separatist mentality that fails to honor and dignify the image of God in those who don’t share one’s narrow brand of faith and practice.
And so on…
But on the other hand, Rachel is right when she observes that a person in our culture who leaves any tradition in search of a more mature faith and practice could have a list like this. Our American cultural assumptions affect all of the faith traditions that practice here.
I left the culture of evangelicalism — in my case a church-growth, discipleship-oriented, contemporary worship, missions-focused group — and found a more comfortable home in an ELCA Lutheran congregation. But our church is what I would call “Lutheran-lite.” Many of the emphases are there, but they are clothed in less than robust expressions of what truly attracts me to Luther and many distinctive marks of what I would call an “evangelical catholicism.” I’m not going to list any complaints, but if I did I would attribute almost all of my specific discontents to our church and denomination’s cross-pollination with liberal American political and cultural values and with envy toward the evangelical world’s success in growing churches.
When I do complain or think about finding another church, it’s not long before I look in the mirror and see an American who is steeped in the spirit of individualism and personal autonomy. Bottom line is, I want what I want the way I want it.
I’m sure every church in which I’ve been a member would have a list of complaints about me too!
Rachel is absolutely on the mark when she writes, “perhaps real maturity is exhibited not in thinking myself above other Christians and organized religion, but in humbly recognizing the reality that I can’t escape my own cultural situatedness and life experiences, nor do I want to escape the good gift of my (dysfunctional, beautiful, necessary) global faith community.”
So…in brief, welcome to the mess.
The path is never straight, the way is never clear, the goal is never certain, the context is never completely nourishing or satisfying. And I’m as much a mess as anyone else.
What is important is being on the path. With Jesus. With one another. With our neighbors.
Loving the Church means both critiquing it and celebrating it. We don’t have to choose between those two things. But those of us who remain Christian cannot imagine ourselves to be so far above the Church – including the American Church – that we are not a part of it. (RHE)
There is a category containing foods over which I have no ability to reason or resist. Should you wish to make a fool out of me, these are the foods that will facilitate the process. If you want to see a grown man reduced to the level of pure lust, this is the formula. If you want to frighten your children with visions of pure addiction, simply bring them over and set one of these foods before me. Just don’t put it in their hands or things could get ugly.
In this third category of food temptations beyond all reason is egg nog.
Yes, egg nog, that heavenly concoction that appears in the holiday seasons and lays claim on the minds, desires and appetites of those of us who have, after ten months, achieved some balance, sanity and clarity in life. It is entirely possible that one day, Denise will come home and there I will be in the kitchen, propped up in the corner, dead, surrounded by a dozen empty egg nog cartons. Pity me not. It will not have been an unpleasant end, I assure you.
Now I must quickly clarify that by egg nog I do not mean some milky sweet medium for the consumption of various kinds of hard liquor. Denise’s dear grandmother Lottie would end the family Christmas Eve dinner with a concoction that looked like egg nog, but which tasted, at least to my untrained Baptist palate, like gasoline. She would laugh with glee at this horror, and I would wonder how anyone could ruin the nectar of the gods.
In a review of egg nog in New York magazine, the author indulged in descriptions that approach the kind of religious devotion I feel toward egg nog. Here are some of the descriptions from the reviews:
[name] seasonal nog is superb: like French vanilla ice cream in a cup. Just the right thickness, with flecks of nutmeg. Very sweet, but not artificial-tasting.
There are thicker brands out there, but for the most part Axelrod gets the consistency right. Somewhat milky, extremely sweet, with caramel and butterscotch accents. Like drinking liquid candy — but tasty nonetheless.
The hands-down champ: extremely thick and frothy, just-right off-white coloration, flavor that’s sweet but not too. All-natural, and it indeed tastes absolutely farm fresh. Only available for two months of the year, but sold everywhere during that period. More expensive than the other brands ($7.99 at Balducci’s!), but worth it.
This is poetry.
We buy a large bottle of egg nog and set it in the refrigerator. The plan is for this bottle to be consumed in small glasses after meals, as a treat for the entire family. Then Denise goes to the refrigerator.
“What happened to the egg nog?”
Silly woman. Some questions are simply beyond the mind of limited human beings. There are mysteries at the heart of the universe. The unknown is always with us.
Of course, that’s not the case here. I just drank it all.
Denise imagines that egg nog is meant to be “cut” with milk. She is unable to comprehend the ingestion of pure egg nog as a beverage. Like a teetotaler suggesting the bourbon be diluted with lesser substances, she simply doesn’t understand that in the higher levels of addiction, it is blasphemy to dilute sin with any amount of righteousness. Let us have our sin straight. In a tall glass. Oh just give me the bottle.
Back in the day, we used to have a dairy called “Velvet Milk.” The Velvet Milkman would bring these big glass gallon jugs of milk to your door, take your empties, and come back as often as you asked. Included in this service, during the holidays, were big glass gallon jugs of egg nog, brought to your door every day.
Now this would be a reasonable service for a family like ours. It is true that we have little money these days, and Christmas will be modest. There are few presents under the tree and we are planning on being apologetic for the gifts we’ve purchased for others. Still, if the milkman would bring a gallon- or several- of egg nog to the house every day I believe we could make a sacrifice or two. Heat. Electricity. Cable. Phone. Shoes.
I should bring this post to a conclusion. God only knows what Phil and Frank will do with this. I’m close to waxing eloquent on visions of falling into a vat of egg nog or being hooked to an egg nog drip during the night.
A man should know his own soul. I admit that I could become the Dr. Faustus of egg nog. I would appreciate your prayers.
Now, if you will excuse me, I hear something in the refrigerator calling my name.
Christ is born for us, let us rejoice in the day of our salvation!
Let us open our hearts to receive the grace of this day, which is Christ himself. Jesus is the radiant “day” which has dawned on the horizon of humanity. A day of mercy, in which God our Father has revealed his great tenderness to the entire world. A day of light, which dispels the darkness of fear and anxiety. A day of peace, which makes for encounter, dialogue and, above all, reconciliation. A day of joy: a “great joy” for the poor, the lowly and for all the people (cf. Lk 2:10).
On this day, Jesus, the Saviour is born of the Virgin Mary. The Crib makes us see the “sign” which God has given us: “a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” (Lk 2:12). Like the shepherds of Bethlehem, may we too set out to see this sign, this event which is renewed yearly in the Church. Christmas is an event which is renewed in every family, parish and community which receives the love of God made incarnate in Jesus Christ. Like Mary, the Church shows to everyone the “sign” of God: the Child whom she bore in her womb and to whom she gave birth, yet who is the Son of the Most High, since he “is of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 1:20). He is truly the Saviour, for he is the Lamb of God who takes upon himself the sin of the world (cf. Jn 1:29). With the shepherds, let us bow down before the Lamb, let us worship God’s goodness made flesh, and let us allow tears of repentance to fill our eyes and cleanse our hearts. This is something we all need!
He alone, he alone can save us. Only God’s mercy can free humanity from the many forms of evil, at times monstrous evil, which selfishness spawns in our midst. The grace of God can convert hearts and offer mankind a way out of humanly insoluble situations.
Jesus sets the benchmark for God’s dealing with the tyranny and cruelty of our world, for He is the Prince of Peace. We do not deny tyranny and cruelty, we do not compete with it: rather, we overcome as we allow ourselves to be defined by God’s true unveiling, transformed by His invading love.
It is this true apocalypse that we are confronted with at Christmas. It is news of God’s purposes for the world God made and sustains, purposes which are better than we can imagine. This apocalypse, this unveiling, judges every world power, reaches out to every displaced people group, every refugee, every single human heart. It begins with ourselves. Both our means and our ends must meet the standard God sets for us here.
The shepherds went and worshipped. Herod sought to kill. Today’s Herods, ISIS and the like around the world in so many faiths, propose false apocalypses. But you and I are called to respond in worship and transforming, world changing obedience, both as individuals, and together, to this revelation of the baby that defines God, for it is our response to Jesus that defines us.
Saint Luke Chapter 2 Verse 8 tells us that, “In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” Living in the fields meant not only were they on the edge of things physically, but they were also on the edge of society. Living rough lives, they simply would have been unable to observe the rigour of the Jewish ritual and dietary laws. The hundreds of laws that governed every aspect of daily life were impractical to men who lived in the harsh environment of the shepherd. Shepherds were coarse; they were unclean; they would have been shunned by the respectable religious leadership. Living in the fields, the shepherds would have felt themselves beyond religion, and that they were far from God.
Perhaps many of us feel like the shepherds, that we are far from God, or that God is far from us, but the Christmas story tells us that it is the people who are out on the edge, the people who feel they are from religious, to whom God comes. If God comes to the shepherds living in the fields, God is also present in our lives – if we want to see him there.
Pope Saint Leo the Great, the 45th Bishop of Rome, the 44th Pope after Saint Peter, once said in a Christmas homily, “Although Jesus shared in our infirmities, He was not a partaker of our sins. He took the form of a servant without the baseness of sin, raising up what was human, but not lessening what was divine. Emptying Himself, the Invisible made Himself Visible. He came down to us, to Whom we could not on our own ascend, that we might be brought back from our former bondage and from worldly errors to His eternal blessedness.”
He said the purpose of Christmas “was to give the human race a wondrous grace so that iniquity might return to the ways of innocence, old age to newness of life, strangers might be received by God as His children and without any claim be capable of entering into an inheritance, that the evil-living might begin to live righteously, the parsimonious become generous, the incontinent chaste, and the earthly might become heavenly-minded.”
May yours, dear readers, be the merriest and most blessed of Christmases. I pray that our Savior might be born anew by His grace in your souls.
Santa is enjoying a well-deserved rest, but we’re back on the road and rambling! We’ll spice our journey today with some tweets we unwrapped on Christmas morning, gifts from Funny or Die and The Church Curmudgeon.
First, here is one practical reason why “contemporary” churches don’t do liturgy…
Second, people have no idea how stressful it is for Christians fighting the Christmas Wars this time of year…
Now, let’s think and talk about something much more serious. Here is the trailer for the new film Concussion, which was released on Christmas Day. It tells the story of Pittsburgh pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu, originally from Nigeria, who uncovered the truth about brain damage in football players who suffer repeated head trauma playing the game. Adelle M. Banks at RNS writes that it was the doctor’s Roman Catholic Christian faith that led him to want to speak the truth and do the right thing on behalf of the injured.
What impact (pun intended) will this film have on the All-Powerful NFL?
As a character in the film says, “You’re going to war with a corporation that owns a day of the week … the same day that church used to own.” In a recent interview, Omalu said he is not “anti-football,” but stressed that his commitment to science and faith obligate him to tell the truth, and he believes the faith community (of which he is part) has a role to be an “agent of change, agent of information, education and enlightenment” in the world.
Sometimes at Christmas we get so caught up with the magi, shepherds, and the barnyard animals around the manger that we forget about the birth that the birth of Christ set into motion. Sometimes, the familiar nativity display so dominates our imagination that we forget the purpose of the One who was born.
The One whose birth we celebrate will grow up and will speak clearly to us of this purpose: “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10b, NRSV). Of him, John, the Gospel-writer, will say, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1:3-4, NRSV).
This life will take on a specific shape. The One who was born to give life will do so through dying. The life of God that Christ offers comes through human death. By giving up earthly life, he revealed heavenly life—a life that entails a lessening of the world’s hold on us and an increasing of God’s hold on us through Christ and his Spirit. Paul speaks of this when he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20, NRSV).
At Christmas, we need to remember that Christmas is only the beginning of the story, and it is the rest of the story which makes the birth of Christ something worthy of our attention. The one who gives life offers it indiscriminately to all who will come to him, even to untrustworthy shepherds and religiously suspect magi. We give our lives that are doomed to end in death anyway to the one who died and was risen, who gives us new, eternal lives as eternal daughters and sons of God Himself. No one ever described this transaction more eloquently and succinctly than the missionary-martyr Jim Elliot: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”
To think rightly about Christmas is to remember that our celebration of Christ’s birth is also a celebration of our own spiritual birth as well. “You must be “born from above,” Jesus tells the seeking-Pharisee Nicodemus (John 3:3). “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6, NRSV), he tells him. To be “born from above” is to have the life of heaven enter into you. Because Jesus was born on earth, we are born in heaven. Because Jesus was born in the flesh, we are born of the Spirit.
In the manger of Bethlehem is born the reconciliation of heaven with earth, where a heavenly life becomes earthly so that all earthly lives may be heavenly. The ensuing life that grows from Bethlehem throughout the world is one marked by the heavenly virtues of love, trust and hope, which are the fuel for human joy.
It is only appropriate that Luke includes in his account of Christ’s birth the celebration of heaven:
“Hark! The herald angels sing,
‘Glory to the newborn King;
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled.’”
In a sense, all Christian worship is an echo of the angels’ singing and the angels’ witness:
“Joyful, all ye nations, rise,
Join the triumph of the skies;
With the angelic host proclaim,
‘Christ is born in Bethlehem!’
In the wonderfully simple words of George Whitefield, “Jesus was God and man in one person, that God and man might be happy together again.” That’s the Gospel of Christmas, and that’s why heaven sings, with the Bethlehem baby as heaven’s invitation to join in the singing.
So, if you should wish someone “Merry Christmas,” say it like you mean it, for you are making a statement about reality. And if you wish someone “Happy Holidays,” say that like you mean it too, for it is an echo of the joy of Christmas, and those with ears to hear your greeting might just hear the angels singing in it.
Note from CM: One of my favorite sites on our blogroll (listed as “J Richardson”) is Jan Richardson’s The Painted Prayerbook. Her art is evocative and profound, her love for the seasons of the Christian Year instructive, and her writing talent remarkable. She maintains several different sites, including a blog for Advent called, “The Advent Door: Entering a Contemplative Christmas.” You can read Jan’s bio HERE, and I encourage you to visit her sites regularly.
Today’s post is a marvelous example of Jan’s insight. As a hospice chaplain, I was moved deeply by it. I hope that you will find it helpful and encouraging on this Christmas week.
• • •
My husband died on the second day of Advent 2013, several weeks after experiencing massive complications during what we had anticipated would be routine surgery. In that season, my primary Advent practices involved such things as remembering to breathe, eat, and sleep as I began to navigate the awful and bewildering terrain of grief.
Two years later, I still sometimes have to remember to engage in those practices. But this year, as I navigated the second anniversary of Gary’s death and entered into Advent once again, I became aware of a keen desire to move through this season in a different way. Just what way, I wasn’t sure.
I searched for resources for Advent and mourning. In my searching, I was struck by how so many of those resources take a strategic approach, offering guidelines for how to manage grief during the holidays. It’s good to have some strategies for coping with the innumerable triggers that can so easily exacerbate sorrow during this season. At the same time, I knew that my grief was asking me to do something more than manage it.
If I have learned anything about grief in the past two years, it is that grief is a wild creature. Grief will resist every attempt to tame it, to control it, or to keep it tidy and well-behaved. Rather than managing it, grief asks instead that we tend it, listen to it, question it. One of the surest ways to calm it is to give it some space in which to speak—or to holler, or weep.
I have learned also that grief loves stories. Resistant as grief is to pat answers, logic, and linear thinking, it finds a natural home within the landscape of a story, where meaning appears not so much in facts or formulas as in metaphors, symbols, and the unpredictable pathways of narrative.
As I thought about what I need in this season, and how I want not just to abide this Advent but to move through it with intention and openness, I found myself naturally drawn to some of the greatest gifts this season gives us: its stories. In the sacred texts that accompany us in Advent and Christmas, we find an extraordinarily rich landscape that, for all its darkness, is luminous with story. This luminous landscape holds particular treasures for those of us traveling through this season in the company of grief.
I want to offer a sketch of the landscape I am discovering as I revisit these stories. I share this not as a comprehensive, detailed map but rather as a way of beginning to trace the outline of the terrain and some of its treasures, looking for what illumination they might provide for this shadowed Advent path.
How do these resonate for you? What light might these treasures offer for your own journey through this season?
• The boundaries of heaven and earth are not as fixed as we think. In the stories of this season, we see a wondrous interplay between the realms. Angels come with strange invitations (Luke 1:5-20, 26-38) and glorious announcements (Luke 2:8-14). Wise men watch the skies and follow a star (Matthew 2:1-12). Ordinary people open themselves to the purposes of God, becoming the means by which God works on this earth. God becomes incarnate in Christ, choosing to enter fully into our human life for the purpose of showing us how heaven is already in our midst. What we tend to experience as separate realms are, in fact, part of one realm in which God is everywhere at work.
In a time when the loss of a beloved can make the separation between heaven and earth seem especially sharp, how might these stories help us perceive and enter into the fluid relationship between earth and heaven?
• In the most difficult places on our path, spaces of sanctuary are waiting for us. Pregnant, unmarried, and alone, Mary is in a perilous state after the archangel Gabriel departs. Rather than attempting to tough it out on her own, Mary goes in search of someone who will help. She finds that help in the home of her cousin Elizabeth, who welcomes Mary and offers her safety, blessing, and sanctuary (Luke 1:39-45).
When we feel most alone, who could help? Where might we find a space of sanctuary—or offer it to someone on their own difficult path?
• When the world as we know it has ended, sing. Or paint. Or dance, or write, or build something. After Elizabeth welcomes and blesses her, Mary responds with a song that the Christian tradition has come to know as the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55). With this song, Mary articulates an astonishing vision of a God who redeems and restores the world, not in a far-off future but already. That’s how powerful her vision is.
Grief tends to gut the imagination. This can make it difficult to discern what vision God has for us, or to dream what our life might look like more than ten minutes at a time. Intentional creativity, whatever its form, has the power to restore and renew our imagination. It helps us perceive the possibilities that are at hand, and, like Mary, to envision and enter into the wholeness that God has somehow already brought about.
When our world shatters, what creative practice(s) will enable us to pay attention to the fragments and perceive how God might want to put them together in a new pattern?
• To find the next step, sometimes we need to fall asleep. The journey of grief invites an enormous amount of intention. It asks that we resist the impulse to go numb or to always give in to the exhaustion that so often accompanies mourning. Sometimes, however, the best thing we can do is fall asleep. I mean this both literally and figuratively. In the story of Joseph, who had to deal with his own world coming to an end, we find marvelous images of how God’s desires became known to Joseph through his dreaming (Matthew 1:20-21; 2:13, 19-20, 22). When God wants to convey something to us, God frequently chooses something other than the straightforward way. Dream, story, metaphor, intuition, synchronicity, poetry, art: God seems to love showing up in our peripheral vision rather than head-on, finding the language or medium by which we will most clearly sense what God is asking of us.
On the path of grief, which often resists our attempts at rational thought and conscious will, what ways of knowing will we open ourselves to? In this season, where will we look and listen in order to discern God’s desires for us?
• Remembering is a practice and an art. Advent has a way of triggering memories that, when we are in grief, can be particularly painful. There is little to shield us against the sheer quantity of seasonal sights and sounds that remind us of holidays past, when our loved one was with us. Just recently I found myself in the midst of an unmerry meltdown at the end of a day that included a trip to a local bookstore for a few presents. Gary and I had had our first date in that bookstore, and, over the years, had spent many happy hours in its café, our heads bent together over books, cups of tea and coffee in hand. Visiting the bookstore again, now decked out in its holiday finery and with Christmas music streaming through its speakers, provided one of the final triggers that prompted a spectacular Advent overload.
In the face of such memory triggers, intentional remembering can, paradoxically, become one of our most powerful practices. Mary knew about the art of remembering. The Gospel of Luke tells us that after everything—after her pregnancy, after Jesus’ birth, after the proclamation of the angels and the visit of the shepherds—Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart (Luke 2:19). She understood that the heart is a treasure house of memory. The heart is a space where our memories can be gathered together and made whole in the present.
In this season, how will I choose to practice the art of intentional remembering? Here and now, as I consciously gather and treasure the memories of my beloved, what new gift and blessing might they hold for me?
• Hope opens us to the future but releases us into the present. Advent draws our eyes toward the horizon as we watch and wait for the Christ who comes to us. In this season, we sing with Zechariah, By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us (Luke 1:78). When we are in grief, looking toward the horizon with hope and anticipation is no small feat. Instead of luring us away from the present, however, Advent invites us more deeply into it, where the kingdom of God is at work even now. This is the nature of the hope that Advent cultivates in us. Rich with memory and infused with expectation, hope calls and enables us to work here and now, in company with the Christ who is already about the work of heaven in our midst. It is perhaps no mere mistake that in other ancient versions of Luke 1, Zechariah speaks not in the future tense but in the present perfect: the dawn from on high has broken upon us, he sings.
What am I hoping for? How does this hope inspire me to act in this moment?
• God has a fondness for what is fragile. This means us. Advent tells us that God came to us—and comes to us still—with complete vulnerability. Christ is to be found among what is fragile—including us, ourselves, when pain and loss have left us feeling less than whole. In coming to us as a child, Christ chooses to take on our human vulnerability. We see this not only in his birth but also, with awful clarity, at the other end of his life, when on the cross he shows us the lengths he is willing to go to in order to enter into our experience.
In my brokenness, can I see my vulnerability as a place where God wants to know me?
• Darkness is where incarnation begins. The gorgeous texts of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany shimmer with the light that God brings into our midst, as in the prologue to John’s Gospel: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (John 1:5). Yet if we lean too quickly toward the light, we miss seeing one of the greatest gifts this season has to offer us: that the deepest darkness is the place where God comes to us. In the womb, in the night, in the dreaming; when we are lost, when our world has come undone, when we cannot see the next step on the path; in all the darkness that attends our life, whether hopeful darkness or horrendous, God meets us. God’s first priority is not to do away with the dark but to be present to us in it. I will give you the treasures of darkness, God says in Isaiah 45:3, and riches hidden in secret places. For the Christ who was born two millennia ago, for the Christ who seeks to be born in us this day, the darkness is where incarnation begins.
Can we imagine the darkness as a place where God meets us—and not only meets us, but asks to take form in this world through us?
Comfort, O comfort my people, we hear God cry out in an Advent text from Isaiah (40:1). If, in this life, I cannot do away with grief, then I pray that I will at least enter into it with a heart open to this comfort, this solace that is one of the greatest treasures God offers us in the landscape of this season. This comfort is no mere pablum, no saccharine wish. And though it is deeply personal, it is not merely that; solace does not leave us to our own solitude. True comfort opens our broken heart toward the broken heart of the world and, in that opening, illuminates a doorway, a threshold, a connection. It reveals to us a place where, in the company of heaven and earth, we can begin anew, bearing forth the solace we have found.
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