This advent, we remember again the fact that much of our spiritual life is lived in limbo because this season is about waiting.
We know this, but perhaps it might be usefuly once again to think about it again. Our waiting is perhaps too coloured by what we know to be coming- we think of advent as merely a countdown to Christmas, not as a season in itself.
We forget about the business of holy waiting.
What do I mean by this?
Well, we know about waiting. Here in Britain, we pride ourselves in being good waiters – we stand in orderly queues, patiently waiting for whatever we feel to be worth it and lots that is not.
.
Behind suburban fences
Middle England retires
Many minor offences
Fuel artificial fires
We grind teeth (and gears)
Wait for lights to go green
We wait out our years
Wondering what it all means
We seek petty distraction
Wait for ships to come in
He waits for her
And she waits for him
.
Meanwhile, in places not so far away, other kinds of waiting are taking place;
.
They wait at the border
Wait for the war
Wait for the sirens
For the shells to fall
In towns without rooftops
They wait behind walls
For men dressed in khaki
To kick down their doors
They raise up our faces
To the bright morning sky
Some slip cold embraces
Some people will die
.
I say this not so we count our good fortunes – I assmume that we do this already – but rather to help us remember that life is fleeting and fragile, and so our waiting should be used sparingly, lest our waiting is wasted.
This kind of holy waiting has no certainty, no guarantee, rather it serves as a spiritual practice, for the only waiting worth the time is that which has at the centre of it a hope of life, like pregnancy.
I was having one of those conversations the other day – you know the kind – in which one of those totemic divisive issues was being kicked around. In this case it was trans rights, and the person I spoke to had firm opinions, which I found myself opposing, albeit wearily and warily.
From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring
Of course, religion has a long tradition of being ‘right’. What we learn in our churches temples and mosques is first and foremost a code of belief, into which a whole set of sub-issues (and even non-issues!) are subsumed. As above, the penalty for disagreement can be appalling.
But being right is not just the premise of the hard line religious kinds. After all, nothing tingles the ego like meeting people who are wrong, so allowing us to be superior and correct. The internet has given this shadow side of our humanity far too much space, in that social media is full of it – quite a lot it from me.
Because we are such tribal creatures, we tend to approach our ‘rightness’ not from careful reasoned consideration of the issues. Rather our position on many issues is proscribed by our tribe. Our opinions then become badges of belonging, and perhaps clubs to beat each other with. Sometimes vulnerable people get caught in the crossfire.
But back to that discussion about trans rights. I am not going to rehearse the arguments here because I’m sure you have heard them all anyway.
As I get older, I am still sucked in to arguments, no doubt related to my own need to be ‘right’, but nevertheless, this is diminishing. Increasingly, I appreciate the need to leave a question open, particularly when it relates to something outside my direct experience.
Particularly when an opinion I might have has a direct impact on others.
Perhaps this seems like a cop-out. After all, some issues require the taking of a position in the name of justice. Some things are just wrong and need to be called out as such.
So I have added another condition to my open questioning – compassion.
If I am pulled towards an answer, then I must seek it from a position of compassion and love. This means applying it in places where it often does not feel deserved- to religious (or secular) bigots for example, or to our ‘enemies’.
As advent unfolds I have been allowing myself to look forward towards hope… to imagine the coming of a new kingdom/insurection/revolution in which goodness and compassion are central. In other words, I am trying to rest again in the spirit of the Magnificat as sung by Mary and recorded in just one of the Gospels…
46-55 And Mary said,
I’m bursting with God-news; I’m dancing the song of my Savior God. God took one good look at me, and look what happened— I’m the most fortunate woman on earth! What God has done for me will never be forgotten, the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others. His mercy flows in wave after wave on those who are in awe before him. He bared his arm and showed his strength, scattered the bluffing braggarts. He knocked tyrants off their high horses, pulled victims out of the mud. The starving poor sat down to a banquet; the callous rich were left out in the cold. He embraced his chosen child, Israel; he remembered and piled on the mercies, piled them high. It’s exactly what he promised, beginning with Abraham and right up to now.
Luke 1 46-55 (the message translaiton)
I have been over in Northern Ireland for a few days to see my father, immersed in the usual chaos of old age – medication, money and care. I went with my brother, and we spent a little while exploring a place that he knew better than me, as he had spent a lot of his childhood over there. (Our family circumstances are complicated.) Here is the grave of my grandparents, both of whom died before I was born, having worked in the flax mill that took such toll on the health of local people.
My family were all born into a town called Strabane, right over on what now is the border with the Irish state in Tyrone. It is a bustling booming town now, because of cross-border trade, but until very recently was a place with one of the highest unemployment rates in all of Europe. Strabane was the most bombed town during the troubles, with the highest proportion of it’s citizens killed. It is overwhelmingly Catholic (91%) and as such was an epicentre of republicanism. There are many of these dotted about;
Until recently, many of the streets would have kerbs painted in sectarian colours across the province, but I was surprised to see that most of this has been removed. However, the tribalism remains firmly in place, seen in many subtle ways. One of the more obvious at present is that in republican areas you will see many flags and banners supporting the Palestinian cause in Gaza, whilst in unionist areas, lamposts are flying the Israeli flag. The currency and apparent group-think of this division are shocking to outsiders, but not to those who live with it day-by-day.
In Strabane town centre there is quite a lot of public art, most notably around the lovely Alley Theatre, but also this piece, which lists a number of famous people born in the town, including former president of the USA, Woodrow Wilson, Musician Paul Brady and writer Flann O’Brien. It does not mention other illuminaries such as William Burke, the 18th Century serial killer, but does give a shout out to a woman called Cecil Francis Alexander who wrote many favourite hymns from my childhood- ‘There is a green hill far away’, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and the ubiqiotous ‘All things bright and beautiful’…
… which takes us back to the root of all this.
The violence and trouble unleashed on Ireland has been blamed on many things; religion (of course), politics, the British, ignorance – all of these things may have played a part, but Cecil Fancis Alexander’s hymn gives us another clue, containing as it does (in original form at least) this verse;
The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly, And ordered their estate.
For much of the last centuries, the Irish were considered as the lowest of all. Alexander, from a wealthy background, was part of a ruling class, married to an Archbishop. She spent her time on charitable pursuits amongst the deserving poor. She lived at the time when around one million people starved to death in what came to be known as the Irish Potato Famine but seemed unable to see the injustice right in front of her nose.
Perhaps you think me unfair to someone living in such a different time and place, but I will not sing this hymn, even with the verse above ommitted. Instead I will thrill once again to young Mary as she sings those words of the magnificat; The starving poor sat down to a banquet; the callous rich were left out in the cold.
I took a morning walk alongside the border river Foyle, which runs through the middle of Strabane thinking about an old concept suggested by the author Phillip Yancey. In his book ‘What’s so amazing about Grace’, he painted a picture of what he called ‘ungrace’, or the opposite of grace. Families, communites and societies who are characterised ungrace seem to experience it in almost like toxic waste or poisoned water.
Ungrace leaves a legacy that can only be overcome by one thing.
Beauty and brokenness have been themes here for years. Inustice can interrupt and disrupt, creating open wounds (which we will discuss again tomorrow) but our pain and wounds can also be something else…
I read this recently , in one of the Centre for Action and Contemplation’s daily meditations.
The Living School [and the CAC as a whole] teaches that this begins with us individually. If it is true that hurting people hurt people, then it must also be true that healing people heal people. Origen (185–254 CE) claimed the skandala—the scars and scandals in our lives—dig out the deep meaning. Our hurts become “health-bestowing wounds,” the source of our individual spiritual genius, which shapes the unique work we are called to do in the world. It’s our wounds that lead to wisdom and teach us, ultimately, how to love and heal the world.
Like Kintsugi—the Japanese method of repairing pottery using gold, silver, or platinum to fill in the cracks—this doesn’t hide our brokenness but makes it beautiful. Thus, we all work to repair the world in a similar way. [1]
As someone who makes a living in part from pottery, you would expect me to agree to this.
1-2 The Word was first, the Word present to God, God present to the Word. The Word was God, in readiness for God from day one.
3-5 Everything was created through him; nothing—not one thing!— came into being without him. What came into existence was Life, and the Life was Light to live by. The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness couldn’t put it out.
From The first chapter of John’s Gospel, the message translation
(I am still in Ireland, so another repost today, this time from a couple of years ago.)
With a great blaze of poetry, John begins to talk about the life of Jesus. He does not talk about babies in mangers or choirs of angels or wise men travelling from afar. Rather, he talks about light…
It is a cliche beyond my enjoyment to describe ourselves as made of stardust, even though somewhere deep in our carbon it may be true. I would much rather talk about how we are animated by light.
It is a mataphor of course, and one well employed by John, but I want to take a moment to consider whether it might also be ‘true’.
The life in us is only our own for a while. It burns bright and beautiful in some, in others it is obscured by so many shadows, but still the light remains.
As advent unfolds towards its apotheosis, I pray that whatever illuminates and animates you will sing in your soul. May it be the most graceful, the most loving, the most simple and the most human way of being.
I believe that this light is not gifted only to those who ‘belong’ through accident of membership or proximity, rather that it is the very core of all created/evolved life. I know this can be debated by application of all sorts of scripture-swords, but stil… I feel it differently.
It does not matter to me at all if you take a different view, because all will be revealed soon enough… in a blaze of light.
I was listening to a discussion the other day about the divinity of Jesus. Those involved were ambivalent about whether they thought of Jesus as divine or not, describing their shifting beliefs and the fact that Jesus is only recorded as making claims of his own divinity in one of the gospels- the book of John. I was reminded of the spiritual practice of doubt.
What follows is an Advent meditation I wrote many years ago on this same subject…
From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the spring.
The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard. But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.
Yehuda Amichai
A few weeks ago, I had one of those conversations with one of my oldest friends. He had made a comment using Christian language that I no longer hear often, and I rather flippantly challenged it. This led to a two hour skype conversation that ranged far and wide over faith, doubt, the origins of the Bible and the meaning of faith and doubt. Unlike most of these discussions, my friend kept this one respectful and listened carefully to what I said, but I honestly think he was shocked be some of it. Perhaps he should not have been, because I have made no secret of my relationship to the spiritual discipline of doubt.
A few years ago I wrote about it on this blog. In hindsight, I remember it as a clear choice- I had spent so long fearing the loss of faith. There were so many thing about the tenets (both stated and unstated) of the religion I had known that bothered me, but for years I coped with this by NOT asking questions. It was easier to focus on the ritual, the shared practice, after all I was busy making music and facilitating the religious expression of others. When I moved to Scotland, it eventually became harder and harder to live with the contradictions however, and there came a point when I decided no longer to fear doubt, because if my faith was worth anything, it could survive my clumsy questions. Any faith named after the man who turned over tables in temples should have no sacred cows.
For a while it seemed as though my faith would wither and die- but it did not. If anything, it made me determined that ‘Truth’ would not be my theological straight jacket, rather it would set me free.
Not that we should ever pretend that this will be easy…
Truth is hard to come by Harder than Love
Love is hard to recognise harder than Need
Need is hard to justify Harder than Dreams
Dreams are hard to testify Harder than Hopes
Hopes are hard to simplify Harder than Choice
Choices are hard to live by Hardest of all.
Tommy Randell
So where has all this doubting taken me? Ten years ago, I started to read voraciously. I discovered other famous doubters, including many who had been grouped together under the (now curiously dated) label of ’emerging church’. Sacred cows started to wander off into distant pastures. We could list them- all those totemic beliefs that we use to define of theological positions. We could display them as sliders and tick of our position on the spectrum of belief (perhaps we started to do this in that conversation with my friend mentioned above) but it would all be a waste of time, because I simply do not think this is the correct way to measure faith.
If faith has value, it has to transcend religion.
Does that make sense? Let me try again.
Religion codifies belief. Think of it as a magnificent cathedral, built from once-molten rock, carved and shaped and rigid. But even though faith might be helped by the shapes and spaces created, faith is not stone.
I stood before this edifice of faith
And it was magnificent –
The curve of the certain arch
The immovable pillars
The knowing eye in all this carving
The soaring ceiling shaped by countless songs of praise
But there was this penetrating drip of doubt
I could ignore it for a little while
Until the swelling laths shed horse hair plaster
And the stalactites point down from on high
The end of everything
Like any fool under falling stone all I could do was move
Out into the sunlight and the gentle rain
Looking backwards to see what might still be standing
Whether it might be anything more than just a
Magnificent ruin
But a ruin holds age with pride
Through the open vault light falls dappled into shadow
And the song of birds blows in on the wind
Chris Goan
Some will rightly accuse me of descending into just a post-modern, pick and mix, me-first faith, in which I have shaped God to fit in with my needs, wants and prejudices. I say ‘rightly’ because we ALL do this, myself included.
This is why I must also doubt the God I have created.
This is why I must also set aside the distractions of doctrinal correctness and stop pretending that ‘truth’ is more important than love. I must doubt that kind of truth, particularly when it is mine.
After all, if we read the gospels, is this not the preeminent message of Jesus?
This is not a surrender to unbelief, it is the promotion of a higher mission. One that is much harder.
A time for the sent ones of God To follow the rough roads Into the barren broken places To look for the marks left by Jesus On the soft tissue And brittle bones Of the Imago Dei The stinking, wretched Image bearers of the Living God
Time for the revolutionaries of God To follow the long hard march Unyoked and with easy burdens Looking for the soft places where people are Where freedom flickers Where hopes soar And we seek out the Participatio Christi With weak but willing hands and sore feet Learning to partake in the labours of love
Chris Goan
As advent unfolds, may our walk towards faith be not shadowed by unbelief. Rather may the tread of doubt take us closer towards love.
A woman IRA volunteer on active service in west Belfast with an AR18 assault rifle. Photo: Colman Doyle Collection/National Library of Ireland
Today I am taking a ferry over the Irish sea to go to see my father, who is struggling. I have never lived in Ireland, and each visit brings me into contact with bits of my heritage which I mostly feel on the outside of, looking in.
Northern Ireland is almost synonomous with the word ‘troubles’. The legacy of all the violence is palpable, not just from the monuments and murals, but in more subtle ways in which people interact. There is a welcome, lot of humour, but also a caution. You can see it too in the lack of footpaths in the countryside, or the way that communities display their tribe in the form of street decorations and flags.
The history of the troubles is not well understood by most people on the English side of the Irish sea, despite the fact that many of lived with it as part of each news bulletin. But then, any attempt to do justice to this history would be long and winding and have to deal with sectarian rights and wrongs which lend different perspectives and woundedness.
It is important for all of us to remember however that the trouble were birthed in injustice – by whom, towards whom and who did it first, we will have to put to one side, but there was indeed injustice over many generations. The Irish diaspora, of which I am part, has scattered around the planet in part to escape this injustice, either in the form of economic hardships or direct threats to life and limb. Back ‘home’ the peace is fragile still, in part because injustice remains, all the worst for being divided along religious lines.
The stories of the Bible are full of similar material. In an almost-echo of the words from the beginning of the book of Isiaiah, this is from the prophet Amos;
There are those who hate the one who upholds justice in court and detest the one who tells the truth.
11 You levy a straw tax on the poor and impose a tax on their grain. Therefore, though you have built stone mansions, you will not live in them; though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink their wine. 12 For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins.
There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts. 13 Therefore the prudent keep quiet in such times, for the times are evil.
14 Seek good, not evil, that you may live…
…I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. 22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. 23 Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. 24 But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!
from amos chapter 5
This sensitivity to injustice must have been particularly strong for a people in exile, enslaved within an all-power Baylonian empire. The Irish might have particular reason to feel empathy.
This part of my Advent journey will remind me once again that the every day work of justice and peace are not trivial matters and that the effects of injustice leave a long legacy, and one that down the road can lead to the very worst kind of trouble and violence.
But I will also give thanks for those peacemakers who still stand in the breach where they are needed, be that in Belfast, Gaza, or our own backyards.
Peace be with us
In the quiet space between snowflakes
We listen to sad songs, and
Feel the prickle of tears, pushed
By beautiful broken things
Less than half-perceived
But never forgotten
In the warm space you made for me
I hide, guilty for those we left outside
Wishing our table was bigger
That every mouth was filled
Every refugee was home
Like we are. Hoping that
In the dark space between all those twinkling lights
Peace is waiting
Like scented water
Fingered by frost and ready to fall -
Ready to anoint our dirty old ground
Like Emmanuel
The Advent waiting is a framing of looking forward in hope towards a time of peace, but it is not a magical peace, brought about by a Messiah who creates peace by the slaying of enemies – this was one of the things that got Jesus in so much trouble. Rather it is a peace that is won by peacemakers, one small step at a time. Here is a statement that I am wrestling with this morning;
There is no peace without justice.
I think this is true. Making peace must involve at some level, the rebalancing of manifest unfairness, partiularly in relation to those who hold power, because power has this way of padding itself at the expense of others – not just materially, but in the way it feeds egos. By the same token, powerlessness debilitates.
This takes us towards another element of this peacemaking- the inevitability of conflict. At first this seems paradoxical, until you remember that as the advent story unfolded, it was full of conflict. Making peace involves challenging injustice.
The way we do this is key. The great protest movements – the marches, the mass demonstrations – championed by Ghandi and MLK give us heroic templates, but hindsight tends to gloss over the messy painful nature of the personal interactions, even when faced with injustice that (at least from our current perspective) is so transparent. Currently we see other mass protests on the streets demanding a cease-fire in Gaza, a cause which seems so right, despite the fact that some seem to think this protest is not ‘British’.
If you callenge power, you should expect it to get ugly.
Most injustices however are not on this scale. They are small, grubby ones that we encounter in the mess of daily life. I am struggling with one just now. I hate conflict but have found myself making a complaint to a community employer because of serious problems in the ways they are treating their staff. I now need to see this through, but today, I am taking pause, and asking these questions;
Is my cause just, or have I got things out of perspective?
If my cause is just, how do I seek peace alongside justice? How do I hold on to integrity?
It is easy to make war in the name of peace, so how can I treat my ‘enemy’ with compassion, whilst still seeking a just outcome?
This is another repost, this time of something I wrote a few days before my mother died. A strange time to think about joy, you might think? Read on though and see if the direction of my thinking made sense.
Today, two poems about joy.
The first one might take you down, but stay with it for a while. Let it rest before you move on to the next.
Most of us are not used to reading poetry but for most of the history of written language, it was used as an aid to meditation and mysticism. The Hebrew Bible is at least one third poetry for instance – more than likely copying the practices of the Babylonian culture that dominated them, from which fragments have survived too, most notably the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Other spiritual/faith traditions are more familiar with this practice, particularly the Sufis within Islam who have inherited the astonishing works of poets such as Attar, Rumi and Sanai as their source material. If you have not read these incredible poems, do a quick search and prepared to be astounded at what was being written in places like Afghanistan around the time of Shakespeare was entertaining the unruly masses…
If you are approaching poems as a spiritual practice it might be worth remembering the tradition of lectio divina, or holy reading, in which we read a passage 3 times, attending to our bodies and looking for words that resonate. The simplest easy to do this is to read, but to allow one sentence to speak to you. Wait for a moment, then read again.
(There is a discussion to be had here about ‘scripture’ and whether it is appropriate to use poetry written by someone like me in this mystical way. I am happy to discuss this further…)
Life ebbs and flows. It is not for ever, or ever predictable. Plans may be thwarted by all sorts of adventure or misadventure. Sometimes we move into challenges willingly, but mostly we are beset by them, often at times when we feel least prepared…
Don’t make the mistake of thinking me wise or well regulated in my own encounter with the vicissitudes of life. Last year was one of the hardest I can remember, for reasons not always clear. The darkness of winter entered my soul and clawed at me from the inside and in my pain I was painful to be with. In hindsight it would be tempting to claim this as some kind of winnowing from which I emerged like a brand new butterfly into a new season of life but this would be bullshit. Rather, I survived by licking my wounds until they were only scars.
I say this not because I do not believe in change – clearly it is what I hope for both for myself and for the world – but rather because I think we need to be honest with ourselves about how this happens. Change is often raw and ugly but neverthless is is both necessary and inevitable.
Does it have to be this way? Of course not. We can all fondly recall those moments in an autumn forest when the dancing leaves turned sepia, or that deep joy in the first blush of bright green in spring. So it is with life. There are times to embrace the passion of the new as well as those times when just brace ourselves to survive. Both will shape and form us for good or ill, but we do have some control over what happens afterwards, in terms of what we do with our new season.
If I have any wisdom at all, it is this – watch for the season and wait for the seasoning.
Don’t expect it to be tidy or linear, but when there is a road ahead, walk it as well as you can with as much love and integrity as you can bring to bear. It is as simple (and as complicated) as that.
Recently we took some steps into a new season. I have no idea where it will lead, or what seasoning it will bring into my life, but it feels right and so that is enough to make me keep walking in the way of it. We became associate members of the Iona Community.
This may seem like a small thing, but I have have not ‘joined’ anything for years. In fact, I consider myself to have developed an aversion to membership or obgligation after living/working so much within institutions for much of my life. I can only desctibe the change like this. I was coming into a new season, and then I had an encounter with something both old and familliar and at the same time vitalising and new.
In a previous post I put it like this;
I took the photo above a week ago, on our way into the abbey on Iona to attend a service led by members of the Iona community. This service, and the one the next morning, had a profound effect on both of us. It was simple, unflashy, with dirge-like hymns. We sat in the cold and damp of the old abbey and I wept.
Why did I find this service so moving? It was the welcome, the sense of deliberate inclusivity, the freedom to make and take whatever I needed from the gathering with no expectations, no narrow hoops to jump through. Then there was the liturgy, skewed towards justice and grace. (It feels like a long time since I did not have to grit my teeth through at least some parts of a communion service.) Then there was the companionship, which included people from all over the world. A mental health social worker from Philadelphia wondering if she could keep going. A group of muslims from Bradford. All of us gathered around the same table which belonged to none of us and all of us at the same time.
It was like coming home.
I could say a lot more about our decision to join, and how long it took for us to make it, but we will save this for another time.
The point here is not that we should all join a community. Rather that as seasons turn, new roads will open to us. Trust this my friends, right the way through. Not just when we are fit and fighting, but even in the darkest winter.
As children of the great spirit who made the world and holds everything together, the roads we choose should sing in our souls. Lets walk on together.
this fragile tent 