Advent: If It Doesn't Happen Now--It Didn't Happen Then...

 I like the way Eugene Peterson speaks of Mary's annunciation in The Message: "You're beautiful with God's beauty. Beautiful inside and out!" We have to hear that before we can hear God say anything else. God loves us for what we are, who we are, and where we are. Don't ever doubt that!

Advent is about preparing, waiting, hoping, expecting, and praying that somehow God will come in some new way, not just to us personally, but to all people everywhere.  It is a time to look for a burning bush in the desert of life, for a pillar of cloud in the day, a pillar of fire in the darkness, a dream, or perhaps an annunciation.  Because God came once upon a time must mean that God can and will come now.  But how, when, where?  Will I be able to discern that coming?  Will I have eyes to see, ears to hear, mind to receive, and the sense to perceive such a coming?   How is God going to come this Advent?  How will Christ be born anew in me, in you, and in the world this Christmas?

Will some Gabriel come with an annunciation?  Does God have some special message for us?  Will we hear it  as Mary did or dream a dream as Joseph did?  Why not?  If it happened then it can happen now.   Now don’t get all disturbed, I doubt that God is going to announce that you are pregnant with child.  But God might very well announce that you are pregnant with love and that you have some special loving to do.  God might say you are pregnant with a word of hope you need to deliver to someone who is in doubt, pain, or crippled by difficulty.  God might say to me, “Hal, at 78-years-old, I’m not done with you.  I want your life to be wider and deeper than it is now.  I want you to see more, to learn more, to be more.  You have yet to become all that I mean for you to be.”  If it doesn’t happen now—it didn’t happen then!

Do you expect anything new to happen within you this Advent?  Do you anticipate God coming to you with an annunciation?  We’ve made the annunciations in the Christmas story so spiritual, religious, other-worldly, and angelic that most think it only happened then and will never happen again. If you don’t expect it to happen, don’t worry, it won’t happen.  Expect to hear, expect to dream some special dream—and maybe, just maybe—you will.  If it doesn’t happen now—it didn’t happen then!

While It Is Day: Advent 2021: A New Time. A New Year

 Advent 2020 was a difficult passage for me and mine (and, no doubt, for many others).  The Advent hope that in some way or another the God of history, of purpose, of Love, would break through got lost in a pandemic.  Advent hope faded for us as we dealt with my wife’s struggle with ovarian cancer.  “Life was tumbling in,” and in ways we did not choose or want. 

In that difficult time, Cherie and I found a “wee bit of Advent hope” in the Christmas carol, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear:” “And ye, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low, Who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow, look now! For glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing.  O rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing.”  We shared this “bit of Advent hope” with family and friends in our 2020 Christmas card.

As we tried to rest beside our weary road, we talked much about the meaning of life, of our yesterdays together and of the tomorrows to come,  of love, of family, of faith, of the life everlasting. Looking back, I now realize how fortunate we were to have had the “time” to do that together.  In those precious moments, the angels were singing, though we could not always hear their song.

Advent often comes that way. God breaks through, God is with us, but we do not discern Love’s Presence in our midst.   And, that is precisely why it is so crucial to our journey to celebrate the Advent season.  Advent comes from the Latin word “advenio” which means “the beginning, or the arrival of something anticipated”.  Without anticipation we may miss what is coming, what is available, what is hoped for, what is needed.

Advent 2021 is a new time, a new year, but only if we anticipate that it will be so. Advent is a time of promise, of preparation, of new beginnings.  Advent is a time of expectancy, a time of new happenings.  Advent is a time of waiting, of moving forward.  Advent is a time for receptivity and openness, of annunciations, of searching and finding, and following a star.  Advent is anticipating that somehow or another, Christ will be born anew in me, in you, and in the world in some new way this Christmas.  The God of history, of purpose, of Love still breaks through, not in the manger of Bethlehem as of old, but in the manger of our hearts, minds and souls.  

So, today, a new time, a new year, I will light the first of the four candles on the Advent wreath in anticipation of a breakthrough.  

While It Is Day: "Obviously"

 

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

Our son, Luke, posted the following on Facebook a few days ago.  

"Made a sort of ofrenda to remember my mom on this Dia de los Muertos.  Just a collage of photos and a thing I wrote a few weeks after she died this February.  On a lavender background, of course.  The grief goes on and on, but this sort of thing helps."

The text in the ofrenda:

“My mom had a particular flair for stating the obvious. “Just stuffin’ this turkey for dinner later,” she’d say, standing behind the counter, visibly shoving dressing deep into the bird’s cavity on Thanksgiving morning. I never thought much of it, until Kim started experiencing it too, and then it became hilarious and really quite wonderful. The day my mom invented lunch (“we just need something to tide us over between breakfast and dinner”) is a truly legendary anecdote in our marriage. 

But sometimes you don’t want your mom to state the obvious. “I think she still wants to be your girlfriend,” is another one I’ll never forget. Mom said this when I was 16. I had been laid up with the flu for a week, and my first girlfriend, who had broken up with me a couple months before, kept coming to visit every day to deliver homework assignments and to see how I was doing. Then again, maybe “she still wants to be your girlfriend” wasn’t obvious at all; I remember being kind of annoyed by the visits, but mom seemed to find the whole situation adorable. Looking back, of course, I do too. My mom had found something meaningful, something obvious but worth saying, in a pattern of events I just saw as fairly uninteresting and definitely uncomfortable. 

My mom’s gift for stating the obvious is just that: a gift. We don’t all see life in the same way, but there are a lot of things that we mutually agree don’t merit much thought or attention. Lunch, that mythical meal between breakfast and dinner, is one of them. But when mom was sorting out some food that day, with her daughter in law and her son and her youngest and most distant grandchildren all lounging around her house, it really was something worth mentioning. It was a new experience, a new day, a new meal, a shared life, a new memory, a joke we tell over and over. A miracle. 

I think maybe that’s how she looked at life. As the memories have rained down the past few months during her advancing sickness and death, most of what comes to me is quotidian and frankly pretty dull. There really aren’t any Hollywood moments: I don’t remember how we felt or what she said when I graduated from college, or got married, or introduced her to my son or daughter for the first time. Instead, I remember going to the Super Fresh grocery store with her every weekend in the late eighties. Going to the mall and conning her into buying me a tape or CD, or the first time she let me go to the movies by myself while she shopped (that was 1989, and the movie was Say Anything). And I remember coming home from summer camp, or college, or grad school, or the wilderness of adult life, and finding her always there, always the same. 

She was into oil painting when I was young, which if you don’t know is a painstaking process of mixing pigments on a palette board and then slowly working them onto canvas or a sheet of slate, back and forth. Think Bob Ross, but much slower: “Still lives” (I found that phrase infuriatingly dull as a kid) and landscapes and flowers. I admired her painting, but I never found it interesting. Perhaps I found it too obvious. Much later in my life, and hers, those roses she smeared so accurately onto slate suddenly exploded and blossomed--just like roses tend to do--into the intricate creations and recreations that they always were. A rose isn’t just a rose when it’s the tender work of your mother’s hands, wrists, eyes, heart, and mind. To paint a rose like that, you have to be willing to really look at it: no two roses, and no two lunches, are exactly the same. 

One of the last things she said to me, from a hospital bed in her periwinkle sewing room, surrounded by walls hung with representations of roses, was “this cancer, it’s just terrible what it does, how fast it can do this.” And my initial thought, back to the old pattern, was “yeah, obviously”: that’s all plain to see and there’s no need to say it. But of course there is: she’d had to live and feel every moment, every cellular shift, of that belligerent sickness making its way through her being. She had to get up and stuff the turkey, and she needed to tell me that. This cancer was destroying her, and she needed me to hear that, too, because, obviously, it all meant everything.”

LEO 

March 5, 2021

The Prayer of a "Patriotic Christian"

 I am a patriot.  I’ve been a patriot for as long as I can remember.  I love the land of my birth.  I spent nearly half of my life in the U.S. Air Force, both as an enlisted and commissioned member.  I am a patriot, however, who found abhorrent the January 6 insurrection.  I am a patriot, however, who supported those who kneeled during the national anthem to call awareness to the inequality that exists in our society.  I am a patriot, who is also a professed Christian.

Can I be both a patriot and a committed Christian?  It has not been easy to be both.  “Render the things of Caesar to Caesar…and the things of God to God” has been a troublesome thing for me.  It still is.  

There is a hymn that expresses my perception of Christian faith and patriotism:  “This Is My Song” puts patriotism in its proper place and expresses what it means to be a “patriotic Christian.”

This is my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine,

But other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;

But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

O hear my song, thou God of all the nations, 

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

This is my prayer, O Lord of all earth’s kingdoms:

Thy kingdom come; on earth thy will be done.

Let Christ be lifted up till all shall serve him,

And hearts united learn to live as one.  

O hear my prayer, thou God of all the nations;

Myself I give thee, let thy will be done.

The Summer Solstice, Lightning Bugs and Cicadas

 Yesterday an amazing astrological event occurred.  The sun traveled its longest path through the sky and reached its highest point of the year—making yesterday the longest day of 2021. In spite of our attempts to make Memorial Day Weekend the beginning of summer—the solstice is the true beginning of the season.  This astrological phenomena happens every year at about mid-year, and has, no doubt, occurred since the universe came into being.  

We are all familiar with “fireflies” or “lightning bugs”—another amazing phenomena of nature.  Lightning bugs are beetles (like the ladybug).  Neither are bugs. Lightning bugs live for only a couple of weeks as adults (about a year from egg to adult).  The flashes we see in our backyards when darkness comes is the language of love. The male of the species is looking for females.  “They flash a specific pattern while they fly, hoping for a female reply.  If a female waiting in the grass likes what she sees, she responds back with a flash of her own.  They will engage in this twinkling love-making until the male locates the female and they mate.”  Isn’t that romantic?   Isn’t it really incredible?

Perhaps you’ve noticed that there aren’t as many lightning bugs “lighting up” your backyard in recent years.  That’s because of “light pollution” which prevents the lightning bugs from seeing each other’s flashes, creating havoc in their love life.  Turn off those outdoor lights!  Like bees, the lightning bugs are also threatened by habitat loss, pesticide use and climate change. 

Everybody is talking about the cicadas this year.  The cicada is another of nature’s wonders.  They live underground for years and only come above-ground in adult form to reproduce (to love).  Some species live underground for 17 or more years.  When they do “come out” into the light it is for one purpose—and once that purpose is fulfilled—they die (usually within a month).  What kind of life is that?  Living in the darkness all those years and only experiencing the “light of day” for a few weeks doesn’t have much appeal to me.  Like the lightning bug, the cicada (only the male) sings a love song and longs for a response before his day is done.

Now what am I trying to say?  I’m trying to say that all the remaining days of this year 2021 will be shorter than yesterday.  Every new day from here on out, will be shorter than the day before.  So we must sing our love song while it is day, lighting-up our own lives and the lives of others.  “What the world needs now” is for us to become what we (like the lightning bug and the cicada) are called to be—instruments of love—while it is day.

Father's Day 2021

 My mind meanders through the yesterdays I’ve lived with so many who are no longer with me today.  I miss them. Some were “Father figures” for me. Some were “Mother figures” to me.  Each of them played an important role in my journey.  Each of them shaped my life.  Just a few days ago, listening to music, I heard Slim Whitman singing “Where Has Yesterday Gone?” The words of that song continue to sing in me.  The question “Where has yesterday gone” seems to have stuck in my mind.

I’m grateful for the yesterdays when I had my father and mother around.  I still wonder how and where they obtained the wisdom and the understanding they demonstrated as they raised me and my six siblings.  They really were extraordinary.  

I’m also grateful for the yesterdays when other men and women were there for me—my extended family—my surrogate mothers and fathers.  There are so many.  Bea Smith (a Sunday school teacher), Ken and Bonnie Mart (my boyhood pastor and his wife), Willie (who ran the garage next door), Julie (Willie’s sidekick and brother-in-law), Freda Roveda (who operated the tavern down the road), teachers and professors who took an interest in me, George, a parishioner (known as Pert to some), spiritual directors like Gordon, Mur, and Elton, who guided me through turbulent spiritual storms.  They were “Star Persons” who, like the light of Bethlehem’s star, led me and guided me along the roads of those yesterdays. Isn’t that what a father, a mother, is supposed to be and do—love us, lead us, and guide us along the path of life?

George, who was a “father” to me in so many ways through almost 40 years, wrote at the time of my father’s death:  “I think of my father everyday and sometimes many times during that day.  He will have been dead 58 years tomorrow.  He was 80 years old plus exactly six months….”

When Father took me by the hand,

Somehow the world seemed small,

The steeple’s point, the towering oak

Seemed only half so tall.

When Father took me by the hand,

Bright rainbows scanned the sky,

And hope and confidence were mine

When he was standing by.

When Father took me by the hand,

I had no thought of fear,

And even now, when trials come,

I feel his presence near.

Thank God, the Father of us all, who through those “many fathers” (and mothers)  of yesterday, took me by the hand.

Looking Up, Looking Down, Looking All Around.

I’ve often been accused of being an optimist.  An optimist is a person who tends to be hopeful and confident about the future; a person who believes that good must ultimately prevail over evil.  An optimist takes a positive event and magnifies it, often minimizing the negative.  It is true.  I am an optimist.  I’m always trying to look up.  My faith fosters optimism. I believe Love is at the heart of things.  I believe this Love is in the process of bringing about a New Age, a New World, where all people are “free to be” and where all live in harmony and peace.  To me, that’s the essence of the Gospel message and to believe it to be the truth, makes me an optimist.  

This belief, this faith of mine, has often prompted folk to suggest that I live in an “ivory tower.”  To live in an ivory tower is to exist in a place where the problems of the world and the trials and tribulations of ordinary people are not known, experienced, or recognized.  It is a great temptation for people of faith to dwell in such a tower and to look down and offer silly platitudes.  “Don’t worry, God will reward you in the end.”   I do not live in such a tower!  I am not looking “down on life,” nor do I believe God “looks down” offering impractical and escapist solutions to life’s issues.  I know,  experience, and walk with my brothers and sisters everywhere the stoney path of a real world  where “don’t worry” or “just believe” or “lean on Jesus” doesn’t cut it!  God is not watching us from a distance as the song suggests, rather God is walking with us.

When Nikos Kazantzakis was a young man, a neighbor said to his father, ”…I think your son’s going to become a dreamer and visionary,…He’s always looking at the clouds.”  His mother responded, “Don’t worry, life will come along and make him lower his gaze.”  And his father had the last word, “Forget the clouds.  Keep your eyes on the stones beneath you if you don’t want to fall and kill yourself.”  

Look up and see the clouds.  Look up and dream.  Look up in the midst of the negative and find the positive.  Look up as often as you can—but, be sure to  lower your gaze and be aware of the stones.  Look down,
and with Charles Dickens realize that “…our path in life…is stony and rugged…and it rests with us to smooth it.  We must fight our way onward.  We must be brave.  There are obstacles to be met, and we must meet them, and crush them.”  Look down and see the stones.  Look down lest you  stumble and fall.  Look down and find God.

Look up.  Look down.  Look all around.  Love is at the heart of things.