Tenting on a New Camp Ground

The story is told in the Bible of the Israelites camped in the desert. They have escaped from the slaveholders of Egypt. They have walked dry shod through the sea, with the water standing like walls to their left and to their right. They have been given water from a rock in the parched and parching wilderness. They have been fed daily with the mysterious manna—the word means “What is it?”—in a land that offered little food. Their response? "If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at." (Numbers 11:4-6)

In fact, they started grumbling the day after they left Egypt, before ever they crossed the sea. Complaint became their daily chorus. The psalmist says of them: “They complained inside their tents and would not listen to the voice of the Lord” (Psalm 106:25). I imagine them camped in their tents, in the dark, the tent flaps firmly zipped shut. (Anachronism is no bar to the imagination!) There they sit, day after day, muttering to themselves and to each other, breathing the stale air of their own laments, sweltering in the heat of the anger they seem to stoke up every morning and refuel all day with their complaints: “We’re tired of this desert, we’re tired of the sand getting into everything, we’re tired of this boring old manna, we’re tired of each other, and, what is more, O Lord, we’re getting very tired of you! When are you going to get us out of here?” Their tragedy is that, when Moses does lead them to the borders of the Promised Land, they complain about that too: “Sure there are figs, sure there are pomegranates, sure there are those gorgeous grapes Caleb brought back, but there are giants in there!” And they refuse to go in (see Numbers 13-14). As the psalmist says, they would not listen to the voice of the Lord, who has done nothing but take care of their every need in the most startling ways; they couldn’t listen to God. They were too busy listening to themselves.

Unfortunately, that scenario is all too familiar. In how many homes was heard this Christmas something like: “You made bread dressing! I wanted rice!” or “I only got an I-pod! I wanted a Playstation!” or “This sweater is red! I wanted green!” In our local paper, on the Friday after Christmas, cartoonist Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse) poked gentle fun at a young wife saying to a friend, “Sure I gave him some hints, Anne! I said—buy me something frivolous and expensive, something I can show off to my friends.” And, in the final frame, “I was thinking suede coat—while he was thinking dishwasher.” The cartoon was amusing. Real life grumblers aren’t. Theirs are the voices of the spoiled children in us who have never grown up. Grumbling is one of those occasional vices that grows all too easily into a habit of mind.

The way out is simple. God says to Israel in distress: “Enlarge the space for your tent, spread out your tent cloths unsparingly; lengthen your ropes and make firm your stakes” (Isaiah 54:2). In other words, “Open up, make room, I’m bringing you more gifts, more possibilities, more riches than you could possibly imagine. But you’ve got to unzip that tent!” Zipping is easier than unzipping, I’ve learned. Sometimes it takes a lot of help to unfasten the elaborate system of zippers, buttons, snaps, padlocks, cords, ropes and chains with which we secure our suffocating safe zones. Other people can help. God will help. But no one helps without an invitation. After all, you never know when walls, or tent flaps, are guarded with weapons and booby traps. I usually discover, though, when I finally manage, with help, to unfasten the tent flaps that close me into the small, dark, stale circle of my own hungry, thirsty, angry self-interest, that the sun is shining, the air is clear, and the desert floor is littered with manna as far as the eye can see. Change of perspective is everything (see the poem below). The trick seems to be to start by letting in a little laughter. Laughter is the best air freshener I’ve ever found. I recommend especially the kind that comes in the can labeled, “Laugh at yourself.”

The best long-term cure for a bad habit seems always to be to cultivate its opposite. The real antidote to the habit of complaint, once you’ve got the tent flaps open, is to cultivate the habit of gratitude: “Gosh, what great rice dressing!” and “I LOVE this Playstation” and “This red sweater is gorgeous! Thanks!” Grumbling and gratitude can’t co-exist in the same tent or even the same desert. Love doesn’t actually mean never having to say you’re sorry, as a thousand parodies have pointed out since that unfortunate line appeared in Eric Segal’s Love Story. Love seems rather to mean often wanting to say thank you.

********
Perspective
This face of rock was roughened by the wind
before time’s ears were blistered by the wail
of my small self protesting. Waters pinned
the boulders into place, but now rains fail.
Dry cobwebbed lichen spreads its tufted lace
in gray-green veiling over dusty pink
of granite knees that offer ample space
for juniper to feather the design with fragrance, sink
its twisted roots where stone has pocketed
small scraps of earth undreamed of from below.
Oh, look! A red-tailed hawk just rocketed
from that dark tangle where fall berries grow.
It seems to me I came out here to cry
that life is foul. I have forgotten why.

2002

©2008 Abbey of St. Walburga
The poem “Perspective” is reprinted with permission from Genevieve Glen, OSB, Landscapes (Virginia Dale CO: St. Walburga Press, 2006, rev. ed. 2008).

Christmas 2008: A Poem

INCARNATION

Christmas 2008

The Word takes flesh in inward hours
when Mother nurses Child and prays
that children everywhere will joy
through length of days.

The Word takes flesh in seasons when
no spring rains fall, when harvests fail,
when winter eats our hopes, when we
learn life is frail.

The Word takes flesh in newborn love,
in days of wonder, in the long
fidelities that losses test,
in trust grown strong.

The Word takes flesh in burning years
of war, when splintered heartbreak learns
the price of lust for others’ lands
whose lives greed spurns.

The Word take flesh in questions and
in doubts that ask why buildings fall
on playgrounds, why a loved one dies,
if this is all?

The Word takes flesh in darkness
and in light, in tears and pain,
in laughter bubbling like the sun
through falling rain.

The Word takes flesh in living centuries
of human struggle to discover how
to weave the hours into real life. The Word
still takes flesh now.

©2008 Abbey of St. Walburga

Christmas Eve

And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. While they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. (Luke 2:4-7)

So very small, so woefully inauspicious, the beginnings of salvation. There they are, the shepherds trooping in from the fields, the magi traveling from the exotic east, and hosts of angels pouring through the skies to sing hosannah--for what? The shepherds had been told to look for a savior, the magi for a king, but all they found was an infant, a newborn, one of no doubt many born in Bethlehem that year. The shepherds wondered, the magi paid homage, but in later years the villagers of Nazareth would shake their heads in disgust and turn away--"A wonder worker? Him? He's just the carpenter's son." His family thought him crazy. Some of his followers thought him extravagant. The authorities thought him dangerous, not because he was the Son of God but because he thought he was, and said so, to others who thought he might be right. They executed him for it, a criminal among criminals. No one special, just another failed messiah.

We still make that same mistake, sometimes, in our search for salvation, whatever that word means to us. We look for the prophet clothed in camel hair, hurling imprecations, or we wait for a voice that speaks in thunder from the top of a mountain, but we miss a simple question asked by a friend, a question that might have turned our lives around had we been paying attention. "Why are you so angry?" or maybe "Do you really have to work all the time?" or "Have you ever thought of....?" We scan the heavens for a star to show us the road, but we pay no heed to a news report on the homeless in our town tonight. We expect a blinding light on the Damascus road, but we fail to see the small, clear illumination shed by a word on a Bible page or the look in a loved one's eyes. Nothing special, the question, the news report, the word, the look--just another interruption in the real business of getting somewhere in life.

Tonight we probably won't see a stream of shepherds heading for a local motel, or a strange band of pilgrims holding up freeway traffic as they follow a star. It's unlikely we'll hear choirs of angels in the sky over the house, or even over the church. But tonight we will hear the same quiet invitation that has been following us around, perhaps for years, tugging at our sleeve and asking simply, "Come. I have what you're looking for." Nothing extraordinary, just our incredibly patient and persistent God, focused tonight in a baby laid in a beat-up food trough in a long-ago town in a faraway place, but in reality everywhere. Even right there, where you're sitting. "Come."

©2008 Abbey of St. Walburga

The Unasked Question

Jesus told a story once, about a man just bursting with success. He surveyed with satisfaction all the grain piled up to the roof of his barns, the yield of the land he owned. Only one thing troubled him. The barns were full, but the harvest was not yet all gathered in. “Where would he put the waiting wheat?” he asked himself. Left in the fields, it would rot. “I know,” he answered himself. “I’ll tear down these barns and build bigger ones to hold all this harvest gold.” Then he made plans for the perfect retirement: “And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry” (Luke 12:19). (He was obviously a man much given to talking to himself.) However, God had plans for a different kind of retirement: “Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' (Luke 12:20). The moral of the story, Jesus says, is this: “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:21).

The man’s real problem, it appears, is the limited circle of his conversation. He talks to himself, listens to his own advice, and acts on it. He does not even think of consulting God. There is a telling passage in the book of the prophet Isaiah. Here God is speaking to the city of Jerusalem as it prepares for a siege: “In that day you looked to the weapons of the House of the Forest, and you saw that the breaches of the city of David were many, and you collected the waters of the lower pool, and you counted the houses of Jerusalem, and you broke down the houses to fortify the wall. You made a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool. But you did not look to him who did it, or have regard for him who planned it long ago” (Isaiah 22:8-11). In other words, you asked yourself what you needed to protect the city, and you listened to your own answer: you gathered weapons, you strengthened your defenses, you collected water. But you did not ask me, who gave you the city and lived there with you. The Jerusalem war committee had a good reason not to ask God. God had already told them to trust in him and not in their own utterly inadequate resources for war against a far more powerful enemy, Babylon. They didn’t like that answer, so they didn’t ask the question. Perhaps that was the rich landowner’s strategy also, for he belonged to the nation whom the prophets had chastised in God’s name for centuries for hoarding wealth rather than using it to care for the orphan and the widow and the starving poor. If you don’t ask, you won’t hear the unwanted answer you suspect is coming.

We see a different version of this story in the life of Joseph, husband of Mary. When Joseph discovers that his betrothed is pregnant with a child not his, he finds himself in a dilemma. According to the law, she could be stoned to death, although scholars say that it is not clear how often that law was invoked by the time of Jesus. Even if she was not condemned to death, she would certainly be disgraced. So, apparently, he asks himself what he should do.

He is a just man, St. Matthew tells us, and does not want to see her shamed publicly. So he answers his own question by deciding to divorce her quietly. (It is a little difficult to imagine how this might save her from public disgrace—she is still a single pregnant mother, probably a young teenager.) That night, of course, God sends an angel with a different answer: “Behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:20-21).

Joseph was a just man, that is, an observer of the mosaic Law. He did not exactly ignore God in his debate about what he should do, but he assumed he knew what God would say because he knew his options under the law. (Scholars point out that the opinion that the law obligated him to divorce Mary is not justified, but he could not, as a just observer of the Law, unite himself with a woman who had offended so seriously against it.) But, as far as the story goes, he did not actually ask what God wanted him to do in this troubling situation. God told him anyway, as God told the rich man and the leaders of Jerusalem—and God’s way was not Joseph’s way anymore than it was the way of the landowner or the city: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8). (One of God’s irritating habits is to answer questions he has not been asked, so persistent is he in his desire to lead us to happiness despite our best efforts to go somewhere else.)

The first moral of Jesus’ story is to lay up treasure not for ourselves but for God, but the second moral goes even deeper: if any of these biblical characters had asked God rather than themselves what they should do, they would have found themselves sent down surprising roads, not always to their own comfort but always to their good. The unasked question is the one that traps us in the dead ends of our own too-small minds.

©2008 Abbey of St. Walburga

Guadete Sunday 2008

Gaudete Sunday takes its name from the first word of the Latin entrance chant of the Mass: gaudete, meaning rejoice.

Today is also sometimes called "pink Sunday" because the priest may wear pink, or more properly, rose vestments.

Not being fond of pink, the sudden blossoming of color in our chapel put me to thinking. Our Advent wreath is rather a sober affair: a bronze ring, time-darkened to the point where the colored enamelwork has become invisible, hung by black chains from a tall, graceful black tripod. The traditional candles--three purple, one pink--stand out against this darkness, but they too are muted in color. Beneath it, deft hands have planted a gaudete garden: a froth of carnations, white, pale pink, dark rose, against a dense bush of juniper top a pink-wrapped pot set amid folds of medium-rose cloth. Outside the windows, the heavy gray clouds of winter storm are edged in radiant rose by a sun not yet risen.

Rose, I suddenly realized, is a lightening of the red strands that, woven with blue, form the traditional Advent color of purple. Rose offers a hint of light in a season of gathering darkness. Rose makes a promise: the night will end, the day will break, the Sun of Justice will arise out of the Christmas midnight to come. Wait. Hope. These darkening days are not the end of the story.

That's a promise we can use these days. Not only are the days around us growing shorter and the nights longer, but the hope of solstice is waning amid the fears spawned by growing violence and a failing economy. The specter of unemployment sits at many a family table. For the fifth year in a row, there are empty places at those same tables, marking the absence of family members sent off to war. A new government waits in the wings, promising change--but what changes will it bring? What changes can it bring? Will they really better our lot? Will they come in time to save us?

The Advent prophet Isaiah also acclaimed a new government waiting in the wings, a government promising change:

For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given;

and the government will be upon his shoulder,

and his name will be called

"Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."

Isaiah 9:6

That is the government whose coming we really await, the rule for which we really hope, the dawn for which we really long. In fact, it came a long time ago, an inauspicious solstice on a night in Bethlehem, very little noticed at the time. That small dawn, which we will celebrate again this Christmas, is still growing toward the fullness of the promised day we yearn for. The dark clouds still obscure its brightness as they roll in and out, sometimes thinning to wisps, sometimes thickening again to smothering blankets of fog.

Nor are we mere hapless observers of the dramas of our skies. Sometimes the clouds above us are smoke from our own fires, smog from our own freeways, choking fogs from our own battlefields. We can't make the waited sun rise, nor can we prevent it. But we can and do clear the way for the light or force it into hiding behind the oil residue from our ego-driven works of darkness, as the Bible often names them. We, who live at the heart of the rising Sun, are called to light up the world with its blaze, said Jesus. He said that no one lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel basket. He lights the lamps--whatever goodness burns in us--but we can be expert basket weavers, covering it up and even smothering it to ashes because fire does burn what holds it.

I personally would be just as happy to see the pink come and go on this one Sunday of the year. To be part of the work of lightening the heavy purple of the gathering night every day is another matter entirely. However, I recognize, at least some of the time, if I clamp down the bushel basket to hide me safely, I too will have to live in the resulting darkness. And so must we all, if we refuse to burn with the light of Christ, the dawn that edges our night with reflected fire.

©2008 Abbey of St. Walburga