Marianne suggests that the seasonal liturgical landscape in some ways reflects the physical landscape and our own internal landscape. In the Christian tradition you have advent in the middle of winter which represents the beginning of a new year. For some advent is the time of new beginnings, then we have January first and for others we have Easter tide but advent is formally the time of new beginnings. The natural seasons reflect our own personal journey and augment the narrative. The parallel between the season of advent and the season of winter is that things are dead and down but spring and rebirth are coming. As well, spring might be here and summer is coming, or you’re in summer and eventually the leaves are going to fall and eventually you are going to encounter the dead of winter. These changing seasons are opportunities for reflection, additionally the liturgical calendar may be set but we may be experiencing any of these seasons at any time. You might be personally experiencing your own dead of winter in the middle of summer.
Listening Heart’s Ministry Guidelines
- Take time to become settled in god’s presence
- Listen to other’s with your entire self, senses, feelings, intuition, imagination, rational faculties, do not interrupt
- Pause between speakers to absorb what has been said
- Do not formulate what you want to say when someone else is speaking,
- Speak for yourself only, expressing your own thoughts and feelings, referring to your own experiences
- Avoid being hypothetical, steer away from broad generalizations
- Do not challenge what others say
- Listen to the group as a whole, to those who have not spoken aloud as well as those who have
- Generally leave space for anyone who may want to speak a first time before speaking a second time yourself
- Hold your desires and opinions, even your convictions lightly
Bill speaks about the winter landscape and asks us to remember that this season can happen for us personally at any time in our lives. Advent is both about endings and beginnings. The stories of the apocalypse and the threat of everything going poorly lead to stories of redemption and hopefulness that life here on earth might become how they are in heaven. Great tragedy and sadness can lead to great fulfillment. Advent is also about beginnings which is reflected by our celebration of the birth of Jesus at the end of advent. Jesus’s birth is The beginning we’ve all been waiting for. Historically, Christians did not celebrate the birth of Jesus for the first three hundred years, when we did start celebrating it was based around preexisting, well established, pagan holidays. The pagan holiday that Christianity co-opted was about the death and rebirth of the sun. The winter advent season is about death and birth and serves as a reminder that our lives have purpose and are headed in a direction. This does not mean that the world is slowly and inexorably becoming more Christian, it means that the world is how it was meant to be by god whatever that happens to be. Early Christianity did not believe that everyone would one day become Christian any more than the prevailing Jewish tradition believed that everyone would one day become an orthodox Jew. The wish of Jesus, a Jewish peasant, was that the whole world would be healed not that the whole world would follow him after his death. It isn’t an accident that we celebrate Christmas near the winter solstice when in the northern hemisphere the darkest day begins leading to lighter days. It was a deliberate, inspired and ultimately very successful effort to capture in the physical world what is going on spiritually. We are waiting for baby Jesus. A baby is a helpless and dependent individual, someone who is utterly reliant upon us. We are waiting in other words on a real and complete and true human being.
Bill refers back and asks ‘where does this happen in you?’ Where do you see your vulnerability, helplessness and complete lack of resources? Where in those moments in your life do you see the possibility of the presence of god? Where you find those moments you are deeply in the midst of your own personal advent.
Endings and Beginnings
Marianne starts off talking about the apocalyptic endings and imagery that often accompanies the beginning of advent. She explains how it is important to make the distinction between the end of The world and the end of Worlds. It is impossible that this world will be crushed and a new world will pop into existence from on high. Instead end of worlds is to mean that the current way of running the world with violence and oppression will end and a new more fair way of organizing the world will come to be. This changing of worlds will not fell us and actually wee need to do something about it.
Heaviness
Marianne is struck by the imagery that comes out of the narratives, it is a time of being pregnant and heavy with something and not knowing what will be born. She recalls a story of Marcus making a remark about a feeling of heaviness during advent one year. It is likely that experiencing the characteristic experiences of a season when that season is actually taking place likely makes the experience stronger. The chill and the darkness of winter encourage going to bed early or hibernating, going to sleep while the watchword of advent is ‘stay awake’. What does it mean to stay awake and alert when every thing else in the world is trying to lull you.
Making Journeys
In Mathew’s narrative of the birth of Jesus, after Jesus’s birth the family must quickly take on a journey in order to escape danger. Winter of course is a terrible time for taking journeys because of the weather but we must make those journeys. In both Mathew and Luke, the only two birth narratives about Jesus, Herod is king and they are warned not to return to Herod. If you think of Herod as a metaphor for the oppressive empire. One of the warnings from the Magi is Herod is dangerous. Herod wanted to get rid of babies under two because he was afraid that this new baby was going to challenge his power and autonomy. Don’t return to Herod metaphorically can mean don’t go back to that way of running the world. Marianne remarks on the profound thought that Bill shared above and how it is a baby not a full grown Jesus that is being born. If you are feeling heavy with the weight of something new don’t expect to give birth to something ready made and fully formed. There will be a maturation and a process that you will need to go through after your own new birth. Advent is about us and is not really about the distant future nor the distant past and if that is all it is about if has very little to do with us. It’s difficult to get people mobilized about climate change in our own lifetimes we’re unlikely to get up in arms about the world ending in the far distant future. Alternatively, if two-thousand years ago, this neat thing happened, what does that say? Unless something tells us where we’re coming from and where we’re going and what our hopes and joys are Bill struggles with what the actual point of the story.
Preparation
What does it mean to prepare for this journey? What does it mean to prepare for a world without Herod? What does it mean to make room? The narrative during the advent is very much about preparing for Jesus but if the narrative is not also about something beyond that then we have missed the meaning and the relevance to our own lives. It is not that we want everyone to become Christians so they know what we are talking about but rather that as Christians we have a bigger sense of what is possible. Other people can have a bigger sense of possible too but the Christian narrative is not the only narrative where this kind of bigger understanding is possible. The Christian narrative at is best is a profound affirmation of what it is to be human and all it’s wonder and creativity and the compelling move toward light that is at the root of the human experience. Preparing oneself to break the bonds of what the current world holds and preparing for a new world.
Jesus
Jesus was an imaginative breaker of bonds but mainstream Christianity has wound itself inevitably back around into Jesus being a creator of new bonds. Bill understands Jesus to be the messiah because he lived and grew to be a liberator of everyone not just the Jews. That makes it strange then to say that god isn’t for everyone, jut the Christians. Bill sees this odd idea as very detrimental but is happy to see people recovering the notion that god is for everyone. The notion that god isn’t for everyone was born during a time when all of Europe was Christian and the average person didn’t know anyone who wasn’t also Christian. Europe was under attack from the south by invading non-Christians. Under this historical context it is unsurprising that people would think Christians were the only good and reasonable people. That is not where we are now, we are in a better place to understand Jesus to be someone who burst the bonds of religion and showed himself to be for the whole world. Jesus claimed that god can be found outside the temple which made the contemporary church shudder and today it still makes the church shudder because much of the wisdom of life can be found outside the church. At one point the church claimed that there is no salvation outside the church that is no longer so. In some ways we can claim these symbolic narratives more freely because we live in a very different view than our predecessors. Modernity is not necessarily leading to a more secular world, it is leading to a world where we can more freely call into question and clarify what we believe and why. It’s calling us to examine what we have in many ways decided to believe by rote. It’s calling us to re-frame and re-imagine what is this really about.