Advent Limbo

limbo—not some other-worldly space or time

but here, right now, in the shushing

of the winter wind through fallen

leaves, the shortened days

*

we’re weary

waiting for relief

from countless sorrows

that afflict our troubled world

and our upside-down-turned lives

with hopes and plans all tentative, unsure   

the fragile walls that hold our lives

our nation, and our world, all crumbling

amid untruths and ugly disrespect

amid storms and droughts and floods

amid the rampant virus variants

*

we’re weary…and we’re also wondering,

wondering where is God

in all this limbo time?

has God forgotten that he once

so loved our world?

has he turned his face from us?

is this our punishment

to be endured until we learn

new ways of truth, learn love for

all, learn love for our good earth?

*

we ponder Mary in these days,

one who lived through her own limbo

of an unexpected pregnancy

birth in a crowded stable

flight to a foreign land

a Golgotha cross for her son

*

we pray to believe, beyond our sight

that she is with us still

as is her son

her God-with-us child

who swaddled himself in human flesh

to walk with us through our

Advent limbo-ed days

beneath the Christmas star

that continues to shine

through all our weariness

and wondering

(picture from “Independent.co.uk)

Waiting with our Charley Brown Christmas Tree

(a gift from daughter Karla)

I smile—and often chuckle with delight—each time this little tree smiles at me, which is often, as it sits on the coffee table beside my sofa-perch.  On this first Sunday of Advent, this little tree brings delight and also embodies for me all the waiting and the hopes we carry with us during the coming Advent days. 

***

We wait for that day when the Tree of Life will be richly filled with fruit and leaves that will nurture the healing of the nations.*

We wait with the nurse in ICU who has seen 99 deaths too many.

We wait with the teacher exhausted from zooming and proctoring online exams.

We wait with the governor who faces scorn for trying to tamp down the spread of covid-19 in her state.

We wait with the lab technicians pressured to produce, produce, produce, the eagerly awaited vaccine.

We wait with the subway worker scrubbing away grime for meager pay to keep his family alive.

We wait with the refugee child sent back home because our gates are, sorry, closed.

We wait with the monarch butterfly whose flight paths and homing grounds are no longer secure.

We wait with the nursing home patient, isolated in his numbered days.

We wait with the mother in the Bronx, anxious for her child who has to learn online but who has no computer.

We wait for God to “scatter the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.”** 

We wait with the loved ones of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and with the loved ones of all other Black Lives that have been unjustly cut down.

We wait with the desperate who sail across the Mediterranean in their flight from poverty and injustice.

We wait with the unemployed and hope for God to “fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty.”**

We wait for that day when Charley Brown’s tree will be richly filled with fruit and leaves that will nurture the healing of the nations.

*Revelation 22:2

**Mary’s Magnificat—Luke 1:26-55

December’s Advent Promise

(dawn from son Kirk’s cabin in the Berkshires)

***

By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.

(from Zechariah’s song of joy at the birth of John the Baptist)

Luke 1:78-79

***

(dawn from friend Sharon’s early walk in Maryland)

 

MAY GOD’S DAWN BREAK INTO EACH OF OUR LIVES THIS ADVENT SEASON

Light in the Darkness

“Savior of the World”

El Greco ( 1541 – 1614)

A dark December day;

dark outside my winter window;

dark inside our too-still house;

dark through all the muscles

of my body, of my mind.

Bombs and missiles frighten

angels in the skies, and bullets shatter

trust across our neighborhoods and schools.

Darkness surrounds and swallows up—almost,

the candles of this waiting Advent time.

*

I turn to the icon* silent in my hands:

El Greco’s “Savior of the World.”

More darkness there:

     of eye,

          of eyebrows,

               of hair, of beard.

And framing all the Christ, a shroud of midnight black:

     threatening,

          brooding,

               dense.

*

I want to turn away, to find a brighter Christ,

the baby Christ of promised peace, the One

to bind and blind the darkness all around.

And then I see.

Behind the darkness, through the darkness, into the darkness,

a strangely halo-ed square of light

shines round the Savior’s face;

shines through his penetrating eyes;

shines onto his blood-red tunic;

shines across his hands, atop his blue-royal robe;

shines un-dimmed by the darkness;

shines in quiet confidence;

shines toward that time when darkness

will be no more.

For now, it is still dark around me.

For now, it is still dark within me.

But as I look into those tender, sorrowful eyes,

a little of that halo-ed light shines hopeful

into me; for now, that is

enough.

*****

*I know. El Greco’s “Savior of the World” is not “officially” an icon, but for me it has become one—even without the sanction of a higher authority.

Advent Snow

The wind mere angel whisper on this

cold December day; virgin snow

spreads soft across the fallen

acorns and forgotten leaves.

Sparrow cocks her head to listen to

the solemn silence ringing through the

emptiness of trees; Squirrel stands upright

with folded paws, reverent beneath this

white cold falling from the skies; the world

is washed; the snarls of pain are hushed;

hushed, too, the noise of anxious rush to

prove our worthiness to be alive;

stillness blankets shrubs and rocks,

the railing on my deck,

our fears and greed as well.

*

It will not last. I know.

Gray slush will soon collect

along the streets; grime will

cling again and crawl beneath

our skin, and war and hate will

clang across the world; but in the

quiet of this winter white, I stubborn

light my Advent-candled hope; await

the Child who will one day unfurl this

pristine interlude of peace until it

fills the whole of space, the whole of

time, beyond the reaches of the farthest star.

Advent Dimensions of Our Lives: the Horizontal and the Vertical

“The Annunciation”

Henry Ossawa Tanner

(1859 – 1937)

          I love the very human Mary of Tanner’s beautiful painting. The puzzled look on her face. The slight tilt of her head. The lack of a halo. Her rather drab peasant apparel. Her bare toes peeping out beneath her wrap. She is most definitely one of us, someone with whom we can identify quite readily as she seems almost to shrink into herself when she is addressed by angel light from beyond.

          Mary’s humanness is further emphasized for me by all the horizontal lines in the painting. Her bed. The simple wall hanging with its horizontal rich-hued stripes. These stripes repeated in the earth-toned carpet beneath Mary’s feet. The bricks of the bare floor. Tanner’s Mary is not a woman inhabiting some ethereal sphere. She is very human. The dimensions of her life are very ordinary; they are horizontal. Mary lives on this everyday earth.

          And something else. Mary’s surroundings are not very neat. Her bedclothes are mussed, her wrap rather carelessly thrown around her shoulders. The deep blue garment thrown over a chair at the right bottom of the picture is not something carefully ironed and folded—more like a dress that Mary took off the night before and tossed unthinking onto the nearest chair. Even her carpet lies on the floor with a big wrinkle, ready to trip her up if she misstepps in reaching for her dress.

          This painting is so real. Life is messy. The horizontal dimension in which we live out our days is never very neat. Full of wrinkles, bare toes, and clothing in disarray. Full of disorder and the muddle of reality.  

          But the horizontal is not all there is to this piece. The vertical shines on the left-hand side of Tanner’s painting as the angel comes to announce to Mary that God is with her. A vertical transcendence intercepts the horizontal. Not a transcendence neatly painted with bright angel wings. Rather a transcendence that defies words or strokes of paint, that goes beyond all human effort to define, spell out, or categorize. Nevertheless so real. So powerfully present to Mary in the midst of her rather chaotic room. Present and shining with a brilliance that lights up the entire space and leaves Mary, and us, in awe and with a deep sense of the Mystery that is God, the Mystery that is God-with-us.

          Tanner’s “Annunciation” invites us during these days of Advent to meditate on the dimensions of our lives. Invites us to humbly acknowledge and confess the untidiness of our lives as we live them out on the horizontal plane of earth. Invites us, as well, to let the eyes of our souls be opened to the marvels of the God who vertically bursts into our messy horizontal ordinariness with all the splendor of the eternal, opening us to fuller, richer, multi-dimensional lives. Lives brightened by the words of the angel to Mary and to us, “The Lord is with you.” Lives warmed by the Love that wrapped itself in swaddling cloths and lay in a manger for us and for our salvation.

          Denise Levertov has a poem which says this all so beautifully. Here is her poem “On the Mystery of the Incarnation”:

It’s when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.