Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity. Vaclav Havel
And perhaps in accepting the absurdity of it all we find truth in the simple things, grace in the naive and hope in the mundane.
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
Annie Dillard.
This has been tumbling around my heads for days. An obstacle that keeps tripping me up: and I stumble over and around it. It has disorientated me and kept me up at night. The remedy to an undiagnosed illness; the solution to an unsolvable problem.
I am not sure I want either option. A sleeping God or a waking God.
A sleeping God can’t hear me or see me.
A waking God is expectant and wary.
But the truth remains – I do not, and cannot, understand the power I so effortlessly summon. I do not and cannot understand this God I presume to love and worship. I try, of course, but my options are limited.
I expect this God to be merciful and just and gracious.
I find that he is distant and faceless and too big – which is not as frustrating or as hopeless as it sounds. It just is.
I would be lying if I said that I longed for the day that the waking God unleashed his power. What would that look like? Would I survive it?
I ask, cover my eyes and count to 10…do I dare peek?
I don’t see anything. I don’t hear anything.
And then there is a warm, gentle, breathe on the back of my neck.
I close my eyes.
For now, this is enough.
Pludek: You see, Berta? Instead of a total victory one time or a total defeat another, he prefers to win a little and lose a little each time. Mrs Pludek: Such a player will always stay in the game.
The Garden Party by Vaclav Havel, Act 1, Scene 1
Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disciples’ dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, It is all right – believe it or not - to be people.
Annie Dillard
(traditional Italian Christmas cake)
Fredrick Buechner on Christmas…
It seems to me one of the miracles of the Christian faith is that the feast of Christmas survives what we have done to it — all the hoopla, clap-trap, commercialism and all the rest of it that I don’t even need to go into because everybody knows what it is. Yet, somehow it does survive. This extraordinary moment when the whole year slows down and you point to this unimaginable event where God somehow became made flesh. It is so cataclysmic; it is so extraordinary; we try to make it habitable; we try to make it cosy; we make crèches and we sing Christmas carols. At best, it can be touching and real. At its worst it can be cheap and banal. What often occurs to me about Christmas is that if it is really true, if the word really became flesh, if the mystery behind all that really took the form of a human life, this vulnerable, tiny human life whose skull you could have crushed with one hand, then there must have been extraordinary anguish and intergalactic struggle to have this extraordinary thing come to pass. It wasn’t an easy thing to happen. There is a kind of terror about Christmas, a kind of holiness and awesomeness about Christmas that we tend to forget. The resurrection and the life came down and tasted the bitterness of death.
One Christmas Eve, exhausted, about to go to bed having put all the presents under the tree, I remembered that our neighbour had asked us to feed his sheep every day he was gone. The snow was falling — this was in Vermont – my brother and I went down the hill to feed the sheep. We went into the barn and we got the bales of hay. We took them out into the sheep shed, cut the string, turned on the forty-watt bulb and began scattering the hay. The sheep came bumbling up, getting close to it. With the smell of the hay, the smell of the sheep and the snow coming down, all of a sudden I realized where I was. I was in the manger and I almost missed it.
I was in this holy place and I might not even have seen it. I happened to see it. It seems to me that in a way, you could say that the world itself is a manger where God is continually being born into our lives, into the things that happen to us. Most of the time, if you are like me, you are looking the other way.
OK – so I couldn’t really just leave a Christmas post like the one below by itself, even for me that seems a tad unbalanced!
The other day I overheard my 4-year-old say the following to my 2-year-old,
‘I have to tell you about Jesus. Jesus is cool’. (She then went on to say, ‘This dinosaur has feet’, so I have no grand ideas that she is the next Billy Graham).
It was a lovely to hear her talk about Jesus with such familiarity. In fact, it made me slightly nostalgic for times when my understanding of Jesus was so simple and Christmas was purely a time to celebrate how ‘cool’ Jesus is in all his truth and grace.
Last year around this time I was involved in putting together a little Christmas celebration and I gathered together a selection of quotes on Christmas which we read and discussed. So I thought in the spirit of Christmas or in the spirit of trying to get to the true spirit of Christmas I would post some of those quotes.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Christmas…
We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.
The Grinch (Dr Seuss) on Christmas…
“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more.”
Weep all the tears you have in you to weep, because whatever may happen next, this has happened. Something precious and irreplaceable has come to an end and something in you has come to an end with it.
Fredrick Buechner
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.
CS Lewis
I was in class for the majority of last weekend (History of the World Christian Movement) and my lecturer made the following comment,
‘modernity created dualism on steroids’.
I like it a lot . Sadly it is the only thing I remember from the class at this stage. Hopefully I will recall more.
Hopefully.
Last week marked the 2 years since our little girl was critically ill. Let me say up front that nowadays she is remarkably un-affected. There are still ongoing concerns with her respiratory and immune system, but overall, she is amazing and well.
It is interesting to me that I am so aware of this particular date. I am notorious for not remembering anniversaries. I honestly can’t tell you the date we got married (bad hey?). But I have noticed that leading up to this date I get edgy and teary. And when the day is over, I am fine. It has been an interesting journey away from that time in our lives and the further away we get, the better.
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. Mark Twain
I didn’t choose to pick up this particular cat (metaphorically speaking), but it happened and we have had to deal with the consequences. Physically (for our girl) the scars have faded quickly and successfully. For those issues that remain we have hope that they will diminish entirely in the future. For me the issue of her being ill is still raw and painful and I don’t like thinking about it too much. However I know that I have learnt much about the person our girl is. She is sassy and courageous, cheeky and strong. I am in awe at her ability to fight and giggle.
But I think that there is still much for me to learn about myself and my faith in light of her being ill. The ongoing, constant search for the truth about who I am, who God is and how this whole thing fits together is exhausting. But I know it is necessary. I don’t want my understanding of God to be compromised because I got tired.
Family life is full of major and minor crises — the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce — and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It’s difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul. Thomas Moore
I was having coffee with a dear friend recently and she asked me what my girls names mean. We had a fascinating conversation about names and how they become an intrinsic part of who you are and how you live. (We also ate scones with peach jam and contemplated the lost joy of a good Sunday roast! x).
Before each of the girls were born and we were going through the whole naming process, meanings became really important to us. I know that for some people it is fairly irrelevant. But we both believed that naming a child was a collaborative effort with God. While we didn’t have any great flash of lightening moment and a burning bush (struck by the lightening!!) spoke and proceeded to tell us what to name our girls, we did believe that God was involved. Names are powerful and they become part of who we are and how we define ourselves. So we wanted names that we felt were strong and would help the girls appreciate who they were and how we, and God, saw them.
Between the two girls we have grace, beauty, purity and one of the most beautiful places we have ever been! Absolute bias aside, we see grace, beauty and purity in our girls and pray that their lives will defined by these elements.
Fredrick Buechner puts it like this: ‘Buechner is my name. It is pronounced Beekner. If somebody mispronounces my name in some foolish way, I have the feeling that what’s foolish is me. If somebody forgets it, I feel that it’s I who am forgotten. I can’t imagine myself with any other name – Held, say, or Merrill, or Hlavacek. If my name were different, I would be different. When I tell you my name, I have given you a hold over me that you didn’t have before. If you call it out, I stop, look, and listen whether I want to or not. In the book of Exodus, God tells Moses that his name is Yahweh and God hasn’t had a peaceful moment since‘.
My name is a direct translation of the Greek word katharos (καθαρός) meaning pure. I have a friend who only ever calls me katharos – and I love it. There is something deeply personal about it and it also a very real reminder of who I am.
I hope I’m not overstating it, but I do believe there is something significant in our names. I hope so, espcially for my pure, beatiful, gracious girls.
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