Labora et Labora

Advent is coming, and, if you ask me, not a moment too soon.



I am sick of the Jolly Green Giant of ordinary time. So what is this, already, proper 67 ? Deo gratias for today's All Saints' flash of white, and the white of Christ The King three weeks hence.



I may squint at it, deer-in-the-headlights, and cower; I may choke up, improbably, inexplicably but predictably, singing Lesbia Scott's rollicking I Sing a Song of the Saints of God with its doctors and wild beasts and tea shops; I am, after all, a theological hysteric, given to hand-wringing and invocations of the outer darkness, to adulterous pinings after Zendos and the Vatican. But I know what I like, and its the two grand penitential seasons of the Church Year.

Bring on the bolts of ecchymotic, early-twilight purple, I say. Bring them on !



Advent is lack. Emptiness. The time before. It is a compound of dark and cold, mourning and desire. It is bereavement, yearning, bafflement. It is interrogation, silence; it is a hand pressed to the chest.



It is a whistle in the dark in the saddest key.



What better place to celebrate the advent of Advent than in an empty autumnal community garden, reveling in the decay that follows the harvest, ecstatic in a screeching, oddly warm wind ?



Oh, the affinities I feel with the bedraggled and overlooked ears of corn !



and with the bittersweet pods that have refused to open !



And with the pod-like sleigh bells, patiently awaiting what lies beyond the furious combustion of these last autumnal days,



when the ruddy season plummets over the edge and and freezes white.



In the meantime, I am all thorn and dead air. Not much is getting through the labora et labora of my recent days. Little flashes of white, someone's cold hand, an inkling of what lies beyond Advent; of what, of course, is already and always present,



but that I flinch from and flee, preferring the shell and the shadowy leaf-cradle



to that hard light.

Show Me The Way To Go Home

I went to the woods recently for the first time in weeks. I went late; the sun was bright and low, and the day was waning. A high wind was rushing through the trees. It was the sound of time itself, pushing, pulling, eddying around me. I wanted to launch myself into it, like a leaf.



It was good to be in the woods. I'd rushed out of the house in the wrong shoes, but I was in tame woods and fleece-lined crocs would suffice. I winced at the convivial dog walkers and the sound of a distant radio. But soon the old, familiar happiness returned. I was alone with my camera and the autumn landscape; light and shadow, bark and leaf, the glint of red berries in the underbrush, vines and branches -- all these slipped under my skin and replaced the fret and existential emergency in which I'd been living for weeks.



Of course, existential emergency is my default setting. I am no stranger to leaps of faith, and I made a huge one three years ago when I plopped myself down on the doorstep of an Episcopal Church and asked to be admitted. I wanted to master some language and grammar adequate to things ultimate; I wanted to be a part of something in but not of the world whose concern was with, well, Ultimate Being. The Dalai Lama had advised hewing to one's own tradition. It was true that my DIY panentheistic Zen-tinged nature mysticism didn't much deal with matters of humanity and community and history. Christianity, with the scandalous particularity of Jesus at its heart, certainly did. And, besides, the Roman Catholic Church -- unlikely object of my lifelong heart's desire -- wanted nothing to do with irredeemable, scandalous, divorced-and-remarried me. And my natal denomination, the UCC, did things like having kids' rock bands play in the sanctuary on Children's Sunday, and, instead of a weekly chalice, distributed little thimbles of grape juice once a month. And if the grape-juice-serving, kid-band loving UCC had the most progressive, open-hearted view of gender matters, the Real Presence adoring, Gregorian chanting RCC was still going positively and gleefully medieval on women and GLBTs. The Anglican/Episcopal Via Media seemed like the place to be.



But, three years in, I was restless. I wanted something bigger, more hardcore. Daily Mass, Carthusians & Trappists, Church Latin. Holy Days of Obligation. Rosaries, scapulars, saints, monasteries and convents, stylites and acnchorites -- the whole, glorious, glamorous Apparatus of Faith that had grown up around Jesus the Christ. I found myself wandering the shores of the Tiber, gazing across, heaving huge sighs of longing. "When you get right down to it," I rationalized, "the Episcopal Church, with its excruciatingly slow approach to gender inclusion, is as compromised as the Roman Catholic Church. So I might as well defect ! Surely I could get an annulment ! And a special dispensation with regards to the disparity of cult that exists between me and my Jewish husband."



Then there was the Zen thing. I'd been fitfully climbing back onto the zafu and listening to some excellent dharma talks generously provided by the Toledo Zen Center . Wasn't this what spoke most directly and wordlessly to the burning question who am I/what is this short-circuiting God-Spirit-Christ and plunging straight into the heart of the matter ? What is a more fruitful way to spend 20 minutes of morning devotion -- reading in the Daily Office about the vicissitudes of Baal worshiping, Jehovah-smitten Israelite kings, or sitting shikantaza ? Mastering the byzantine arcana of the Anglican Breviary, or chanting the Identity of Relative and Absolute ? And what about the Rosary ?

Prone to wander, Lord

But Who/What was this Lord I was addressing, anyway ?



I'd been round and round these circles before. I was looping a well-worn neural circuit with increasing velocity.



God, in the guise of centripetal force, finally intervened. Off I shot, at a tangent. Landed in the dense underbrush of a killer work-week and a killer cold. It's hard to sustain an existential emergency while navigating oceans of snot and progress notes.



I needed to calm down, and shut up. To stop yammering, and start listening. To stop fretting and keep showing up. God is, by definition, everywhere. Christ died for all. As today's Gospel said, it's about serving, not about jockeying for position and privilege. It's about listening, not about winning complicated theological arguments. And (this is the hardest) it's about love, justice and mercy. As Rev. Norm said, "It's not about you."



It's about "you" in relation to everything else: God, world, others. One body. One reality so vast that is there any wonder there are so many languages that have arisen to describe it ?

Anon.

The Wind Blew the Breadcrumbs Away

Vacancy

After the storm I wander the riverbank
and watch the trees deform and reform in the wind



Raindrops have hung themselves out to dry
on every line and filament,



and snails drowse
on the high ground of the switchgrass.



The footfall of the housefly



echoes in rift between summer and autumn.



I listen with an eye of water.