Chronic

Time is out of joint. We did our family Christmas on Thanksgiving, and my father headed south. Advent arrived, and I found myself lost on the Boulevard Noir. I put my Daily Office book aside, canceled an Advent Retreat at Holy Cross Monastery, and stopped resisting the cold and darkness that had taken hold. This was the desert I wanted, right ?



I went to the church Saturday night to check the set up for Advent 4. I winced at the Christmas tree that our partner congregation put out during the week of Advent 2; I raised an altar guildian eyebrow at the white frontal that this week's crew had put back on the altar contrary to our plan to keep it bare for Advent. Christmas Pageant props were everywhere. It is still Advent I muttered under my breath, heading back to the sacristy to get a lavabo towel to replace the corporal that was draped on the lavabo bowl. That's when Santa showed up. A magnificent Santa, in fact, from the church that rents the basement hall for its services.

I admired him, of course; from girth to beard he was the picture of authenticity. But this was not the arrival that I'd been -- been what ? Awaiting ? Resisting ? Dreading ? "It's still Advent," I'd been crying for weeks in my little wilderness, adding inwardly a prayer that it might remain Advent, and, absent that, segue right into Lent.

The juggernaut of Birth is unstoppable.



As is, of course, the juggernaut of death. And the two, one cannot fail to note, are related. Consider the memorable image from "Waiting for Godot," of giving birth astride a grave. Even I, in my most grimly existential moments, think that's telescoping things a bit overmuch. There is, for most of us, the in-between time called "life," that time about which the Zen evening gatha says

Let me respectfully remind you,
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken.
Awaken! Take heed!
Do not squander your lives.



The Gospels' "little apocalypse" seems to me more terrifying than all the gothic arcana of Revelation. What it predicts is visible all around us. War, rumors of war, false prophets, persecutions and betrayals, the desolating sacrilege that is the signal to flee to the mountains --



the one on the housetop must not go down to take what is in the house; the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that your flight may not be in winter ...



"Keep awake, therefore," Jesus warns a few parables later, "for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming."

Awaken. Take heed. Do not squander your life.



In Matthew, Jesus' eschatologic discourse ends with a depiction of who will inherit the kingdom prepared for (them) from the foundation of the world. Those, he says, who fed me when I was hungry, gave me water when I was thirsty, clothed me when I was naked, visited me when I was in prison.



And lest the righteous be baffled about when they encountered Him in such transactions, Jesus lays it out:

just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.



So Advent is about waking up.



And to what does one awaken on the Boulevard Noir ? Jesus, like a sudden apparition of Santa Claus ?



In my several years in Episcopalia I fear have not made much progress with the Jesus koan. I think I have been approaching it wrong. I think I have been scanning the dark corners of the church looking for something akin to Santa, or, worse, expecting some swoon-inducing, overwhelming mystical encounter like Julian of Norwich's shewings. Something flashy, exotic, some glimpse of the Beyond.



A few nights ago I was prowling the outermost reaches of the Boulevard Noir. It was damp and cold, right at the freezing point. Some gelid compromise of water, neither rain nor snow, was suspended in the air. There was mud and ice underfoot. I had an earworm of REM's Losing My Religion and I was muttering under my breath.



What's the point of this churchgoing, anyway ? My spouse thinks I've become like the hyper-pious Simpsons character Ned Flanders and suspects my priest thinks so too, my son's mildly amused by his churchgoing mother, and my father thinks church is some kind of therapy I've undertaken to feel better. People I know and respect equate being Christian with belief in biblical inerrancy, espousal of Creationism and with a whole unsavory spectrum of homophobic attitudes. I can see the atheistic triumphalism in their eyes when they look at me -- as condescending, smug, pitying, contemptuous and superior as any religious triumphalism I'd ever encountered.



I slipped a little on the slick mud and thrust my hands deeper into my pockets. A few dim lights glowed behind the dirty panes of the back alley windows of the Boulevard Noir. There was a faint fume of alcohol in the air.



I thought of the things I'd undertaken in the church, of my role in the community, of -- to use a phrase that unsettles me to use -- the ministries I was participating in. I was, as the chilling last line of Weldon Kees' poem "The Smiles of the Bathers" tolls: involved. Was that the vision of Christ I was searching for all along ? So dry, so mundane ?



It troubles me that lines from grim, secular poems seem to form the foundation of my religious life. My ecclesiology starts with Philip Larkin's "Churchgoing" -- the poem's persona reflecting on a church ruin as "a serious place on a serious earth." Seriousness, involvement: all well and good, but why is my soul still moved mostly by the magic words -- Magisterium, Iconostasis, Theotokis, Mystagogy, Unction -- and all the gorgeous paraphenalia claimed exclusively by the boroughs of Godlandia whose borders are most tightly guarded against, well, the likes of me. And within whose borders triumphalist Truth-claims unashamedly resound. And whose shut doors I nonetheless periodically charge, like Gilda Radner's SNL character, the manic little girl hurling herself at her pink bedroom door.



And what about the worm at the heart of the gorgeous, tempting fruit of those boroughs ? The worm of "invalid" and "objectively disordered," the worm that looks me in the eye and says that, being female, I am so irrevocably unlike Christ in such a fundamental, defining way that I am eternally, indelibly ineligible for priesthood.



I stopped under the last streetlamp of the Boulevard Noir. An oily, freezing fog was coiling around its flickering bulb. I needed an aspirin for headache and heartache. Soon the road itself would give out, blend into the stubblefields and vacant lots of the farthest outskirts of Bouville --



-- and then what ? The uncharted, unclaimed geographies beyond ? I tripped on a small stone, stumbled into an involuntary genuflection, and continued. The brittle ice crunched under my feet like broken Christmas ornaments. No, wait. It wasn't ice, it was a Christmas ball, an errant red one, that I'd stepped on. I shook the shards off my boot and continued toward the darkness.



Whom or what would I find there ? Taoist hermits shivering in the burnt-out, rusting husks of schoolbuses ? Purgatory ? Beelzebub ? The boarded-up strip malls of the next barely-incorporated town, still festooned with garland from some long-forgotten Christmas ?



I turned back. That excursion would have to wait for Lent.



Christmas has leaked into the farthest, most devastated reaches of Advent. Does else anyone consider a two-weeks-too-early Christmas tree in the church a desolating sacrilege ? (I was happy to hear that the priest substituting during our rector's maternity leave had also raised an eyebrow at it, although she likely does not go as far afield as "desolating sacrilege.")



I would have to content myself with the undeniably grim aspects of the Christmas Story. Mary and Joseph traveling like refugees at the behest of an occupying power. Birth in a stable. Flight into Egypt from a retributive genocide.



The miracle is that God would condescend at all into a joint like this.



The miracle is being able to discern God-with-us at all.



The miracle is to be able to sustain any assent or optimism whatsoever when the the instruments of power -- even, and maybe especially, the institutions of religious authority -- seem to so privilege the Aristotelian accidents of heterosexuality and masculinity.

I remember how I felt about my Bible when I was in junior high. I still have this Bible, a flexible-leatherette-bound RSV with the obligatory color plates of the usual pale, extravagantly coiffed Jesus with a lap full of improbably blond, rosy-cheeked and well-scrubbed cherubic children. I can, even today, recall the satisfaction I felt as I walked to Sunday school carrying my Holy Book: everything I needed was between its covers. It was all there, neatly packaged and completely vetted. And even if I didn't understand the least bit about the confusing stuff I found in its pages, still, it was reassuring to know that I owned a copy of The Truth.



I am happy to report that my relationship to the text has changed.

And I have to confess that I am not unsympathetic to Pontius Pilate's question: What is truth ?



But I'm not going to get any closer to the answer than I am now



until I stop living by the motto that I have framed and hung over my bed.

Lam of God

It's a cold, bright windy day and I am on the lam. I suspect the Advent desert is full of outlaws like myself, but in the vastness and obscurity one can travel for days with only passing shadows for company.



I have said that I joined the Church to be part of something in but not of the world; to adopt a tradition that considers questions of Being of primal importance, and to use its signs and its grammar as a means of discourse with and about the Numinous. If that sounds a bit cold and abstract to you, well, it does to me as well. Religion as language and grammar expressive of matters of Ultimate Being. How many heresies does that entail ?



Frankly, this empty, dark and frigid desert is a relief. Even if ++Rowan Williams is here (and I have no doubt that he is) the vastness swallows up his recommendation that the Episcopal church exercise "gracious restraint" with respect to human dignity and equality in service of preserving an already fracturing ecclesiastic structure. Never mind that the "Anglican Communion" is just a bit of a Christendom that is such a crazy welter of cracks and schisms that the prayer "may we all be One" seems the Highest of catholic small-c comedy. The Orthodox scorn the Romans, the Romans think everyone else is deficient, disordered and invalid, triumphalism, patronizing and condescension are the attitudes du jour, the Anglicans remain a glorious and fractious bouillebaisse, and there are days when it seems that the only common ground is the agreement that the only unfallen human state is to be heterosexual and male.

(Cut to image of Bible being waved.)



Did you know that Rick Warren has issued an "Encyclical Video" to Ugandan clergy in which he comes out against state-sponsored genocide ? So it's Pope Rick now ? It seems the real Vatican has also taken a stand against the kill-the-gays legislation that Uganda has been considering. But don't these ecclesiastic entities understand that they are a major engine for propagating homophobia in the world, for cloaking it in scripture and doctrine, disseminating it, legitimizing it, excusing it, allowing it, insisting upon it, and, most significantly, funding it ?



I cannot forget that, in 2007, even Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori asked for a season of fasting in service of institutional preservation.



"What," I ask myself, "am I doing here ?"



The Presiding Bishop issued another warning shot in my general direction last summer when she said that the "Great Western Heresy" was the notion of "individual salvation." "Ubuntu," she said, as Lambeth held its indaba groups and the General Convention adopted a "public narrative" process model. Where did that leave a lone wolf like me ? Some days I feel like the church (like my workplace) is being taken over by the jargon-spewing StuderGroup,



and that the only approach to Being that does not entail bad faith is the one that starts from point zero.



And where is that ?



It is only here, in this desert, where I have an inkling. An inkling I had long before I joined up



when, in a series of poems about provisioning a hermitage, I wrote

The afternoon can barely lift its head.
Storms muster in the west, and, to the east
the restive ocean gathers at the gates
of Harborview and Pigeon Cove. The year
falls past fall again, the same old cadence.
I can’t fatten or slumber, so I sing
along, my voice as brittle and apt to break
as a cheap glass ball mis-hung on a fractured branch --

I am the wren that quivers in the mouth
of the stranger’s broken eaves. I am the snow
that slides across its blank, unmoving eye.

Stars flicker between branches. Christmas lights
blink on and off, too fast, monotonous
emergencies of red and green. Herod
mugs with schoolchildren. White bulbs detonate,
blinding -- God, I can’t do this anymore.
I’m sick of stories, yours, mine, them all.
I have desired to go where words all fail.

Will Providence attend me, even there ?



How odd and disturbing, then, to find myself looking to my pre-Churched, wordless deserts for sustenance.



To my knowledge, there is no Christian analogy to the Buddhist "if you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." One first has to get around the sore point of the crucifixion. There are, of course, the complexities of the Atonement: we have already killed and continue to kill Christ, and, as He forgave, so too are we called to forgive and to look on others, as James Alison says, with the eyes of Christ. On Rick and Rowan and the PB, on the Ugandan legislators -- so, obviously, we are going to need Jesus to help us with that transaction.

There is iconoclasm, but that's not quite what I mean. Some days Christ just seems to stick out of the Trinity like a sore thumb, upstaging the other two persons like a bad ham actor. Even Christian "Contemplative Prayer" is imperfectly apophatic: it prescribes sitting with an "intention" toward God. That seems imperfectly trusting. If God "Is," won't God find/be found by the practitioner ? Isn't it, otherwise, waiting for Godot ?



But here, in the rarified air of the desert, it all seems (by fragile moments) clear.



Scripture loses its schismatizing edge and becomes music. Music for all ears.



Music that blends with the sound of the wind through stripped winter vines. Music that includes the cries of the world.



Follow it, then, to the very edge of the lightless desert, pass through the thorny gates, and discover what, if anything, lies beyond.

Thank You For

the night at the end of the burning world,



the red bones where my flesh still hangs,



the woods beyond the reach of human voices,



the gulfs that engulf and bind,



and the light that blinds.



And thank You also for procession,



for reach



and gravity,



for the literal tree on the literal green hill,



for the transparency of upraised arms



and for the world caught in convex water.



I thank You most of all for You
and for Your signs:

for dappled yellow waving against blue,



for the path that spiky lanterns light



and for the for the bower of stars, that, sunk in self
I, forgive me, often fail to see.

What I Had Forgotten

Warm, wet night. I come home to a dozen moths flattened out in porchlight on the vinyl siding by the back door. Small, dull things with frayed wings, pitiful, dignified. Damp bits of feathery protoplasm nearing the end of their days. Empathy collapses at the starting line. Compassion surges.



What's that line from Neruda ? A veces me canso de ser hombre -- sometimes I am tired of being human.



What can be added to or subtracted from moths in the porchlight of a damp November night ?



Earlier tonight I was in an unaccustomed grocery buying gift cards for church Thanksgiving baskets. It's on a crowded bit of the town's main drag. The rainy night and the traffic were grating on my nerves. It had been an awful week at work and I came into the weekend unrested and jangled, dreading Saturday call and already dreading Monday. I'd been running a rat race on a treadmill with my nose and shoulder simultaneously wheeling and grindstoning and there was no end in sight.

Sunk in a foggy reverie, I watched the pleasant, helpful young woman at the service desk neatly label each card and set them in envelopes.

"Thanksgiving ?" she asked, casually, as she worked.

"Yes," I answered, startled, briefly awake,



"Thanksgiving."

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.