Advent, stuff I don't need and one more piece of junk you don't really want.

Advent weeks one and two



Been trying to spend more of my time focusing on things that actually matter to me. I've been trimming some of the fat in the department of commitments and trying to rearrange the furniture in my life to free up some space. To that end I'm also trying to spend a little less time on the interwebs, but I saw this on a friend's facebook, liked it and thought you might all as well. Happy Advent.

Status Quo and the First Sunday of Advent

For better or worse Christmas shopping season is upon us. Black Friday/Buy Nothing Day/the single largest shopping day of the year was on Friday (ironically placed as it is after a day when we at least claim to be thankful for all we have and run out to get more and more than we need or even sometimes want) and today is the First Sunday of Advent. I hope to over the next four weeks to post some things about how the Christmas Story (when I make to pry it from the death-grip pop culture seems to have on it) speaks to and radically challanges me. I expect much of the reflections I share will be heavily influenced by the Advent book I'm planning on going though Follow the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas.

Today I read a piece by Henri Nouwen where he says:

waiting is active. Most of us think of waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands. The bus is late? You cannot do anything about it, you have to just sit there and wait. It is not difficult to understand the irritation people feel when someone says, "Just wait." Words like that seem to push us into passivity.
But there is none of this passivity in scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing.

That resonates with me because the world's messed up and I need to get my rear in gear to help fix it (I wrote a piece on work a few weeks back that seems particularly relivant at this second).

A Resurrected Christmas from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

The other side of waiting (and Nouwen does go into this) is hope.

I'm excited about some of the things that are happening in and around the #Occupy movement but part of that excitement for me is rooted in a hope the status quo is unsustainable and at some point must change but also that God's going to make things right. I've heard Stanley Hauerwas say that it's important for us to read the Bible in reverse and I think that's true in how we should read the Gospels (Good News) as well, with with Life beating the hell out of Death. And if we can't muster the strength to make that story one that is being lived out in our communities, it can feel like cheap lip-service to say we'll see it in the realm to come.

May we all learn to actively wait
To live out resurection in our own lives and community
And may we find our hope in things bigger than the stuff is (not) under our Christmas tree

A joyfull Advent to you all.

Thanksgiving

I saw this on the blog for American Public Media's wonderful show On Being (formerly called Speaking of Faith). It spoke to me and I wanted to share it with you. Though written long ago, to me this prayer seems all the more poiniant today. We live in a time were Christmas is a point of contact between two religions that I exist in the context of, each with their own ritual, orthodoxy and sacred stories.
One, perhaps the one we are most familiar with, says that I show love to the few people I really care about by buying them things that they don't need (and often times don't even want), I gorge myself with food and the drive for more. "It's a wonderful life...but I'm going to be paying off credit cards till Febrewary!". The other is a story of refugees from an occupied land, amidst dictators, infanticide and the creator of the Universe siding with the losers of history in some strange ways. So, in the approaching shadow of Black Friday/Buy Nothing Day (the single largest day of consumerism in the USA each year) and the approach of Advent, I offer you all this prayer and my hope we all might find what we are looking for under a glowing bush (instead of a artificial tree).

Thanksgiving Day Prayer
by Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918)

For the wide sky and the blessed sun,
For the salt sea and the running water,
For the everlasting hills
And the never-resting winds,
For trees and the common grass underfoot.
We thank you for our senses
By which we hear the songs of birds,
And see the splendor of the summer fields,
And taste of the autumn fruits,
And rejoice in the feel of the snow,
And smell the breath of the spring.
Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty;
And save our souls from being so blind
That we pass unseeing
When even the common thornbush
Is aflame with your glory,
O God our creator,
Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

The prayer was origionally posted here

Follow-up piece here

Work

I'm feeling pretty slammed at the moment. The Olympia Film Festival is this week and I'm just one of the hundreds of people who've put in some literal blood sweat and tears into making it happen (I'd love to see a few of the films), Books to Prisoners takes up my Mon's, and there is Spanish class on Wed's, I work 40 hrs a week, try not to fall asleep in church, I'm working on putting out a slightly timely book review for here on my blog on one of the densest books I've read since college, I have to go to a CPR training to renew my certification on Fri, still trying to cobble together some of the intrest in my failed "Faith @ Occupy Olympia" into...something. There is so much crap that I need to get done. Oh yeah, and I'm sick at the moment.

In the midst of all this I have two things kinda floating through my head about the Sabath, the Biblically mandated time of rest: 1) As I decry the ways that the powers that be exploit and take advantage of me, as is the nature of the state and the capitalist system (and for that matter is a story as old as empire) I'm quick to ignore the ways I do it to myself. I'll take the overtime when it's offered, I'll overcommit myself but somehow it's not a problem when I do it to myself... I don't remember who first pointed out this tendancy but it rang very true and is particularly ringing true at the moment.
2) Ched Myers and Walter Brueggemann, two of my favorite theologians, have argued that the purpose (or at least one of the many purposes) of the Sabath is to remind us that we are not in control and the world doesn't need us as much as we'd like to pretend. My world/The World won't fall apart if I allow it to go on by itself, if I sit back for a day. I'm not even talking about my "job" per se, but all the wonderful stuff that I cram into my week. Even when it's "the Lord's work". We resist this but in a society of workaholics (like me) I think this is a very timely, even prophetic message.
3) We need to rediscover resting outside of the dominant naratives of our society; we need to discover how to rest in community appart from our (usually) unspoken civic (read: the religion of USAmerica) duty to buy stuff and consume.

What about you guys? Do you Sabbath well? Do you find it easy to relax? Really relax? To trust that the world won't fall apart without your medelling?