Giving other people the ability to harm you is, I think, paramount in developing as an adult. And that is really difficult to do.
The two quotes appear to exist in separate orbits, though there may connections I can’t see. At first glance–or maybe even second or third glance–they don’t seem to have much to do with each other. But one greeted me this morning and the other tonight as I sat down to write my journal entry after an evening with Ginger of looking at Christmas light displays at the convention center in Hartford. In my little mental solar system, they have criss-crossed like comets, intersecting without colliding, and leaving a trail of things for me to think about.
Eckhart is already a significant part of Advent for me because we have used another of his quotes (well, an adaptation) as the theme of the season:
What good is it to us that Mary gave birth to the son of God two thousand years ago, and we do not also give birth to the Son of God in our time and in our culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.
God is always needing to be born–I wonder how that went down in the 1300s.
As far as his words on erasure, I wished, first, that I had known of them when I was working as an editor. They would have made a hell of an email signature. Then again, I don’t think he was talking about erasing the words of others. He was talking about being willing to change, to learn, to grow, which is where he connects with Isbell’s words about growing to the point as a human being that we are willing to give people the ability to harm us.
One of the books I read on writing many years ago said the best way to learn how to edit your work is to find your favorite sentence and delete it. The logic was if you could do that then you could be a good editor. That might be a little extreme, but it is holds the same idea as Eckhart. I don’t know enough about the chronology of classrooms to know if Meister had blackboards, and I’m assuming he didn’t have No. 2 pencils with erasers on the back end, but erasing carries a strong note of the temporary.
To erase is to trust we have not run out of words. To be vulnerable is to trust we have not run out of healing. Both of them affirm the creative power of life, of humanity, even in the face of doubt and pain.
Since Jason Isbell is one of my songwriting heroes, I have some sense of how hard he works on his songs. That’s a big part of why I love them so much. I’m quite sure it took a lot of erasing to get to these lines from my favorite love song, “If We Were Vampires:”
maybe time running out is a gift I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift and give you every second I can find and hope it isn’t me who’s left behind
From what I know of Eckhart’s biography, he spent a good bit of time facing charges of heresy, I assume because he kept erasing orthodox ideas and saying things like, God is always needing to be born. Both men chose their words carefully, and I am writing about how much that matters in a blog post that is not much more than a rough draft with a couple of revisions. But what I am chasing here is about more than tweaking sentences, as much as I value a good editor.
As we live these last few days of Advent, I wonder how we can erase the indelible lines of the story we have told over and over and find something as alive and surprising as an infant. As we become accustomed to living in a world (and a nation) that is constantly at war and fear is the common currency, how do we grow into people who are willing to be hurt by others for the sake of all of our healing?
Those are not the only questions; they may not even be the best ones. But they are on my heart tonight until sleep wipes the board clean for tomorrow.
I preached about joy this week, which helped me as we get closer to the solstice and the daylight drips down to its shortest appearance. Joy is easier to recognize or feel than it is to preach about, but I gave it a good shot.
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I amused myself as I worked on the sermon this week because I realized that I began the first week of Advent by saying that hope was a difficult word to define, and then last week I said a definition of peace didn’t come so easily. I was amused because I had the same thought about joy as I began to write. So let me also jump ahead a week and say that a definition of love isn’t that simple either.
None of the definitions comes easily, yet we thrive on these things—hope, peace, joy, and love; we know they matter. We recognize them when we see them, when we feel them, yet they can’t be described as easily as they can be experienced.
As far as dictionary definitions go, joy can mean “pleasure,” “delight, or “gladness,” to name a few, though none of those paints the full picture. Joy also carries notes of appreciation and belonging, as well as a sense of wonder and trust and some gratitude mixed in.
When Jesus told his disciples not to worry, for instance—when he told them to look at the beauty of the lilies who didn’t worry about a thing and just bloomed extravagantly each spring like nothing else mattered—he was painting a picture of joy.
This morning we lit the candle of “fierce joy.” The word fierce can mean “wild,” or “intense,” or “powerful”—or all of those things. We talk about someone being a fierce competitor or having a fierce determination. In Texas, people say things like, “She went after him somethin’ fierce,” which generally means the person being pursued didn’t stand a chance.
The two words together lead us to things like a sense of wonder that runs wild, intense delight, or formidable trust. And we are still playing with words and not really getting to the joy.
Maybe joy is like a joke: if you have to explain it, it’s not funny. And here I am trying to explain it.
Isaiah was trying to describe it as well in the verses we read this morning:
God’s spirit is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim release for captives, and liberation for prisoners, to proclaim the year of Divine favor
Those words were the text for Jesus’ first sermon, which comprised of his reading the passage, setting the scroll on the altar, and saying, “Today these words have come alive in front of you.”
Neither Jesus nor Isaiah was speaking euphemistically. They meant that God had called them to take care of the poor (as in work to get people out of poverty), comfort those who were brokenhearted (as in get involved in their lives), liberate the captives and incarcerated (as in really get people out of prison), and proclaim God’s love for the world as though it really made a difference.
All of those actions pull us outside of ourselves, outside of our comfort zones, into places where the ferocity of joy can take us, as poet David Whyte says, over “the edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.” He says joy is, “practiced generosity. . . . To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; . . . to have walked through the doorway of fear, . . . the claiming of our place in the living conversation,” to say, “I was here and you were here and together we made a world.”
Practicing the generosity of joy means looking for ways to get outside of ourselves and feel connected to that living conversation, whether that means learning to pay attention to a sunset, or learn the names of the checkers at the supermarket, or surprise a loved one with a gift that makes them feel known the way you did when you gave me those hippos in my office.
Isaiah was talking to a country full of people who felt oppressed and despairing when he talked about liberation. He acted like they had the ability to change lives with their actions, even though they thought of themselves as the ones in bondage.
Jesus read the same verses and then invited the crowd in the synagogue to risk taking him seriously. He, too, was speaking to people who thought of themselves as the ones being oppressed rather than those who could set someone else free, and he invited them to be a part of a conversation that was about more than fear and survival—to trust that things could be different.
Mary—a teenage girl—had her life turned upside down by the words of an angel and responded by saying, “Let it happen just like you said.” The hymn we are going to sing in a moment puts her words to the tune of an Irish folk melody.
My soul cries out with a joyful shout That the God of my heart is great And my spirit sings of the wondrous things That you bring to the ones who wait You fixed your sight on your servant’s plight And my weakness you did not spurn So from east to west shall my name be blest Could the world be about to turn?
My heart shall sing of the day you bring Let the fires of your justice burn Wipe away all tears for the dawn draws near And the world is about to turn.
During this Advent season, we have talked about shocking hope, just peace, and now fierce joy. Shocking hope helped us name that we can thrive and flourish when we embrace uncertainty: the hope that anything could happen. In our conversation about just peace, we talked about following our broken hearts as a way of healing the world. Fierce joy—wild, intense, powerful joy—calls us to engage the fleeting nature of our existence with tenacious generosity and hopeful abandon; to live with a sense of impending joy rather than impending doom; to hear that the world is about to turn and trust that that’s a good thing.
Jesus read the scripture and then said, “I am here and you are here and together we can build a world.” Mary listened to all Gabriel said was going to happen to her and said, “Let it happen just like you said,” and then sang a song of joy so strong that she thought it could open hearts and topple governments.
None of them had an easy life. None of them was praying for God to make things go their way. All of them were praying for fierce joy, for the ability to see how the Spirit of God connects us all even when we feel isolated. All of them trusted that life was too short for anything but joy and too hard for anything but gratitude and generosity.
Poet Mary Oliver wrote,
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
That last line: Joy is not made to be a crumb.
We are all in this thing called life together and we’re not here long. May we live what days we have as those who trust God’s abundance, those who host banquets instead of settling for crumbs. Amen.
My birthday gift this year was Burt Burleson, my most enduring friend whom I have known for almost fifty years. As a third-culture kid who moved around most of my life, I lost track of those I knew in my childhood and adolescence. Burt and I met in the fall of 1976. I can remember calling him in the fall of 1986 to say he was the first friend I had had in my life that I had known for ten years and known where they were all ten of those years.
He and Ginger hatched a plan that gave Burt and I the better part of a week together (hence why I haven’t kept up my Advent Journal the last few nights) and the time was filled with good things. I took him to the airport in Hartford early this morning and came home to find that he had left a leather box for me–one I recognized because I left it at his house when I was there a couple of years ago. Inside was a dehydrated summer squash, a tradition we began quite by accident several decades ago.
It was the perfect parting gift. My thank you note to Burt is this poem.
the squash of friendship
if you asked for a list
of all the metaphors
that might carry the
meaning of friendship
a dried summer squash
would not rank highly
if at all, were it not
for the time I snuck
a squash into your
suitcase at the close
of a visit and then
found it tucked in mine
the next time I came
to see you; without
knowing much about
how to dry a vegetable
we kept that same one
around for a decade
until it got lost like
luggage at LaGuardia
so when I got back from
taking you to the airport
after your surprise visit
and saw the squash I left
at your house two years ago
I felt nourished and loved
the wrinkled remains of
a fairly standard squash
that dried out instead of
spoil is a strong symbol of
friendship particularly
when housed in a fancy
leather fountain pen box
mostly because friendship
is not valuable because
it produces or accomplishes
anything; it offers no
guaranteed return on
investment; it matters
more than measurement
thank you my summer squash
friend for a love for no
reason, a story without
a moral, a scavenger hunt
of hope that have kept me
alive; in a world that wants
answers we have a squash
The emphasis for the second Sunday of Advent is peace, or in our version, just peace—not in the sense of only peace but of peace informed by justice. The scripture passage was from Mark 1 and described the appearance of John the Baptist.
As I said in the sermon, talking about peace feels even more difficult this year with all that is happening in Israel and Gaza, along with Ukraine and other places. Even so, we are called to be peacemakers.
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One of the reasons I chose the particular translation we are using this morning is because the translators caught something that most have not, and that is that the opening words of Mark are the title of the book rather than the first sentence:
The beginning of the gospel—the good news—of Jesus Christ.
Then Mark moves to quote from the prophet Isaiah about preparing the way of the Lord and ends up focusing on John the Baptist, giving us a picture of an odd man dressed in camel hide and eating locusts and wild honey. John chose a remote part of the Jordan River, many miles from Jerusalem, to issue his call for repentance. Still, people came to be baptized.
But the words we read are not the beginning of the good news of Jesus. They are the opening scene; the whole book is the beginning. Jesus’ life is the beginning of the gospel; we are still telling the story. It has lots of chapters. We are reading these introductory words on this Sunday as we talk about peace—just peace—even though the word is not mentioned in the passage.
Last week, we talked about how difficult it is to define the word hope; I’m not sure peace is much easier. The root meaning of the word in English carries the notion of binding together, to make a promise as a way to end conflict. Then it came to mean friendly relationships with others. The word also carries the idea of inner calm and quiet, as in peace of mind. Peace has a lot of angles to consider.
When I was in seminary, I made plans to get my doctorate. I actually completed a year of study and then I met Ginger—a turn in my life I was not expecting. That one year was all I did. That’s the way life goes sometimes.
One of the requirements for admission was I had to pass a French test so I could read European theologians. One of the ways we studied for the test was translating from a French New Testament. We were working on the Beatitudes and found that the French version of “blessed are the peacemakers” translated to “blessed are those who make peace around them.”
Philosopher Cornell West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” To talk, then, about just peace is to talk about binding ourselves together in love—and by ourselves we mean all of those around us, both near and far.
How do we make peace around us?
That’s a difficult question under any circumstances, but it is even harder in these days when we are inundated by news of what is happening in Gaza and Israel, as well as in Ukraine. And those are only two of the thirty-plus wars going on in the world right now. The wars make the question difficult not only because people are dying, but also because we are a long way from those wars and there’s not much we can do about them, or at least that is how it feels.
When we say, “make peace around us,” how far out do we draw the circle?
I want to add three other questions, added layers to what it means to make peace around us. They come from writer Judith Baker in an essay titled, “Violence, Mourning, and Politics:”
Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, what makes for a grievable life?
Yesterday several of us participated in a Service of Remembrance that we hosted here working with the folks from Beecher and Bennett Funeral Home. The heart of the service was the reading of the names of those who died this past year. As the names were read, family and friends put an ornament on a tree we had down front and then lit a candle. Every name recalled a grievable life, someone who was missed and longed for.
By contrast, I read an article this week about the ongoing civil war in Sudan—a war that rarely makes the news here. They commented that five thousand civilians have been killed there in the last six months. In the war we do hear about, fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7 when twelve hundred Israelis were killed in an attack by Hamas.
In most all the reporting I have seen, no names were mentioned; how can those lives be grieved when we don’t know who they are? But the impact of these wars hits closer to home.
Judith Butler says mourning means agreeing to be transformed by our sadness without knowing where those changes will take us. John the Baptist invited people to repent, which meant more than just feeling sorry; it meant turning your life in a new direction. That is what it takes to make peace around us.
I have a friend who is a Methodist minister. His name is Eric Folkerth. He says people are not changed by following their passions, they are changed when they follow their broken hearts. If you want to live your life to its fullest, then work to heal what breaks your heart. That’s another way of saying make peace around you.
As the war in Israel and Gaza has escalated, I watched Ginger’s heart break for the situation at large, but also for the rabbi nearest us who lost friends in the Hamas attack and also feared reprisals from people here who see the situation as a chance to lash out in hatred. She knew she couldn’t change much in Gaza, but she organized a group of us to go one Friday evening as the temple was gathering for shabbat services. We stood silently with candles as people arrived. Some thanked us. Some even wept. We did not stop the war, but we made peace.
We are not going to stop wars with our efforts, regardless of what we do. We can, however, widen the circle of those for whom we grieve. We can learn names. We can ask questions. We can let our hearts be broken and then see where that takes us.
As we prepare for the election year that is just around the corner—which is going to feel like a war—we can let our hearts break for those with whom we disagree. I don’t mean feel sorry for them because they’re wrong. I mean allow them to become grievable lives to us: people we know and care about. We can practice that right here in this room. We have no better place to begin to live like peacemakers; then we, too, can see where it takes us.
The world will not be changed by opinions or by outrage. The world will be changed by those who make peace around them—those who look at others as grievable, as loveable; those who learn names and have conversations; those who are willing to follow their broken hearts.
A quick note: I am playing a bit of catch up with my Advent Journal because I picked up some malware that was sending people spam messages when they tried to get to the site. That is all corrected now, thanks to the good folks at Dreamhost, but it has kept my quiet for a few days.
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This is my second Advent season since I left my job as an editor.
It was not a pleasant parting. Thanks to my having turned sixty-five, I could retire instead of just quit to get out from under the misery of the situation aimed at pushing me out. In my exit interview I said, “One of the things I have learned is that our Human Resources department is called that because the company sees human as resources, not that you are offering resources to humans.
I left the job feeling like I had failed.
I loved editing manuscripts and working with authors. I loved my colleagues (most of whom were also pushed out by the new administration). I felt good about the work I did and the relationships I built. I thought I would work there for another ten years. And then I wasn’t able to do that anymore; I felt like I had failed. (I realize I’ve already said that once; it was a strong feeling.)
Part of the reason I felt that way is almost every morning after I announced my retirement I got an email from my new boss telling me I was a failure in so many words. Those missives took their toll. Those feelings surfaced again this week as I read Joe Moran’s words in If You Should Fail:
This is meritocracy’s fatal flaw: not that it sets up people to fail but that it defines so meanly what success is.
Later in the same chapter, he went on to talk about “the tadpole philosophy,” a phrase coined by the writer R. H. Tawney. He said it was how unequal societies (and companies?) justified their inequity–by convincing the tadpoles they would be successful only if they became frogs. Only a few actually make the transition and then “croak addresses to their former friends on the virtues by means of which tadpoles of character and capacity can rise to be frogs.”
But whether or not a tadpole becomes a frog has very little to do with how smart they are, what choices they make, or how hard they try. Moran says,
A tadpole has a right to its blameless, vegetarian, tadpole’s life, the same right to be on the earth as any other living thing. That life may be brief and cosmically insignificant, but so, in the deep time of the universe, is the life of a frog, or a human.
No matter our age, we spend a lot of time and energy in this country trying to prove that we are successes, that we are ready to move to the next stage, while living with the impending sense that we are not going to measure up. The anxiety that inflicts so many of our young people lets us know we have passed that value on to them as well.
Our church sponsors a community-wide youth group that takes an annual service trip to Appalachia or the like. The week is rich and meaningful for the high schoolers who go each year. I heard one of the adults recount talking to a parent of a kid who had not gone and saying, “I told them she should go on the trip because it is a great way to boost their resumé for college.”
I knew the adult didn’t hear the implications of what they were saying, and I prayed that no one had repeated that logic to the high schooler. I didn’t want them to pick up the message, intended or not.
Life is a competition only if we make it so, and too much of the time we do, setting up an seemingly endless string of necessary achievements for a person to feel successful and none of them is ever enough–at least, not for long.
What a tadpole needs to become a frog is in its DNA. At some point, and for a variety of reasons that the tadpole doesn’t control, those cells start to grow, much like a child goes through puberty, I suppose. (Remember, I am not a biologist; I’m talking metaphor here.) The best thing a tadpole can be is a tadpole, rather than a frog-in-waiting. They, like us, are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.
My boss was right about one thing: I couldn’t do the job they way wanted me to–in large part because the job was set up so I couldn’t do the job they way they wanted me to. It was, to use Moran’s words, a mean definition of success. Where they were wrong about me and my colleagues is we are more than resources to be used up. We, like the tadpoles, are good just like we are.
That goes for you, too. And for my old boss, if they were willing to see it.
The book opens with a description of the “rough sleeper” who inhabits the doorway across the street from his university office. Moran notices, among other things, that the man reads even as he lives on the street, which gives him a sense of connection with this one experiencing homelessness, and makes him realize only a few circumstances separate one life situation from the other. Then, on Page 3, this sentence–and the new word:
Watching that rough sleeper, it struck me how flimsy the carapace of competence that makes us feel like paid-up members of the human race.
I have a habit of writing in the margins of books I read, so I was quick to underline and then rewrite “carapace of competence,” first because of the rhythm and alliteration when I both read them and then said them out loud. One of the reasons I love reading Moran is the musicality of his prose. He knows how to craft a melody with words. Actually, what I first wrote in the margin was “carapace of confidence,” but I’ll come back to that.
Our friend Mandy was visiting this weekend and she was sitting on the couch reading her own book. I read the sentences to her and we both admitted we didn’t know what a carapace was, so she looked it up.
car·a·pace
/ˈkerəˌpās/
noun
noun: carapace; plural noun: carapaces
the hard upper shell of a turtle, crustacean, or arachnid.
“the study found oil in the carapace of twenty-nine sea turtles that returned to feed in the spill area”
something regarded as a protective or defensive covering.
“under her carapace of self-confidence she was very sensitive to criticism”
I listened to the definition and then went back to Moran to read the sentence again, which was when I realized I had read confidence instead of competence. What I heard in his use of the word was the shell we think will protect us is not quite as reliable as we think it is, which made me think that was true for both competence and confidence.
I have a document where I keep a list of phrases I have heard that are evocative, much like “carapace of competence.” One of them is “delusions of adequacy.” The two phrases make decent companions. For a good many of us, competence has a veneer-like quality. I don’t mean we aren’t skilled or that we aren’t telling the truth. I mean, like Moran, when it comes to seeing those whose shells have been stripped away, we must face the reality that both the competence and the confidence that keep us from sharing their plight are like a lobster shell and less like Batman’s shields.
What Moran is talking about is more layered than having a bed to sleep in and a door to lock. A couple of pages later he talks about the “human hunger for stories, the need to turn life into allegory,” and goes on to say, “Behind this fallacy . . . lies the illusion of control. We need to feel that we have some say over the unseeable course of our lives.”
The carapace of control is not all it’s cracked up to be either.
An allegory, as you know, is a story with a lesson, a moral–tortoise and hare kind of stuff. When the stories of our lives get distilled into such tales, we quit telling the truth. To look back and say, “If I had not persevered when that (bad) thing hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be in this (good) position today,” or, “I worked hard in the face of adversity and I was rewarded for my efforts,” doesn’t mean God or anyone else was rewarding our competence or confidence. We are not masters of our own destiny, we are people doing the best we can with what we have–or at least trying to do so.
Perhaps I am illustrating the point that the stories that make up our lives, both big and small, don’t necessarily come to a conclusion with a lesson to learn by getting to the end of this post and not having a strong finishing statement. What I mostly wanted to say was I learned a new word today and it made me think about life, stories, vocabulary, and all the things that draw us together and also tear us apart as I meandered through the details of my day wishing I could tell someone what I had learned.
