It's coming on christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
– Joni Mitchell, River
You know, more and more, I have trouble viewing Christmas as a celebratory time of year. I mean, apart from all the Christian ranting about how this time of year has been co-opted by contemporary cultural paganism (“Jesus is the reason for the season!”), I'm not convinced that a Christian approach to Christmas – that of remembering the birth of Jesus – should be a cause of so much frivolous joy.
Certainly there is a joyous element to it. Jesus' birth signals God becoming human, God entering into our world, coming alongside of us to redeem us. God with a face. God we can know and love and hold and be held by. That surely inspires awe and celebration.
And yet how can we unrestrainedly celebrate that event when we know what it leads to? The birth of Jesus was just the first step of a journey of humiliation and suffering. God humbled. God made vulnerable. God as a child. A child destined for abandonment, torture, shame and death. Surely a cause of awe, that God should love us so dearly as to endure such things for us, but not so much a cause of frivolous joy. Christmas is the first step to a journey that culminates in the cross.
I wonder how much those who celebrate Christmas really understand suffering. I wonder how much those who sing the words, “Thank you for the cross” really understand what it entails. Saying thank you for the cross is like saying thank you for the rape of a loved one. Celebrating Christmas so lavishly and thoughtlessly is like celebrating the first step that leads to that loved one's rape.
~
Only in light of the resurrection can we thank God for the cross. And even then it is a thank you that we whisper, that we speak with tears on our cheeks. It is not a thank you for forms of torture but rather a thank you for a love so deep that it was willing to be tortured, and by being tortured set us free.
That's why I think Easter Sunday is the truly celebratory moment of the Christian calendar. New creation bursts into the old. Life is brought out of death and hope out of hopelessness. Humanity is reconciled to God and God is shown to triumph over even the most brutal forms of forsakenness.
This Christmas season, while the world celebrates and feasts, I think Christians would do well to step back and remember a child held by a breathless mother in a barn in Bethlehem. Awed by the miracle of birth, his tiny fingers clutching her thumb. Christians would do well to remember how that same mother would come to see her son beaten beyond recognition and hung naked before a crowd that mocked him as he died. His weathered hands outstretched and pierced. Christians would do well to remember that while the world celebrates we are called to mourn, and while the world feasts we are called to fast. During Christmas we need to remember the God who identified so deeply with those who are oppressed and forsaken that he entered into their forsakenness with them. This Christmas season let us remember that we are called to do the same.
Dinner for Sixty
For the first time since moving out here I felt like I was home. Home in the way that usually only those who have been homeless can understand it. Yes, this is where I belong. I felt like I was with family. These are my people. These are my kids. I was glowing. Those who know me well would have recognised the look in my eyes, “Uh-oh… Dan’s in love.”
And I am. I love these kids. These gutter-punks, thugs, queers, loners, trannies, junkies, prostitutes, and crack-heads. I love ’em. They burst through the door decked out in chains and trench-coats, bandannas and diamond earrings. A flash of leather and teeth, steel and skin. Bruises, pock-marks, scars and unwashed hair. I think to myself, “how can so much beauty fit into this room? God, these kids are beautiful.”
So I wait on them, I bring food to their tables and clean their dirty dishes. I laugh at their jokes, not politely but like a lover – it doesn’t seem to matter how funny the joke is, it’s just a delight to be in the presence of your beloved and any excuse to laugh will do. It’s good to laugh with these kids. God knows they’ve spent enough time crying.
You know, when all is said and done, I think that love is all that I have to give. I used to read stories from the Bible about all sorts of miracles. I used to long see those things happen in my own life, you know, some dynamic in-breaking of God’s power to heal the sick, to restore the down-trodden. I’m not really looking for the miraculous anymore. I’m just looking to journey in love relationships with the down-trodden. I am content to only have my love to offer, as imperfect as it is.
The funny thing is that, in the end, it is through love that the truly miraculous occurs. It’s this strange paradox of surrendering to powerlessness and, in doing so, discovering the power that truly transforms the world. It’s a hard line to walk and an even harder line to describe to others. To embrace love as the only thing I have to offer is to recognise weakness. It highlights all sorts of limitations. Yet, at the same time, I am convinced that love will triumph over all else. It’s victory, but not in the way we are accustomed to thinking of it. It is the victory we discover in the character of the God who loves us deeply enough to come alongside of us. The God who embraces weakness and suffers with us… so that we will be set free.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
– Paul, 1 Corinthians 13.13
Conversations with my eyes closed and the candle burning Low
“You know it's got to be this personal relationship thing that you talk about because that's the only chance I have. I can't count on others, I just can't. The man who abused me was the holiest man I knew. I just can't bow my head, I can't cross my hands, I can't even listen to the kind of language. It triggers me. When I talk about God it's like something deep inside of my chest doesn't even want to say the word. It's like something tearing, weighing on me, I can barely talk about it. No, the only chance I have is what you're talking about.”
…
“Prayer, it's more about a conversation, more about just talking openly with somebody, it's not about formulas or right words. It's like talking to a person.”
“So when I yell at God and say, “Why the fuck did you let all this happen to me?” that's more of a real prayer?”
“Yes! Exactly, that's the most genuine kind of prayer.”
Old Friend
Oh we drink and we smoke and we fight and we fuck
And we bleed and we’ll die when we run out of luck.
– Anonymous
Part of the problem was that I was one of the one’s who actually fell for it. I actually believed punk rock was about unity. I actually believed that it was about standing together regardless of the way we looked. It was about honesty. It was about letting people know who you are. Nobody needed to hide the fact that they were fucked up. This is me, this is my heart on my sleeve. Punk rock was about coming together. It was about accepting one another as fucked up. It was about finding strength in weakness, getting through things together.
I don’t know when everything changed. Punk rockers “pimpin’ their rides” and Tim and Lars singing about “bitches and hos”. Maybe things were always the way they are now. Broken kids crying out, lashing out, searching for something to soothe the fire, to put the pieces back together. But the only community you discover is your own loneliness reflected in the faces around you.
She left home cuz daddy beat her
Out on the street they say they love her
So what if they hit her when they’re not sober
Their parents beat them too
Then when she went home daddy said he loved her
And when mom went out he started to kiss her
And when it was over part of her died
So she don’t go home no more
Run to the shelter the streets are your friend
Situation at home won’t ever end
Here are your brothers your sisters your lovers
We can empathise
She started turning tricks so her daddy wouldn’t touch her again
She started smoking crack to numb the pain
She likes the stupor induced by liquor
Her daddy wouldn’t recognise her
Run to the shelter the streets are your friend
Situation at home won’t ever end
Here are your brothers your sisters your lovers
We can empathise
She slit her wrists when she was twenty-one
And let her broken heart bleed out
Before I could bridge the distance between us the scalper had already busted the kid’s face up pretty good. His lips were split, his nose was gushing. I jumped between them. “Okay, enough. That’s enough,” pulling the kid away. Fifty punk rockers looked on without moving. Fuck you, this scene isn’t about unity.
~
I don’t know why I’m the only one who really made it out. We used to walk the streets all night together. Curling up on park benches in quiet suburbs watching the sun come up over the trees. Sleeping in industrial parks on the edge of town in tents that would always collapse. They problem wasn’t that they loved too little, the problem was that they loved too much. I’ve never seen somebody love their mother as deeply as Critch did. Even after she kicked him out when her boyfriend moved in… and then again with the next one, and the next one. JP loved his mom and she died. Years later he woke up in a hospital with bandages wrapped around his wrists and a daughter of his own. Curty – Curty could have been anything. Breaking walls, breaking doors, breaking faces, until he too was broken. I sit and share a beer with him and wonder how we drifted so far apart. I remember when I was jumped by six guys. They were serious, spitting in my hair and pulling out brass knuckles. Curty was the only friend that didn’t turn tail and run. He stuck by me – not because he thought we’d win but, fuck, he wasn’t going to let me go down alone. Now we barely have the words to say so we sip our drinks and cigarettes and silently wonder how we can miss each other so much when we get together.
Children's Letters to God II
I trace the scars on your hands that never fully healed. I push back your hair and memorise the lines on your brow. Lifting your shirt I see the tree with forty branches on your back and the mark on your side that others have felt before me.
I don’t understand how you still bear these.
What is the wisdom that carries the scars of the old upon the new?
Who is this god that loves so deeply as to be forever wounded?
When we are finally restored, when all things are made new, will you also find your hands are healed? Will you then walk without limping and finally be able to straighten your back? Yes, it must be so. You will be made new alongside of us. Your tears too will be dried.
Children's Letters to God
ruach
A sigh, soft, but I know it well.
Your arms flung over my shoulders, your body against my back.
That is to say
You enfold me with your breath.
Hovering.
~
These meetings, once so unexpected, have not lost any of their wonder now that I have come to know that you will always be here.
~
No, this does not grow old. Such words are formless here. Shadows without voice or substance. Here is the presence of the creative. Not simply the imaginative but that which brings something out of nothing.
kaine ktisis
Overwhelmings
It is love who mixed the mortar, it is love who stacked these stones, it is love who made the stage here, though it looks like we're alone.
In this scene set in shadows, like the night is here to stay, there is evil cast around us, but it's love that wrote the play.
– David Wilcox, Show the Way
David Ford, a theologian with the heart of a poet, says that our lives are shaped by our interaction with the overwhelming. I tend to think of things that overwhelm us as negative things. Ford does well to speak of “overwhelmings”, a multiplicity of things that overwhelm us – things both positive and negative. Thus, I can be overwhelmed by horror but also by peace, by ugliness but also by beauty.
So which overwhelming becomes the most formative? Which of these shapes our lives most dramatically? Ford argues that the solution is found in living in the midst of overwhelmings in a way that lets one of them be the overwhelming that shapes the others.
Here we face a crucial decision about the way in which we choose to perceive the world. Whether we choose to see the world as a brute (and brutal) fact or as made by love for love determines whether a negative or positive overwhelming becomes the one which shapes the others. There is no absolutely convincing argument one way or the other and so all of us engage in an act of faith when we make this decision.
Ultimately, Ford asserts being overwhelmed by God is the overwhelming that should shape all the others.
I love Ford's words, his insights and his gentle strength. I resonate with this. It is because I have been overwhelmed by God that I can move amongst so many other overwhelmings and remain hopeful. It is because I have discovered the tenderness and passion of God that I can continually love and be tender to the people I journey with without hardening or breaking.
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.
– Paul, 2 Corinthians 4.8ff
A Memory Stirred
To those who have only known deserts talk of an ocean is meaningless babble.
To those who have only known brokenness talk of wholeness is not compelling… it’s foreign.
To those who have only known sorrow, joy is simply three letters strung together.
To those who have only known death talk of life is laughable.
Only after one sees the content of speech can one understand the words.
I remember cresting the final dune. Both of us sore, our clothes stained by sweat and the sun. I remember the look on her face when she first glimpsed the horizon and realised the noise we were hearing was the tumbling of waves. There was salt on her lips and a light in her eyes as we dove into the water.
Holding the first deep breath.
Trusting God and Loving Others
Psyche bit her lip till the blood came and wept bitterly. I thought she felt more grief than the wailing Orual. But that Orual had only to suffer; Psyche had to keep on her way as well. She kept on; went on out of sight, journeying always further into death. That was the last of the pictures.
The Fox and I were alone again.
“Did we really do these things to her?” I asked.
“Yes. All here's true.”
“And we said we loved her.”
“And we did. She had no more dangerous enemies than us.”
– C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
The faith we claim to profess is illusory unless it is demonstrated in our relationships with others. Anyone who has stopped to consider the nature of faith has realised this.
However, I think there is one area in particular where the implications of this have been overlooked. Perhaps we have been too scared to consider such implications, but our refusal to do so has been devastating.
Here's the thing. Christians tend to profess a personal trust in God, they recognise that times of suffering may come but they feel called to love enemies, bless instead of curse, give the thief more than he imagined to steal, that sort of thing. Yet, when it comes to our loved ones, it seems like a completely different standard applies. You know, strike me and I'll turn the other cheek but if you touch my beloved I'll kill you… slowly. There's a double standard that exists. I trust my life to God but don't trust the one's I love to God. I can't help but wonder how much we've fooled ourselves into thinking we've trusted God with our own lives when we don't trust God with the lives of others.
Of course, we don't have to look too far to realise how harmful this way of thinking can be. That's how we end up with “just wars”. That's why Christians in America are impotent to prevent things like the war in Iraq… and in fact actually end up supporting that war.
Now, even as I come to recognise this I'm not too comfortable with the implications. I mean, I don't want the people I love to be hurt. I want to stop them from being hurt in whatever ways I can. It's like I've recognised that I carry a cross if I follow Jesus, but I do all I can to prevent the people I love from even realising what a cross is. However, as I learn to trust others to God it means I actually allow people I love to go into situations where they might be hurt. Sometimes it even means I allow people I love to continue in places where they have been hurt. I just come alongside of them and hurt with them instead of doing all I can to bail them out. It's no longer about taking the cross off their shoulders, it's about helping them carry it because new life is found on the other side. Only on the other side of crucifixion is there resurrection.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting anything close to turning a blind eye to abuses or encouraging people to return again and again to places where they are dehumanised. To do that is to repeat another mistake which, to our everlasting shame, has been made over and over again within the church. After all, in order to regain its prophetic voice the church must once again begin crying out on behalf of the oppressed and abandoned and journeying in genuine love relationship with them.
It's just that we must do so in a way that resolves this double-standard. We need to learn again what it means to trust God as we journey in love relationships with others.
Paper Writing
I plundered the library's commentaries. I found all ten of the biggest names in the field – Longenecker, Betz, Dunn, Bruce, Lightfoot, Hays, Chrysostom, Martyn, Matera, Cousars – added in a few others for the sake of historical perspective and walked to the counter with their books. Then I remembered the book limit in my undergrad. Something like eight books for each specific subject. So, I ask the guy at the desk,
“Hey, is there a limit on books I can get out on a single subject?”
“Yeah,” he responds smiling, “but don't worry, you can still take out forty more.”
Welcome to grad school.
I'm like a kid in a candy shop. Damn it, I'm going to hit that limit.