Greetings from the Dark
Today is the start of the cold moon. Also, the solstice is coming, halfway out of the dark. But for today we are still very much in the middle of the cold and the dark. Buried under ground like a bulb. No sign yet of the warmth and light that will bring our new life. So much of advent is having hope in the coming of something we really have no evidence for. It's continuing to tell our stories and believing they are true even when we doubt, even when our comrades have given up. Lately I've been telling myself stories of a five years from now version of me that loves herself, that believes in her work, that goes new places, and tries new things, that isn't so afraid.
All of these stories, stories in the Bible, stories planted in our hearts, stories from thousands of beautiful traditions the world over, are about creatorly creatures working for beauty and wholeness, and expressing the unique individual they were created to be. I have found such stories in the text of the Bible and also in other traditions, and in the lives of people who have rejected tradition altogether. Sometimes these stories have divided us and pushed us apart, but it is also stories that bring us back together. We try to use our stories to differentiate us from one another, but stories are mostly made up of the same ingredients, so we keep finding that their story tastes a lot like ours. That's because, just as Paul told the Romans, God has been making themselves visible throughout creation from the beginning. The important thigns about who God is that they want us all to discover and learn and know like our own selves, have been woven into the fabric of creation all along, so that we couldn't miss them.
Ever since David we have been trying to build God a house of wood, but God can't reside in one dwelling and just stay there, God is everywhere in all of us, in the bits and pieces of image that we are made of. Just like when the people asked for a king, and God told them that kings aren't what they wanted, they kept asking and he gave them one anyway, only to discover all the ways that having a ruler thwarted the natural order of their life. God did the same thing with a temple. God went ahead and gave Solomon a design for the temple, all these layers to protect the presence of God, it is a box for containing the vision we have of who God is, but the box was also designed to fail. It was a box to show how a box can't work. A container to demonstrate the impossibility of containing God. This temple had rings, an outer ring for non-jews, called gentiles, a ring for women, a ring for jewish men, a ring for priests and sacrifices, and a ring that only the highest priests, the most consecrated, on the holiest of days could enter and carry out precise and exact rituals. They wore a rope around their ankle, so that if they screwed up and got struck dead their colleagues could drag them out. But when God, in the form of Jesus, gave themselves away for our healing, the curtain dividing this Holy of Holies, as it was called, the place where the true presence of God was said to live; this curtain was torn, top to bottom. And this wasn't your discount sheers from the department store. This was a tapestry curtain 60 feet tall, ripped in two. They say it sounded like thunder. And God was set free, from the box that had tried to contain them for centuries.
Remarkably there was already a new ritual prepared for the presence of this newly free God. Jesus had broken bread with his followers before his arrest and crucifixion. He broke the bread that he told them represented his body, poured out the wine that was his blood, gave thanks for this broken body, this spilled blood, and told them all to consume it. God just goes around willy nilly making the most ordinary of things into holy, sacred things, filled with their presence. Listen, there's not a magic spell that we cast on the bread and the wine, or the welch's grape juice from the convenience store. The act of taking these elements into our bodies is holy and filled with the presence of God because we say it is. We are co creators with The Creator. It was designed that way from the beginning when the plurality of God said, “let us make them in our image.” They grabbed a fist full of oozy mud and molded it into the form of a human, took a deep breath and filled the lungs with spirit, ruach, breath, wind. We humans, each and every one of us is animated by the divine presence. How could we ever have put that in a box? It was an illusion, to meet our delusions, a measure to give us some sense of comfort and control, but God was always breaking out, always filling the whole earth with glory.
Right now under ground, in the dark, in the cold, are seeds and bulbs and cocoons. They can't see or feel the sun, If we dug them up we would find no hope, no signs of the potential for life in them. They're on a calendar that we can only estimate and guess at, but we know because the stories we've been told, and the stories we've experienced and formed in our own minds, that in just a little more time they will break open and spill life out all over this earth again. That's a story we'll get to when we get to it. It's not the season for that story. The story for today is that the time in the dark and the cold is not a wasted season. There is a purpose for the darkness and for the cold. There is a purpose for the waiting. Emily Dickinson said, “The Truth must dazzle gradually, Or every man be blind.” So we're waiting for the advent, the appearing. We try so hard with the business of this season to distract ourselves from that stillness, that patient waiting, that wound tight nugget in our core. Try to make some time this month to sit in it instead.