Advent

(Hey all: I've started an Advent writing project with Tai Amri and Corbin. This is my first post. My boys will respond on a webzine called Patheos. I will post the link later and if you find interest in this material, check us out.)

Advent, the season that includes both religious holiday and secular consumeristic spin-outs, is a time of preparation. For Christians in particular, this is a time to halt, a time of pause, a period of waiting. But we do not wait for waiting's sake. We await the event of incarnation, a birthing of divinity and humanity in the world. We move collectively during this time of preparation, as a people, toward the promise of Christmas. Like any other liturgical season, Advent takes form in our lives through practice. We practice Advent. And again, like any other liturgical season, the practices of Advent take on drastically different forms given the Christian sect/denomination/community wherein they are being ritualized. For instance, while some Christians will pray, light candles and open miniature calendar doors each evening during Advent, other Christians will spend the bulk of Advent shopping for gifts, preparing meals and attending bi-weekly church services. It's all about context.


The diversity of Advent practice is made more complicated by the undeniably far-reaching reign of commercial industries capitalizing on this time in order to make a profit. We hear Jingle Bells set to Best Buy's advertisements, see GAP models adorning cute little santa hats in order to sell ordinary blue jeans, and find Christmas Blend coffee stocked heavily on the shelves at any local Starbucks. With equal force, those finding the man of Nazareth missing from this holiday extravaganza, step in the streets with their "No Christmas without Christ" signs or "Jesus is the reason for the season" buttons. All of these things—pious prayer, corporate cash-ins and religious resistance to consumerism--are about the practice of Advent. There’s a spectrum here and quite honestly during my 28 years of Christianity I’ve probably gone to the extreme on both sides. Today, after seminary training and years of work in the field of ministry, I find myself somewhere between unconscious consumerism and self-righteous blasting of all-things-Capitalist. I find myself practicing the “middle way.”

There's meaning to be found in buying just the right gift for just the right someone, even if you find that gift at Best Buy. There's value to be found in lining up and resisting the forces of classism, homeless and hunger in our city streets--and doing that resisting in the name of Christ precisely because Jesus came into this world through a homeless, unwed, pregnant, teen-age girl. Reverence for life and reverence for the liberation made known in Jesus can increase with every candle lighting, every sung version of "Oh Holy Night." However, there’s the danger of “going through the (Advent) motions” just to get through the holidays. This is the danger of meaningless habituation that accompanies any ritualistic activity. We can pick gifts off the shelf without thinking much about the person receiving them or where those gifts were made and under what conditions. We can prepare a Christmas meal for our extended friends and family because we’re supposed to, not because we actually want to. We can go about the obligatory, business as usual practices "we've done every year," or we can go about the work of checking our intentions. Perhaps the most faithful discipline we can engage as we approach the season of Advent in 2009 is the practice of Advent intentionality.

As a progressive Protestant I’ve seen the shortfalls of “thinking” about religion—my people are notorious for thinking themselves right out of holy living--and so I am not advocating a more heady way of approaching Advent. Instead I’d like us to consider that we’ve always practiced Advent and there’s something to be discovered in revisiting those practices with the lessons of faith we’ve learned in the last year. Certainly this will lead us to change some practices and to hold onto others with greater appreciation.

Seeing the Doc. Seeing the MRI. Seeing the future

To put words

when he sheepishly avoided my mother's question about long term prognosis

To put words

to the color chaos--where white should have totalized, no, greyish black moss

To put words

where potrusions illustrate this screaming, aching, knifing, killing, pain that's been and been and been

I cannot.

The River

"It's grief. They want you to have some normal response to grief, you know, so they don't have to watch. But it's mine."
--Henry Carter portrayed by Kevin Spacey in the movie Shrink.

Three days ago…

While walking next to my girl Maritza through the streets of the Mission District in San Francisco on Dia de los Muertos, I realized something profound was happening. Painted skeleton faces. Candle luminaries all around. Packed crowds full of mourning, carnivalesque pilgrims communing with their dead. Skull and bones etched upon elaborate altars made from scratch. They call the march a "processional." Here the boundaries of life/death, religion/secular, sadness/celebration, here they go blurry. Here the isolation of grief meets its eclipse. I turned to her and said "Pretty prophetic for a culture that doesn't want anything to do with grief."

We don't grieve because we refuse to face the unnecessary damage we accumulate through unnecessary war, unnecessary violence (read: racism, sexism, neo/colonialism, heterosexism), unnecessary consumption/production practices, unnecessary distancing, unnecessary silencing. Our refusal multiplies the contents of grief. So we accumulate and accumulate and accumulate and the buried dead, the relational deaths, the sorrows of significant and untended loss—they whisper, call out, scream and haunt. They haunt, hoping we will wade in the water, hoping we take seriously the things we have loved, hoping we will not turn away.

Maritza nodded. She knows a lot about death and dying and grief--and about the murderous silence often accompanying them. She works for/in the Latino/a community, in the field of AIDS prevention and outreach. She lost her brother. She knows. She uses the language of "crossing-over" and while that language is foreign to me, it communicates so honestly the trespass, the back-flipping liminal space that momentarily exists when what's lost comes alive again in memory. This is the real stuff of resurrection. Christians should make this street their classroom and put down their pathetic theories of heaven. She bends down and gazes into the altar constructed for Cesar Chavez. She takes pictures and lingers. His work is her work. And I witness her witness, his resurrection inside her wide-open heart. And this: my gaze upon her adoration, this is the work of mourning together, the hard, sometimes almost impossible work of staring at and seeing loss without trying to strangle it, or put a wall up in front of it, or shooting someone because you refuse to feel it. This is the radical and creative motion necessary for the ash to penetrate the earth while giving permission to its surrounding soil: yes, let something new bud here.

If we create space for each other, if we allow our companions the dignity of grief, without attempts to control or fix or minimize, we might possibly end the ceaseless marches to war. We might instead, begin floating in a river that changes its pace, follows no predetermined direction and therefore promises no security, and sometimes gets colder than we can tolerate. But the river, the river will deliver us.

Welcome to the World Little Ones

For Isabella, Gabriel & Alex, Clementine, Elanora (and some still on the way...)

My friends are having babies. Many many babies.
And what is there to do but become enamored with
the possibilities born of our world
when wonder and grace filled people
make the radical decision to multiply?

It's radical. It is because our world quickly crashes
any naive eschatology promising safety,
painlessness or gauranteed success
for any child. Any child.

Here they are anyway, their mere existence a testament of hope
reaching from the guts of sperm donors, mommy bears
and delivery dancing dads.

My soul stands up, claps, and refuses to sit down
even when the ovation has grown long and others have begun to subtly
gesture their tired and time-bound allegiance.
Keep standing, I say! This is the stuff of true celebration, of worship.

And if we are not indoctrinated into new types of responsibility
by the mere announcement of pregnancy,
then shame upon shame,
for these are the holy whispers of futures untouched,
members of a new order,
a new order that altars our world and
asks of us new symbols, gestures and language, asking:
what do you, dear pilgrim, bring to this table?

They have come from bellies over-swollen and
ribcages close to collapse, from mothering giants overwhelmed with discomfort.
They have come impossibly, through pain and tearing and sleepless nights
to awaken the dead and sluggish from their slumber,
to announce the myriad of miracles in flight,
still searching for open hearts to occupy.

Welcome. Welcome.

Grief

This is long overdue. Thank you for waiting. The classroom you extend requires the utmost of presence.
The reading, writing, and interpretation listed on the syllabus are not optional.
There is no graduation, just continuation.

See then why it took me so long to take my seat.
Oh that I had learned your lessons earlier
and avoided the ice castle constructs blocking me from genuine freedom.
I did not know your liberty because I was too afraid to surrender.
Forgive me.

You promised to set us apart, to help us stand up, to redeem our unbelief.
But I did not hear, too consumed with fix-it faucets slowly leaking the lies
of cheap repair, too consumed with the mythical protection of hard-heartedness.

Worn thin, out of ideas, I could no longer deny your power or invitation.
There came a moment when “do or die” went from slogan to maxim,
from sure I guess to unequivocal yes. I broke. You seduced. I came.You delivered.

I should have known.

When I was wrecked with nothing left you unraveled
with my slightest consent and made new the deadliest spot within.
I was surprised. Some days I forget only to return again on my knees.
You are generous.

I should have known tears would be the solution,
wordless exhaustion and admittance of despair my redemptive hope.

I have not received a grade, rather a summons
to participate in the most revolutionary of movements,
one that re-members me over and over again
in the faces of suffering, in the dust surrounding bodies torn apart
from rape, war, and neglect.
Sustained in this world without end.
Amen.

Monja Blanca by Clive James

Ejoye's note: I read this in the New Yorker a while back. The last two stanzas read like apophatic theology and I have given "bold" to my favorite lines. Herald the dope. Peace and power my people.



The wild White Nun, rarest and loveliest

Of all her kind, takes form in the green shade

Deep in the forest. Streams of filtered light

Are tapped, distilled, and lavishly expressed

As petals. Her sweet hunger is displayed

By the labellum, set for bees in flight

To land on. In her well, the viscin gleams:

Mesmeric nectar, sticky stuff of dreams.



This orchid’s sexual commerce is confined

To flowers of her own class, and nothing less.

And yet for humans she sends so sublime

A sensual signal that it melts the mind.

The hunters brave a poisoned wilderness

To capture just a few blooms at a time,

And even they, least sensitive of men,

Will stand to look, and sigh, and look again,



Dying of love for what does not love them.

Transported to the world, her wiles inspire

The same frustration in rich connoisseurs

Who pay the price for nourishing the stem

To keep the bloom fresh, as if their desire

To live forever lived again through hers:

But in a day she fades, though every fold

Be duplicated in fine shades of gold.



Only where she was born, and only for

One creature, will she give up everything

Simply because she is adored; and he

Must sacrifice himself. The Minotaur,

Ugly, exhausted, has no gifts to bring

Except his grief. She opens utterly

To show how she can match his tears of pain.

He drinks her in, and she him, like the rain.



He sees her, then, at her most beautiful,

And he would say so, could she give him speech:

But he must end his life there, near his prize,

Having been chosen, half man and half bull,

To find the heaven that we never reach

Though seeking it forever. Nothing buys

Or keeps a revelation that was meant

For eyes not ours and once seen is soon spent:



For all our sakes she should be left alone,

Guarded by legends of how men went mad

Merely from tasting her, of monsters who

Died from her kiss. May this forbidden zone


Be drawn for all time. If she ever had


A hope to live, it lies in what we do


To curb the longing she arouses. Let


Her be. We are not ready for her yet,






Because we have a mind to make her ours,


And she belongs to nobody’s idea


Of the sublime but hers. But that we know,

Or would, if it were not among her powers

Always across the miles to bring us near

To where she thrives on shadows. By her glow

We measure darkness; by her splendor, all

That is to come, or gone beyond recall.

Love: Something Else & Mechanism

Forgive the streamy-ness of consciousness here.

Everyone says the word
but it becomes more and more apparent
that we're talking about something else
when we utter it in phrases mocked
by its over-usage elsewhere.
Talk about needed translators. This is serious.
You can bet at least 30 million people let it
go from their lips this second. At least.
Right now
someone is confessing it instead of joy
another it instead of silence
another it instead of lust
and sadly another it instead of sheer wonder.

I had a professor once who said
the problem with the English language,
and hence the whole population of persons who
organize their lives with the English language,
is that we only have one word for it,
therefore we cannot distinguish
appreciation from gut-wrenching connection,
nor biological impulse from that which is breath-taking to behold.
I’m taking this further.
When talking about its presence in relational configurations,
some are describing ownership contracts,
others conflating home, culture and comfort with power and privilege,
still others speaking to an arbitrarily constructed equation based
on the necessity of gendered halfs.

For instance, Anna and I went to this poetry workshop facilitated by
Christina about 3 years ago where we did language games of word association in order to promote the splaying forth of poetry. When Christina called out “love” I wrote down the name of my mate of the time. Anna wrote “tomatoes.”
Let me tell you: Anna’s answer stood alone
in honesty/meaning/attachment-clarity and creativity,
but I thought she was so very silly at the time.

Talk about a language problem. This is serious.
Talk about stunted relational maturity. This is so fucking serious.

So here are my people
limited in speaking what's given
limited in our capacities to build below and beyond this narrow concept
which actually might be, in its multiplicitous variations,
the most vital concept on Earth, at least near that of G-d,
while also attempting to out-source democracy. Mercy.

And so I think we're talking about something else
when we talk about love of country. Is it duty? I suspect that
after listening to the stories of soldiers and impulses
of aspiring politicians.
What is more, when we talk about loving neighbor, we are talking
specifically about responsibility. I've learned that after paying
attention to the texts that get quoted when people are asking
for charity or compassionate attention. We don't love someone
who is hungry on the street, but we love something enough
to practice responsibility in the moment we bend down to give
the leftovers in our hands. I think we love the utopian promise born
of responsibility, or the distraction acts of charity provide in
the face of debilitating suffering, or perhaps we love the people who tricked us into believing that caring for an innocent stranger
actually matters. How about those conversations about loving to witness the flourishing of all people? Perhaps you mean justice.
At least, I mean justice when I'm talking about love,
at least half the time. The other half I'm busy conflating it
with this incredible mystery I cannot describe but
keep aiming for with my poetry, theology, dancing and sex life.

Perhaps we all keep aiming for this incredible mystery
with our worn out, shallow language and
in spite of our knowledge that the aim and language will never
deliver us or set us free or give us security
there's some mechanism that won't allow us to quit trying.

What is that mechanism?

There's this YouTube Derrida video, yes I posted
it here before, that I remember now. The person behind
the camera asks the philosopher to speak on "love."
He says,"I have nothing to say about love in general,"
demanding that she pose a question.

That is the mechanism.

And the Award for Most Spacious Goes to...

I would like to write a poem
entitled "The Space in James."
When my readers were done
with the last line they'd know
I was describing G-d.

New Link to (and for) the Left

To all of you interested in peace and pastoral care, check it check it.

http://globalministries.org/mee/from-war-to-peace/the-war-and-pastoral-care.html#

Power to the peaceful,

Ejoye

My (creative) response to a ranting and raving (liberal) lunatic