Dance it out

Today, on the corner in Chinatown where my ears are often assaulted by the paranoid ranting of one our more creative DC-area hate groups, there was a single person, armed with a laptop connected to an amplifier, blaring dance hall tunes.

Dancing with abandon.

Some people stopped, watched, laughed. Others passed by, head down.

I did some mix of the two, and smiled.

I don't know who you are. Keep dancing, please.

The first time I really understood Christmas

I post it every year, because it’s true:

The first time I really understood the Nativity was in Yanoun, in the northern West Bank. The shepherds we were with–Mohammad and Mohammad, not joking–showed us where they keep their sheep. It was a low, dark, cave. Noisy, crowded with animals, and smelling like–well–sheep shit. The mangers were rusty, with sheep pushing at each other to find space to eat. Not the sort of place you’d want to have a kid. I remember thinking: “If God can be born here, I guess God can be born anywhere.”

(To support the people of Yanoun, who are sorely pressed by military occupation and nearby settlements, check out the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program of the World Council of Churches, which maintains a nonviolent accompaniment and human rights observation presence in the village.)

Christmas: Flickering light

Well. Here it is. Not sure if it's what I expected but it's what happened. Merry Christmas. I hope that today you can take some time look for ways--often tentative, fragile ways--that God is being born in unexpected places in your life. 

We are waiting.
In refugee camps, crowded with stories, crowded with pain, we are waiting.
In checkpoint lines, in terminals, interminable, we are waiting.
By hospital bedsides, with loved ones encased in tubes, we are waiting.
At psych ward nurses' stations, shuffling, in line for red pills, blue pills, pink pills, we are waiting.
By corner liquor stores, hands outstretched, pleading, we are waiting.
On Metro grates and airplanes, soup kitchen lines and traffic lanes, waiting, waiting, waiting.
All our lives this world has taught us: avoid it at all costs.
And yet, here we are anyway, desperate for distraction, driven to frustration, to panic even. 
Waiting.
We wait, and in our waiting we gain some small sense of a waiting that echoes forever in the hallways of time.
We wait, and on those rare occasions when we sense others waiting, too, we--if we are in our right minds--weep.
We wait, and on those rare occasions when we sense others waiting, too, we--if we are in our right minds--dance for joy.
Do we dare to ask if God is here?
Do we dare to risk confusion? Disappointment? Amazement?
We are told of a light in the darkness.
And in this deepest night of our waiting, do we begin to perceive it?
We are so tired of waiting.
And we are looking, searching, on horizons and in hearts,
For this dawning, this flickering, fragile suggestion of the great light that is to come. 

Advent: Looking, searching

And we are looking, searching, on horizons and in hearts...

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Tired

We are so tired of waiting.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: deepest night

And in this deepest night of our waiting, do we begin to perceive it?

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Longest Night

I delivered this message at a Longest Night service at Wesley UMC last night. A Longest Night service is a service intended for those who have a difficult time around the holidays. Maybe they have  lost a loved one, making this time of gathering with family and friends particularly difficult. Or maybe they suffer from anxiety and depression. Or maybe the stress of the holidays in the U.S. is just too much. Maybe this will be helpful to you, too:

I don’t know why you’re here.

I don’t know if the loss of a loved one makes this time of year, this time of gathering with friends and family, particularly hard to bear. I don’t know if the horrific events in Connecticut last week are at the forefront of your mind. I don’t know if you’re one of the many people across this country who suffers from anxiety and depression around the holiday season. I don’t know if this time of shortened days and cold nights wears on your body and your soul. I don’t know if you are feeling, for whatever reason, that—in the words of the Psalmist—the waters have come up to your neck. That you are sinking in deep mire, where there is no foothold.

I do know this. I know that there is room, in the middle of the ‘tis the seasons and the bells and the tinsel and the ads blaring at you to “buy now before it’s too late.” Room for feelings of hurt and of loss. Room for you.

As Mary and Joseph approach Bethlehem, they do so cut off from their families. Scared. Confused. The Nativity itself, far from a picaresque scene for holiday cards, was a scene of desperate poverty. Their only shelter was likely a shallow cave. Mary’s baby was laid down in a dirty feeding trough. Before the angels and the shepherds, before the fireworks, there was only an isolated family huddled together, uncertain of the future, anxious, afraid.

The poverty of this family makes me think of a letter, written by the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung, to a young Christian woman. Jung wrote: “I admire Christians, because when you see someone who is hungry or thirsty, you see Jesus. When you welcome a stranger, someone who is ‘strange,’ you welcome Jesus. When you clothe someone who is naked, you clothe Jesus. What I do not understand, however, is that Christians never seem to recognize Jesus in their own poverty. You always want to do good to the poor outside you and at the same time you deny the poor person living inside you. Why can’t you see Jesus in your own poverty, in your own hunger and thirst? In all that is ‘strange’ inside you; in the violence and the anguish that are beyond your control! You are called to welcome all this, not to deny its existence, but to accept that it is there and to meet Jesus there.”

Each of us comes here tonight with our own poverties. And perhaps we have been taught to deny or repress those poverties, those hurting places in our lives. Particularly around this season of the year, we are meant to be cheerful, full of peace and goodwill. But our Savior was born in darkness and in poverty, and today we can still find God being born in the midst of our hurt and our mourning. Jesus, this child to be born, this God with us, is no stranger to the darkness.

The Psalmist prays: “My tears have been my food day and night,/While people say to me continually,/“Where is your God?” And perhaps you have been asking yourself this same question. Where is my God? The Christmas story tells us to look in places that we don’t expect. In caves. In dark places. As Jung writes, we look for Jesus “In all that is ‘strange’ inside us; in the violence and the anguish that are beyond our control.”

I hope that you are able to take time tonight to sit with whatever it is that brought you here. And to begin to ask a difficult question. Where is God in this? Where in this hurt, in this loss, in this fear, is Jesus being born?

God will not always be easy to see. The shepherds and the magi needed miraculous signs and direct messages from angels in order to see God. But God is at work in you, healing, easing alienation, suffering with you, standing alongside you.

This message—that God is with you, in the midst of what brings you here tonight—might not seem like enough. The birth of one child in a backwater occupied vassal state of the Roman Empire certainly did not seem like enough, either. But it is exactly here, and not on the Target sales floor, that we start to look for God being born to us. Because here, before the angels, before the shepherds, in the midst of the darkness and the fear, it is possible to find a quiet, fierce joy. The flickering hope of the great light to come.

You're talking about me

I was chillin' with my therapist/pastoral counselor the other evening, and we were talking about the Sandy Hook massacre, because really, what else do you talk about in therapy right now? I told my therapist that I felt choked up, like I didn't know what to say. He challenged me to think of what I might have to say given my particular situation.

The thing is, I've got some mixed feelings about the conversation happening right now in our country. After the shootings I saw a lot of posts on Facebook that said something to the effect of: "The conversation about guns is scapegoating [not true, I don't think] and the real conversation is about mental health."

I am all for a national conversation about mental health. We absolutely need more support for people in this country with mental illness.

But please do me a favor when you're having that conversation, and remember that you're talking about me.

I don't want to own a gun. And I'm sincerely grateful that Washington, DC has strict regulations on owning firearms. I am sincerely grateful that, at my lowest, I was not able to just walk into a shop and buy a gun here. I am pretty sure I wouldn't have hurt anyone else. But I very well might have hurt myself. 

I am one of the lucky ones in the country. As much debt as I'm in because of it, still, I was able to get treatment. And beyond that, I have a strong support network of friends and families and faith communities. So I'm really incredibly lucky. I was in the hospital with plenty of people who didn't have that kind of support and who were going to get booted from the hospital as soon as they were somewhat stabilized. They were going to be released into loneliness, maybe into homelessness, maybe into isolation.

So yes. We do need a national conversation about mental health in the country, and about the lack of support systems, and about the need for more and better treatment, and about the need to fight stigmatization and social isolation. But we need to have this conversation, not because people with mental illness are inherently more violent than anyone else--the common thread running through school shootings and other gun massacres in this country is not mental illness but white men with guns--but because there are too many people relegated to our streets and jails because there is nowhere else for you to go if you are mentally ill and don't have the money to pay for a private hospital. 

So please be part of the conversation about mental illness in this country. And please push for more support and better treatment. But please be careful that the conversation doesn't drift into one about profiling and stereotyping. 

Please remember that when you talk about mental illness, you're talking about millions of people.

Please remember that when you talk about mental illness, you're talking about me. 

Advent: We are told

We are told of a light in the darkness.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Risk

Do we dare to risk confusion? Disappointment? Amazement?

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Do we dare?

Do we dare to ask if God is here?

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Joy

We wait, and on those rare occasions when we sense others waiting, too, we--if we are in our right minds--dance for joy.

I don't have many words for what happened Friday. So weeping seemed an appropriate response. And dancing always seems an appropriately defiant response. 

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Weep

We wait, and on those rare occasions when we sense others waiting, too, we--if we are in our right minds--weep.

I couldn't think of what else to day in response to the elementary school shooting today.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Hallways of time

We wait, and in our waiting we gain some small sense of a waiting that echoes forever in the hallways of time.

Advent: Here we are anyway

And yet, here we are anyway, desperate for distraction, driven to frustration, to panic even. Waiting.

Shared from a friend in Palestine

A friend living in Palestine shared this with me:

We are singled out,
waiting,
and strip-searched twice,
waiting,
in order to watch, 
waiting,
while our stuff is spread across a table,
waiting, 
and the guards accuse us of lying to our face. 
We are lying to their face
and pretending to read Mark Twain for six hours.

Advent: Avoid

All our lives this world has taught us: avoid it at all costs.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here. 

Advent: Waiting, waiting, waiting

On Metro grates and airplanes, soup kitchen lines and traffic lanes, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Advent: Psych Wards and Corner Stores

I missed a day, so two lines today. What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

At psych ward nurses' stations, shuffling, in line for red pills, blue pills, pink pills, we are waiting.

By corner liquor stores, hands outstretched, pleading, we are waiting.

Advent: Hospitals

By hospital bedsides, with loved ones encased in tubes, we are waiting.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Pop Pop

So I'm doing this Advent thing with a one line post a day. But my grandfather died this morning and I want to write about him.

I never called him grandfather actually. I called him Pop Pop. Come to think of it I have no idea how that particular appellation got attached to him, but that was the name that I always called him.

He died in his sleep at the age of 103, after a full, fruitful life. So I'm sad, but I mainly want to celebrate his life here. There's a lot to celebrate.

My memory is always a scattered sort of place, so I can't really construct a narrative of my experiences with Pop Pop. My dad and my aunts and uncle have spent some time collecting Pop Pop's story. But my memories are of particular things. Things like the various contraptions that Pop Pop would design to try to keep squirrels off of the bird feeders, back at the house in University Park. Things like the marimba in the upstairs room, though I don't know if I remember him playing it--I found out just the other day that Pop Pop played piano, when he played some for us at his 103rd birthday party. Things like Pop Pop playing golf, up until his 101st birthday, and how I saw him sink a long putt on Father's Day in his late 90's.

I remember Pop Pop sunbathing, in various places over various years. I remember a ukulele, and whistling. Whistling is probably my earliest memory of Pop Pop. I remember the kite he was making in his retirement community room, as if he were going to fly away. I remember him beating me at shuffleboard.

Each year at the family reunion, we had a book that people could write in to keep a joint account of our time together as a family. Pop Pop's children would encourage him to write in the book, and when he did, he always wrote that he missed his wife, my grandmother, Ellen. We called her Grams.

On Pop Pop's 100th birthday, the family threw him a big party, with my cousin as DJ. Pop Pop convinced multiple people to get him food. And he danced with my mom and my aunts.

There are plenty more stories that my family can tell. Maybe some of them will be shared here. Awhile ago I wrote about the lawnmower that Pop Pop passed down. And my family can tell you all about how Pop Pop and Grams met. And about Pop Pop training pilots during WWII. There's lots to tell.

But I guess what I'll end with is a comment that my dad made just the other day, at Pop Pop's 103rd birthday party. "He really keeps a good attitude about it all, which is really saying something at this age," my dad said. I think my dad and I probably have a particular reason to notice good attitudes about the world. Ours are a bit marred, both by mental illness and by an inbuilt sarcasm. But Pop Pop, in the midst of all the aging aches and pains, saw the world as a good place. You could see it in the way he looked at his great grandchildren as they played around him. Or in the contented way that he took naps in the sun. In the way he danced, and just generally kept plugging away. His is quite a life to celebrate, and he knew it. May the same be said of all of us.

(Pop Pop dancing with my mom on his 100th)

(Pop Pop with two of my little cousins)

Advent: Checkpoints

In checkpoint lines, in terminals, interminable, we are waiting.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here. 

Advent -- Refugee camps

In refugee camps, crowded with stories, crowded with pain, we are waiting.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here. 

Advent: We are waiting

It's Advent.

Advent is a season of waiting and preparation in expectation of the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus the Messiah.

It stands in stark counter-cultural contrast to the busy rush of holiday season, the shrill cry of advertisements, and for students the intensity of finals time.

This Advent, I'll be posting here each day. I'll be composing a poem. One line at a time. One day at a time.

I'm hoping that this will be an exercise in waiting, in preparation, though of course it runs the risk of just being silly. I won't rush this writing. It will take its time, throughout the month. It begins, simply and obviously enough:

We are waiting.