December 31, 2004

Name

Feast of the Holy Name

Perhaps more than any other season in the year, Christmas inundates us with its great repertoire of symbols, plowing and enriching our thoughts and feelings and visions with its universal time, its universal language of liturgy and music, its universal message of peace, good will, and joy. The same is true of all the other symbols we use to communicate with one another. It is no different with art and the dance, with poetry and prose, with all our myths and the language myth requires for its telling. But it seems especially true of Christmas.

No wonder, the Wonder of it all.

It is common religious practice often to think of such symbols as icons, as windows through which one may prayerfully discover and perhaps experience a greater depth and power. We speak of sacraments in that way, as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace…(and) as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.” (Book of Common Prayer, p 857) As well, it is not uncommon to make icons into idols, to admire — or to be offended by — only the window and to remain completely blind to the view, failing to discover any possible deeper meaning altogether.

On the First of January in the very middle of these twelve days of Christmas, the church keeps a day whose symbol, indeed, whose icon is for Christians perhaps second only to the cross.

We call it the Feast of the Holy Name. It recalls for us that this child of manger and miracle became through his flesh a son of the Old Covenant. And it recalls that through his naming as Jesus, he became a symbol and bearer of the New. Thus Jesus is a name above every name that, like the cross, anyone can use or misuse, but that is always rendered superficial until we can read through and beyond it, until we can read behind the symbols.

The power, place, and understanding of icons and especially the icon of Jesus himself has not been nor has it ceased to be the least source of great division in the Christian tradition. The study of this person and his work in our own time in the so-called “Jesus Seminars” creates likely some of the most controversial scholarship since the great credal councils themselves.

For in and through the historical Jesus, there is shaped the discovery of the Christ of faith and the possible reconciliation of all humankind. Through the icon of his holy name and his identity with it is revealed the profound irony of the Word made flesh, Christmas. But Christmas. like anything else that ever happens, including you and me, enters history through this peculiar event and its peculiar people with whom we share our lives. If it is not a miracle, then it is such an exception that it might as well be.

It has been said that God’s sense of humor is perhaps no more apparent than in his creating human being so that the universe will have something to talk through, so that God will have something to talk with, and so that the rest of us will have something to talk about. That irony of God, that reversal of events by surprising us with the most familiar, is perhaps never more apparent than in his choosing our human being for a window through which we can see not only ourselves, but beyond that to God’s very presence.

We are occasions, you and I, opportunities, if such were needed, for all sorts and conditions of things. Just look at the way the universe fits itself around us. For doors and doorknobs and dishes. For mattresses and motorbikes. For books and bathtubs. For poems and posies. For pulpits and pews. For each other. Forever.

We are made and named in the image of God, that is, as God imagines us to be… to love, to create, to reason, to live in harmony with all of creation and with God, to serve as God’s windows (BCP p 845). But, of course, the irony is not only that we are so imagined, but that we are set free simply to say Yes… or simply to say No. That we’re given this choice calls forth preeminent imagination and reminds us that we may be nearest God’s will for us when we are most imaginative. It should be no surprise, as well, that it is then that we are also most faithful.

In the name of Jesus, are we named. In the name of Jesus, do we pray. In the name of Jesus, are we made whole. What a remarkable way to begin a new year.

December 30, 2004

Susan

Susan Sontag died this week at seventy-one. She was one of those writers I aspired to read and could never quite grasp, falling away, but still in utter fascination with the brilliance of it all, drawn back again and again. Tolstoi and Proust and Cynthia Ozick also come to mind. My intentions are unbearable.

Her obituary in the Los Angeles Times recalled that she often counseled all who aspire to live fully the life of the mind to “Be serious, be passionate, wake up!” We churchers in these times might find no better advice.

December 29, 2004

Becket

You’ll probably never find anywhere among a mall and the night visitors shopping there a remembrance of Thomas á Becket. The irony that he shows up today in a calendar loaded with all the Twelve-Day heavy hitters, however, must not be lost.

Right or wrong, we remember Thomas á Becket as one of the great mediaeval figures in the English Church, not alone for championing the things of God over the things of Caesar. His pal Henry II did his best to persuade him otherwise, but Thomas knew better — even before his Jeffersonian namesake — that the separation of church and state was a workable and more salutary solution. He won out, but not until after Henry’s hit men made a martyr out of him.

This Christmas finds us and our mideast beneficence all in the name of democracy both creeping toward theocracies, instead. The word on the street over there is that if they pull off an election at all, they’ll probably get an ayatollah. The word on the street over here is that we’ve already got one. Even if we use slightly different titles, the claim is made and remains that we’ve got God’s chosen in the catbird seat.

If only the church would get its sex life straightened out and remember Thomas in some other, more efficacious way than a darkened nave with wilted poinsettias, perhaps then we could at least, even if reluctantly, make a case for what we’ve already got before we lose it altogether. On the other hand, the hit men are formidable up there in the Loop.

ps. Please remember to visit the Episcopal Relief & Development website at www.er-d.org and support its work with the tsunami victims.

December 28, 2004

Innocence

It has been said, and I am proud to join in the chorus, that one of the blunders religious people are fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.

If this season of incarnation means anything at all, it means that our vocation is not to be more spiritual but to be more human. I’m probably more with W C Fields about children than with Jesus, but when Jesus suggests that we consider children to equipped with the owners manual to the kingdom of God, we’d better listen.

Hardly anyone is more human — and in touch with their humanity — than children. Perhaps that’s what the “terrible twos” are all about for that’s when the kids begin to see adolescence looming ominously ahead and throw all those tantrums watching their humanity go.

We remember the Bethlehem preschoolers today and call them the Holy Innocents not because they were without guilt so much as because they were without the burden of it. Precisely as we set out to make them like us — it’s called parenthood — do they catch on quick that guilt’s a thing to be reckoned with the rest of their lives. All the shrinks in the world will not let us see the rid of it.

And so Jesus’ counsel together with this twelve-days-of-Christmas reminder that we become less childish and more childlike is but another way of saying wake up and don’t let the grace grow under your feet. Go ahead and walk on it. It’s probably the very path back to the kingdom.

December 27, 2004

Ambiguity

T S Eliot suggested that the real meaning of exploration is to get back to the starting point “and know the place for the first time.”

Such counsel seems altogether appropriate for Christmas. For even though we always know exactly how the Christmas story turns out, we really have never the foggiest notion about what pertains for the very next day of our lives. Most of us heave a sigh of relief when Christmas is “over,” when in fact, it’s never over at all, not if we truly explore life and stop just experimenting with it, then take Christmas as a starting point and risk knowing “the place for the first time.”

“The light shines in the darkness,” John wrote in the prologue of his great gospel, “and the darkness has not overcome it.” (Jn 1.5)

When he wrote this about Jesus, it’s safe to say he probably knew from nothing about the quantum principle. It is also safe to say that neither do I. Homiletic license, however, can lead one into all sorts of indeterminacy with the very best of them.

Light, say the astrophysicists, can be either particle or wave, but never both at the same time. It depends on the way you look at it, they say. So does Christmas. So does Jesus. It’s always a matter of holy ambiguity. One cannot stop Jesus and make him into a Christmas ornament and also know where he’s leading one at the same time.

We can bring the dark path of our experimentation with life, disappointed as we often are, and even lay it before the bedecked and garnished Christmas altar, free to look away from the light into another year of resolutions, planning, and expectation… and find more darkness.

Or we can embrace the ChristLight to lead us forth into this new year, exploring with love and faith and all those other great risks of grace. We can remember that Jesus told the questioning apostle Thomas that he, not some system of thought or doctrine, not some attempt to freeze and manipulate reality, not some Church or Network or Windsor Report, that he was none of those, but that he was “the way, the truth, and the life.” Christmas allows us and perhaps even inspires us that in returning, we might quite possibly come to “know the place — and perhaps even know our Lord — for the first time.” Maybe some of us will and then discover the ambiguity of the holy.

December 25, 2004

Step

“Let go, and let God” is one of those simplistic sayings to which
some cling so desperately as to fail to see the irony in possessing
it and not setting it free to follow its counsel. Five words that can
turn a life around. Five words that can relax the tension of this
ancient season into joy, and shift it out of dysfunction into come
what may.

It’s no bed of roses to have a family you’ve been avoiding all year
suddenly jammed in your face as if all had always been sweetness and
light. It’s no “comfort and joy” to have cousins with new six-figure
careers embracing those who’ve just lost a job or the newly marrieds
chatting over cranberries with the newly divorced.

The Third Step says about matters like these to make a decision to
turn one’s life and will over to the care of God, that is, in short,
to let go and let God. Come to think about it, that’s more or less
the reverse of what God already did when he let go and let us in the
Christmas manger and sort of keeps on offering ever since. It’s
called grace.

December 24, 2004

Names

On December 24, 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts, orbiting the moon, read passages from the Old Testament Book of Genesis during a Christmas Eve TV broadcast. Everybody seemed to be as warmed over as chestnuts, but I wonder if they could get away with that today, some three plus decades later?

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the Political Correctors would get around not just to the way, the how, and the where we celebrate Christmas — they’ve already done that some time ago — but to the very name by which we call the day and the season. It is apparently very important for them to get rid of Christ, for the name is obviously proving quite annoying.

Names have always been powerful. Moses found that out at the burning bush and Jacob at the wrestling matches. God is simply not forthcoming in the matter of names. Moses was told that God rather whimsically chooses to be whomever he pleases to be, and Jacob, not getting God’s name at all, got a new one for himself for the effort, instead.

Actually, December 25, was more than likely not Christmas at all, we just made it up that way to divert folk from another more pagan — at the time — celebration. Nobody really knows exactly when Jesus was born, and it’s he, not the date, as they say, who’s the “reason for the season.” And on top of all that, “Christ” wasn’t his name at all. It merely came to be a sort of ID. As the theologian Paul Tillich loved to remind us, the proper usage is to say, “Jesus, the Christ.” Jesus was his name. Christing, that is, being the Messiah, saving folk, was his business, what he was about.

Frankly, I hope we never find out Jesus’ actual birthday. For then — having probably done away with the name “Christmas” altogether and maybe put a lot of merchants out of business — we’d have to start all over with the calendars and the music and the white dreams and heaven knows what else.

Further, I haven’t heard anybody say anything about Santa Claus. Since his real name was Saint Nicholas (ring a bell?), he’d have to give that up, as well, as no saints by any name would be allowed anymore, and Santa’d have to gear his whole production system to quite another style, probably out sourcing it to India.

But then there’d be maybe the biggest bonus of all. We could stop calling ourselves Christians. That would surely be a welcome relief because nobody seems to agree on what being a Christian means anymore, anyway. Then we could really get that Old Time Religion and just call ourselves like they used to call themselves long ago — followers of The Way. Getting back on that track, we’d finally discover what it was all about in the first place, then celebrate our own birthdays by seeking and serving the Christ in us all.

PS. OoN’s going to wonder where it wanders these twelve days and reflect on each as it comes. Merry Christmas to all. — LD

December 23, 2004

Iceman

The iceman cameth last night, then beckoned a couple of inches of snow to cover himself. All this thwarting any pretense we might have about getting down our driveway and going anywhere today in the twenty degree (and falling) weather.

Deodar (reference previous OoNs) more or less welcomed him with drooping, if not open, arms. Among trees, she’d be a pretty slim sister, altogether appropriately designed to become a New York fashion model should the occasion arise.

I’m not sure what latent sexist virus might have made me presume the ice-bearer is masculine. Even though I am in good company with Eugene O’Neill, I checked a handy language book, anyhow, to find out that in Spanish, at least, ice is, indeed, masculine, but Iceland is feminine. Iceman wasn’t mentioned. There is, of course, the Ice Queen metaphor that sometimes gets into play, but I decided not to go there.

The English language seems to have survived reasonably well having discarded all that gender stuff, though I truly wish it hadn’t. Maybe if we’d somehow kept it, all those who get so lathered over about gender among us human beings and how we manage it, would have something else to think about. Anyhow, all this recalls for me rather fondly a somewhat dotty English teacher of mine who would frequently remind us that gender is for words and sex is for people.

December 22, 2004

Age

The chief justice of the California Supreme Court took it upon himself the other day to say that it may sound a bit whimsical, but it’s literally true that the leading cause of death on death row is old age He ought to know. But it seems to me that, whether it causes it or not, old age sooner or later inevitably leads one to death.

Take my ninety-seven year-old double second cousin Zenobia Ruth. (We got that relationship, by the by, by no fault or credit of our own, but only because her father was my grandfather’s brother, and her mother was my grandmother’s sister. That’s the way they reckon it down in Mississippi.) The leading cause of her recent death could surely be considered to be old age, but so far as I know, she was never on death row (or even skid row, for that matter). She might have been on her college sculling team, but that surely would only have prolonged her life, that kind of exercise and all.

It’s possible the justice was trying to make the case that the strain and stress of spending one’s remaining years on death row was punishment enough and maybe might be a better and more civil way out than injection or electricity. Just a thought, but as usual, I’ve not the foggiest idea what he had in mind.

December 21, 2004

Thomas

Interesting that today Thomas is the only one among the been-there, done-that saints who makes the Advent cycle. With this blue season’s messages of hope as thick and rich as plum pudding, it’s refreshing to insert the Sultan of Doubt for a day of reflection just in time.

To his credit, Thomas was the only one with enough chutzpah to break out of that upper room and go look for a new job, the place crawling with all those nervous, trigger-happy Romans. All the rest, save Judas who’d got his reward another way, seemed to be cowering behind the razzle-dazzle future of it all.

I suppose there’s not much risk in a hope sealed tight against fear and uncertainty. But then, there’s little opportunity for grace to leak in, as well.