the embodied prayers of trimming the tree...

Monday evening, after fifteen inches of snow had fallen with more coming down, we put on a Christmas CD from the library and unpacked our decorations. It is always one of my favorite times of the year. At some point in the past I quit using the correct liturgical colors for the Advent wreath candles, swapping them out instead for whatever tapers might still be intact at year's end. This year it is pale yellow and grey - a mix and match set from Lourdes and Pittsfield -  that create an oddly soothing combination suggesting the naked Aspens that grace the edge of the wetlands behind our house. 

As Chanticleer sang, "O How a Rose E're Blooming," we took out the trimming for our tree: some gems harken back to our childhood; others from shared or solitary trips to Europe, Canada, and Central America; and more than a few celebrate the lives of our children and grandchildren. Bedazzling our home at Advent has become an embodied prayer for me. I think that is true for many whether we name it as prayer or not. Each sacred spangle rekindles a story or memory. Every Advent/Christmas song conjures encounters with glory as well as times of aching emptiness. Like Linus in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," I am suddenly with a multitude of the heavenly host praising God with tears of joy. For a moment I feel lifted into that great cloud of witnesses who have gone before singing: "Gloria in excelsis Deo." At the same time, I am awakened to the relentless rolling stream of time that "bears all our loves away." Who could have imagined that putting ornaments on a tree - and sitting in a darkened room lit only by the faerie lights on its branches - could melt past, present, and future into a paradoxically holy night?

Afterwards, basking in the beauty and stillness, we spoke of the decorations that are most meaningful: a delicate, hand-painted Inuit bulb from Canada, a velvet shamrock and thistle from London, the glass icicles from Cleveland, the wooden triangle Christmas tree from El Salvador, the bear claw from Tucson. We made plans to slip away this weekend for a quiet Christmas gift shopping trip, too. I found my heart returning thanks to God for my friends at L'Arche Ottawa who were decorating their tree at roughly the same time as ourselves. "Why does it takes a tree in our front room to bring us together on the sofa at the end of the day for a bit of reflection?" Why indeed - I am simply glad it does.

My heart has been fragile this Advent. I am searching for new/old ways to watch and wait for the birth of the Christ Child. One that is simmering this season is found in Cynthia Bourgeault's fascinating and challenging book, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity. She clarifies what it means to "let it be" in the spirit of Jesus. Kenosis - or self-emptying - is at the heart of the spirituality of both Jesus and Magdalene. They show us how to live into the embrace of God's love by trust. 

Kenosis is not the same as renunciation. Renunciation implies a subtle pushing away; kenosis is simply the willingness to let things come and go without grabbing on. For all intents and purposes it is synonymous with non-clinging or non-attachment. But unlike a more Buddhist version of this spiritual motion, kenosis has a certain warm spaciousness to it; to the degree one does not assert one's own agenda, something else has the space to be. The letting go of kenosis is actually closer to letting it be than it is to any of the "non" equivalents... its flow is positive and fundamentally creative. Between the let it be of kenosis and the let it be by which biblical tradition envisions Creations itself as coming into existence, there is a profound resonance. (p. 104)

From his mother Mary's willingness to trust the holy beyond the obvious that brought Jesus to birth to his wandering in the wilderness for 40 days, baptism in the Jordan, fasting and feasting as well as his acceptance of the fear and hatred of the Cross: Jesus practiced letting it be. Bourgeault's  small but significant book, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, puts it like this:

So far I have talked about the gesture of surrender in terms of actual physical dying - and certainly that is the moment when the secret of one's life is most decisively released. But spiritual practice does not ordinarily start on one's deathbed. The real dying is much more an inner attitude, more of a "just let the fear come up and fall through it to the other side." This gesture can be learned in life as well - in fact, that's the shortest description of what spiritual practice is all about. And once it's been learned, our actual physical death is no longer the huge watershed it formerly appeared to be but is seen as merely a continuation of this same inner gesture we have already become intimately familiar with... The code word for this inner gestures is surrender - it means to "hand oneself over " or "entrust oneself." It is not about outer capitulation, but about inner opening. It is always voluntary and rather than an act of weakness, it is always an act of strength. (p. 72)

So much of my Christian tradition has ignored and avoided sharing this simple truth. Our liturgies and theologies teach that the Cross of the Lord is a unique act of suffering born of human sin. Rather than helping us grasp that the Cross was the closing act of a life-time of letting go freely embraced by Jesus on the human side of death, our official obsessions focus on fear and penitence. As the dawn of Advent began, I found myself pondering these words in my heart like Mary: 

The meaning of the Paschal Mystery lies in something far deeper than merely the resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus' real purpose in this sacrifice was to wager his own life against his core conviction that love is stronger than death, and that he laying down of self which is the essence of this love leads not to death, but to life. He was not about proving that a body lives forever, but rather that the spiritual identity forged through kenotic self-surrender survives the grave and can never be taken away. Thus, the real domain of the Paschal Mystery is not dying, but dying-to-self. It serves as the archetype for all our personal experiences of dying and rising to new life along the pathways of kenotic transformation, reminding us that it is not only possible but imperative to fall through fear into love because that is the only way we will ever truly know what it means to be alive. (Magdalene, p. 186)

The inner darkness that I have lately been experiencing - a listless sense of irrelevance and boredom - is ripening into an upside-down gift. It encourages me to choose the way of surrender and dying-to-self rather than staying lost in my regular distractions. Richard Rohr recently wrote: "Periods of seemingly fruitless darkness may in fact highlight all the ways we rob ourselves of wisdom by clinging to the light. Who grows by only looking on the bright side of things? It is only when we lose our certainties that will we be able to deconstruct our false images of God to discover the Absolute Reality beneath all our egoic fantasies and fears." My Advent discipline this year is to walk with Henri Nouwen who offers much the same insight:

When Jesus says, "Follow me," something different is happening. We enter into a a different way of following because it is a call away from "me" and toward God... It is not a way of searching for the self, but a way of emptying, of leaving the self to create space for a whole new way of being that is of God. Jesus' life was an increasing giving up of himself so that God could be totally at the center. This is what the crucifixion is all about. When Jesus says, "Follow me," he is saying: "Leave that place of the self. Leave mother, father, brother, sister, home, familiar possessions. Leave your "me" world - my mother, my brother, my sister, my possessions, my world - and follow me." Leave it so that God can enter into the center.

As you might expect, it takes practice to follow Jesus. So I am practicing dying-to-self and letting it be. Bourgeault's simple summary of how to practice this death before death, kenosis, is precisely the way to follow Jesus. Incarnationally
the gift of flesh is helping me draw closer to God in spirit and truth.

In any situation in life, confronted by an outer threat or opportunity, you can notice yourself responding inwardly in one of two ways. Either you will brace, harden, and resist; or you will soften, open, and yield. If you go with the former gesture, you will be catapulted immediately into your smaller self with its animal instincts and survival responses. If you stay with the later regardless of the out conditions, you will remain in alignment with your innermost being, and through it, diving being can reach you. Spiritual practice at its no-frills simplest is a moment-by-moment learning not to do anything in a state of internal brace. Bracing is never worth the cost. (Way of Wisdom, pp. 74-75)

I am so very grateful...