Voting with the right wing or cheering for the left wing is our attempt to create a kingdom outside ourselves, but the kingdom we ultimately discover is "not of this world." It is not a perfect government, nor is it the kingdom of God, only a pie in the sky which we get in a better day than this one. It is a process in which each of us participates. It lies in our individual, inward relatedness to God. The kingdom God has prepared for us becomes ours as we participate personally, with growing consciousness, in its ultimate unfolding and fulfillment. In knowing ourselves, in living out creatively our unique way, and in loving relationships with our fellows, the process takes place, and we inherit the kingdom. (To Dance with God, p. 231)
Beauty, paradox, and the challenge of relinquishing control shape my take on the feast of Christ the King Sunday, all of which have been obscured in my tradition for too long by our sentimental attachment to the dominant culture's take on our secular Thanksgiving. Two more wise women have helped me move beyond the mythology and ideology of this holiday. Carrie Newcomer links God's revelation in nature at this time of year with a sacred invitation to make harvesting flesh:
I’ve always have connected the holiday of Thanksgiving to the concept of harvest. In September and October people are still stopping their cars at road side stands for the last tomatoes, red peppers, waxy light green cabbage, round womanly squash, sweet potatoes, sweet apples and cider. Although the unbridled abundance of July has slowed, the last crops are still completing their natural cycle. But by the end of November the harvest is now fully in and next year’s garlic planted. The fields, so recently lush with tasseled corn, are now dry stalks and stubble. The last golden remnants of warm air is now carrying the first early hints of the coming winter. Harvest is a time of cutting down and bringing in, preparing for leaner times and longer nights. And yet, I can’t think of harvest as a time comprised solely of dying. Yes, Harvest is the completion of a cycle of planting, growing and reaping, but it is also a time of taking stock and acknowledging the fruits of our labor. Harvest is a time to consider what has grown from the seeds we planted in hope and tended with our most sincere trying. Harvest is also about grace and gratitude for what we did not do—for the sunshine and rain, for natural processes, butterflies and bees, for all the things we did not create but only received as a gift.
Harvest is also about considering who the fruits of our work might feed. For I am surely the recipient of the work of those who came before me, the ancestors who did not meet me in person, but dreamt of me when they planted seeds that would take more than one life time to bear fruit. I am the receiver of all they envisioned and I am the keeper of a promise I carry forward. I am planting seeds for those I’ll never meet. I am sending songs into the air to fly where they will, landing like birds or apples in the grass. I am not done by a long shot with all my growing, but at the end of autumn I am considering who the harvest of my life might feed. This is one of the beauties of autumn, a reminder that the work of our lives is not measured in how much we did—but how deeply we loved, how hopefully we planted and how faithfully we tended our gardens the time we are given.
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This is one of the rare times in the year when Christianity’s two major feasts — Easter and Christmas, Cross and Incarnation — come into close connection. The one condemned before crowds in Jerusalem is the same one born in a forgotten, backwater town. The one hailed by angels, shepherds, and philosophers from afar is the same one eventually betrayed, abandoned, and left to die in shame. “Silent Night” and “What Wondrous Love is This?” overlap and interweave, together creating another kind of song entirely. And this juxtaposition, this creative tension, is precisely the point. To paraphrase the great womanist theologian Delores Williams, the “kingship” of Christ can only be understood through dissonance and harmony: “King of Kings!” on the one hand, as if sung by a resplendent choir; and “poor little Mary’s boy” on the other, as if whispered by an elderly woman standing alone. Or, “Reign of Christ” on the one hand; and God’s child, exquisitely vulnerable, on the other. These two songs, Williams contends, sung back and forth in call and response, is “the Black church doing theology.” Each song needs the other for the truth to shine through.
And Kaitlin Curtice, a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, amplifies this in the ways she encourages us to move beyond the algorithms of empire by returning: "to the dust, aki, earth, our wild selves, our relationship with Segmekwe refreshed and refined."
"Be wild; this is how to clear the river. In its original form, the river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. IT is made up of divine paradox. It is an entirely interior process."(Clarissa Pinkola Etsés) Want to escape the technological grip on your life? Get to the woods, to the river, to a quiet spot of the house where you can stare at the leaves falling from trees or birds flying by.
"Be wild; this is how to clear the river. In its original form, the river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. IT is made up of divine paradox. It is an entirely interior process."(Clarissa Pinkola Etsés) Want to escape the technological grip on your life? Get to the woods, to the river, to a quiet spot of the house where you can stare at the leaves falling from trees or birds flying by.
So, while dominant culture squeezes us into the mold of conformity by paying homage to the idols of Black Friday; empire ignores our legacy of genocide by confusing overeating and falling asleep in front of our TV sets with gratitude; and popular religion hides the subversive elements of Christ the King Sunday: the heart of the feast day insists that:
This is one of the rare times in the year when Christianity’s two major feasts — Easter and Christmas, Cross and Incarnation — come into close connection. The one condemned before crowds in Jerusalem is the same one born in a forgotten, backwater town. The one hailed by angels, shepherds, and philosophers from afar is the same one eventually betrayed, abandoned, and left to die in shame. “Silent Night” and “What Wondrous Love is This?” overlap and interweave, together creating another kind of song entirely. And this juxtaposition, this creative tension, is precisely the point. To paraphrase the great womanist theologian Delores Williams, the “kingship” of Christ can only be understood through dissonance and harmony: “King of Kings!” on the one hand, as if sung by a resplendent choir; and “poor little Mary’s boy” on the other, as if whispered by an elderly woman standing alone. Or, “Reign of Christ” on the one hand; and God’s child, exquisitely vulnerable, on the other. These two songs, Williams contends, sung back and forth in call and response, is “the Black church doing theology.” Each song needs the other for the truth to shine through.
Every year, to honor THIS Christ the King as well as the discipline of Advent, we leave these barely United States of America for French-speaking Quebec to sit in the woods. To be still and know. To let go of all the superficialities of our native land so that we might discern not only what is real but what the Spirit may be asking of us as the new year of Advent ripens. Kaitline Curtice gets it right for me when she asks that this year:
In the United States, it’s Thanksgiving Week, and, hardly anyone would know it, but the day after Thanksgiving is Native American Heritage Day.
And I feel a lot like the way it feels with a lot of things, how the build up to something is so big, so epic, so monumental—get Thanksgiving right or get out of the way. But I want something different this year. In the same way that I don’t necessarily endorse New Year’s resolutions in the sense that they are supposed to last all year—we need seasonal resolutions and goals—I wouldn’t endorse Thanksgiving to be the destination for us.
This year, I want Thanksgiving to be a beginning, not a destination.In other words, I want us to show up tenderly to this moment, whether it’s in our personal lives or in our collective ones. I want us to think of Thanksgiving as a marker on our journey, or the beginning of something, not the final destination. I think we put too much pressure on ourselves—to change, to say the right thing, to deal with people in the ways we think we should, to read the right books, to post the right things to social media. This is where the tenderness of words, of poetry, of the prophets of our time speak to us.
Slow down. Let the words come as they come. Don’t rush this process. You will be ready for everything when you’re ready.This week, we begin. We decide where we want to start from—the truth about Thanksgiving, holding nuance and complexity, honoring the sacredness of Mother Earth, or all of the above. We begin here, knowing that the journey is lifelong, that it isn’t just this holiday season, but the coming cold winter months that will guide us home to ourselves, the sacred Earth always tending to our wounds with us. That is where we begin, and that is how we hold space for a destination beyond and above us. We have arrived, but we are still arriving.
And I feel a lot like the way it feels with a lot of things, how the build up to something is so big, so epic, so monumental—get Thanksgiving right or get out of the way. But I want something different this year. In the same way that I don’t necessarily endorse New Year’s resolutions in the sense that they are supposed to last all year—we need seasonal resolutions and goals—I wouldn’t endorse Thanksgiving to be the destination for us.
This year, I want Thanksgiving to be a beginning, not a destination.In other words, I want us to show up tenderly to this moment, whether it’s in our personal lives or in our collective ones. I want us to think of Thanksgiving as a marker on our journey, or the beginning of something, not the final destination. I think we put too much pressure on ourselves—to change, to say the right thing, to deal with people in the ways we think we should, to read the right books, to post the right things to social media. This is where the tenderness of words, of poetry, of the prophets of our time speak to us.
Slow down. Let the words come as they come. Don’t rush this process. You will be ready for everything when you’re ready.This week, we begin. We decide where we want to start from—the truth about Thanksgiving, holding nuance and complexity, honoring the sacredness of Mother Earth, or all of the above. We begin here, knowing that the journey is lifelong, that it isn’t just this holiday season, but the coming cold winter months that will guide us home to ourselves, the sacred Earth always tending to our wounds with us. That is where we begin, and that is how we hold space for a destination beyond and above us. We have arrived, but we are still arriving.
Lord, may it be so for those open to a new/old way of being...
credits:
1) karl barth for dummies
2) kay redman: servant king
3) christ the king: ronald raab
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