I Wonder...

It’s Christmas morning, and the Nativity Stable is crowded.  

My friend Dave shared a thought that really threw me.  “If Mary and Joseph were not able to find room at an inn because of all the people traveling to the census, there must have been lots of other people in that stable, too. In Detroit there are “warming centers” where the street homeless can come in out of the cold.  There are no beds, just rows of folding chairs.  The room smells of sweat as clothes worn for days without access to showers begin to raise the humidity in the bare room.  There is no apparent joy in the room that I picture, in a place that used to be called the “24-hour walk-in center”.  There are dedicated people who staff that room during the day, helping people try to find housing, healthcare, and maybe the odd job.  But at night, it’s just the security staff, whose gift to these lost is not encouragement, but merely alertness and equity.  The chairs are as hard as the life that these lost live, in a city to big and too poor to give them hope.

When Dave reads the Gospel story, I hear that the Shepherds leave and spread the joyful news.  But I’m still stuck in the 24-hour walk-in center, and the smell is in my nostrils, and it is worse than a stable.  What sends the shepherds out with enthusiasm? 

He said that in those times, guys who could not find other work often were hired as shepherds.  These guys might have been day-laborers, the bottom of the manpower barrel.  For the last ten weeks I’ve been working with a crew of homeless guys.  Eleven guys started out at Goodwill Inn, half of them Veterans, just three of them who have remained through the program.  What has made me feel like a failure in working with them is that despite their considerable talent and goodness, I can’t seem to lift their sights higher than mere survival. 

So these three are the ones I see as shepherds in my imagination, and I think “what in this scene succeeded where I have not; what has given them enthusiastic hope?  This morning Kathy and I will go to the morning Mass, what is called “The Shepherds’ Mass”.  The church will not smell like the walk-in center, and none of my three day-laborer companions will be there…not physically.   But I am inhabited by these images, and they will enter the church with me.  

Wonder will enter the church with me this morning.  Not wonder as in wonderful; wonder as in I wonder.  I need to experience whatever those shepherds experienced, so I can leave not in disappointment and despair, but with excitement and joy, eager to spread the story of whatever they saw in that crowded stable. 

Promise…Reality…Legacy

photo courtesy of Washington Post

Mary and Zechariah both learned something that I need to remember.  Patience, people!

Zechariah sees this angel, you know?  

Angel says, “Hey!  Zech!  Elizabeth’s pregnant!” 

Zechariah says, "My old Lizzie, she’s too old!"

Angel says, “God can do it, and God did.  She’s six months pregnant, dog!”

Zech says, “No way!  Can’t be!”

Angel says “Shut Uuuuuuuuuuup!” and old Zechariah, he shut up, all right, ‘cuz he can’t speak.  God thinks “Hmmmm…I gotta let this talker think some on this.

And so Zechariah thinks for three months, reflects on things, goes about his work in silence.  And by the time Elizabeth gives birth to a son three months later, Zech has changed his tune.  He’s changed his thinking, and adjusted his view.  He had opened his mind, and when Elizabeth’s body opened up and produced a son, Zechariah opened his mouth and pronounced his name: John.

Mary sees an angel too, and she says yes, and then her body is closed around the child forming in her, closed for nine months.  These days people get ultrasounds, and post fuzzy images on Facebook.  But then it was just mystery, just trust.  Nine months.  She had said yes to something that would change the world.  Her life changed.  But do you suppose that when the angel disappeared and she was alone again there in the recesses of her parents’ house, that she felt any change?  What about the next week?   I would have had doubts.

These weeks I’ve been working with a group of guys; talented, promising…and homeless.  Like the first homeless person I’d known in Detroit and thought I could “fix” when I saw how good he was, I have found myself suffering disappointment by what I see as a lack of progress.  This morning I came upon an article in the Washington Post about 79 Seat Pleasant Elementary School students.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/local/seat-pleasant-following-the-dreamers/?hpid=z2 The video is a great start; please watch it.  

But the three titles of the three articles are what helped me most. 

The Promise

The Reality

The Legacy

Mary and Zechariah waited, each in their own way, from the promise to the reality.  But just as they suffered the reality, the not-quite-as-I’d-hoped-or-imagined, and just as we do, you and I, all of us are held to discover the legacy only as it unfolds…and keeps unfolding, generation after generation.  Whether homelessness or salvation or family…patience, people!

Celebrate Disillusionment!

image courtesy verticalblue.net

Father Anthony Citro shared that today’s readings (4th Sunday of Advent) regard three main characters all of whom were disillusioned.  David thought he’d build a Temple for God, but God said he had something greater in mind – the House of David bringing forth the Messiah.  Paul of Tarsus thought he’d be a hero of the status quo by persecuting the Christians, but got knocked off his high horse and ended up preaching the salvation of Christ.  And Mary of Nazareth thought she’d be a traditional Jewish woman, practicing virtue in the recesses of her home, and the Angel called her to a true light.

None of them, Father Anthony said, ended up with what they had thought.    They all had to let go of the false light (il-lusion, from lucis, the Latin word for “light”) of their preconceptions in order to move into the bright light of truth, and become their true selves. 

If someone came to me and said that they were disillusioned, my response would be sympathy, and I would be inclined to console them.  But to become disillusioned literally means to be relieved of a false light.

This is the season of light, celebrated in many faiths in the northern hemisphere because the days are shortest now, and darkest, and we long for brighter days.  For Christians, it is looking to a star, and following that star to the Bright Babe, who would grow to learn that being the Chosen One would be…different than he might have expected.  He would follow the true light to the Cross, and then beyond the grave, and knock at the tightly shut door of our hearts, we securing ourselves in the darkness that is our illusion, our false light.

This is a time of illusion being stripped from most of the “developed” world.  We are learning that our prosperity is not what we expected.  Our misconception has led to a miscarriage, and our false dream is stillborn.  Mary conceived, and soon hope will be born…again. 

Shall we abandon our sparkly darkness and step into the light?  I think we’d better hold hands.  It will take our eyes some time to adjust to being able to SEE as we come to discover the joy of our humanity, our true selves, our real brightness, our translucent humanness.

Wait, Watch...or WORK? The Call to Christmas

“Waddya waiting for…Christmas?”  My dad would say that if somebody was in his way in traffic.  That was before “road rage”.  While it didn’t seem to faze the driver in front of him, it certainly linked “Christmas” and “waiting” in my psyche.  And didn’t we, as kids, have a hard time waiting?  But we were stuck with it, and so we learned…to…WAIT.

Maybe that’s why last Sunday I was surprised by the word “Watch” in the Gospel.   I guess my default position is more passive and indifferent, a vestige of my childhood – to wait.  I found the call to watchfulness a perturbing call to a more adult engagement in Advent, and my immaturity surprised me.

But this Second Sunday of Advent calls us further.  It calls us to past waiting and even watching.  It calls us to work.  “Prepare the way”….  Oh, yeah?  How?  Make the high places plane and fill in the low places, so that the son of justice can quickly come. 

We read daily about the growing gap between rich and poor.  The high places are getting higher and the low places lower.  How do we turn it around?  How do we?  Who can we lift up?  How can we bring the cry of the poor to the ears of those living so high that they do not hear?

There are 25 working days 'til Christmas.

O Christ! Christ, Come QUICKLY!

My last post suggested the “watch” as defense against threat.  But Advent is a watch not against conquest, but a watch for liberation.  I find myself needing this reminder on this morning after what is called “Black Friday” and before the First Sunday of Advent.  The shopping madness is called “Black Friday” because, we’re told, lots of stores run the whole year in the red, at a loss, and only turn profitable after the holiday shopping surge.  But I think of it as a reminder of the darkness that we create by shading our eyes from the light. 

This morning, if we care to look, we can find all kinds of stories of the madness of yesterday’s bargain-hunting bedlam.  Despite this binge, the likelihood of a profitable year for merchants and suppliers is in doubt because of the weak economy not only here in the U.S., but in Europe as well.  Today’s financial front pages are full of frightening headlines…just as yesterday’s and last week’s and last month’s were.  The Arab Spring seems to have sowed a lot of seeds on rocky ground.  The Supercommittee turns out not to have been super at all.

Perhaps this is why when I realized that Advent was coming, I realized that my watch for the coming of Hope was urgent.  “Come, Lord Jesus, Come” was not sung sotto voce but emerged as a shout!  “O Christ!  Christ, come QUICKLY!"  I am reading, thanks to one of my friends from Tuesday mornings, Exiles, a Novel by Ron Hansen, about Gerard Manley Hopkins… and the five young German Nuns whose death at sea inspired his greatest poem “Wreck of the Deutschland”.  There on Tuesday morning as we prayed for the coming, yet again, of the Son of God, I found myself calling out as the 28 year-old Sister did, 

Away in the loveable west,	185
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
And they the prey of the gales;
She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails	190
Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’:
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.

Hopkins wrote from his safety in Wales, torn to his heart as he imagined them in the gales.  If not for ourselves in the relative safety from which we access this internet, then for those in the storm, must we not cry out?  And as I reflect on the madness of “Black Friday” and other distractions, I find insight in the way that 78 people (including the five newly-vowed nuns of Hopkins’ poem) died.  The S.S. Deutschland did notsink in the depths of the ocean.  It ran aground in shallow water 15 miles from shore - water too deep to sail in but deep enough to drown.

Perhaps we too are aground, stuck while the world swirls around us.  Or perhaps like Hopkins we are in safety as others drown.  Or perhaps we are just oblivious, wrapped in our safe isolation.

Hockey, Chutzpah, and Holiness

20 years ago my brother Dan went with our mom to try to find the place in Europe where her mom grew up.  They succeeded in finding her town, and shared a story that lives on in me though they are both gone.  And it shines a light on Advent as I reflect on this Sunday’s Advent-opening Gospel.

Rosina Luprich served as a watch nightly – and so did the other women in their town of Deutsch-Proben, midway between Vienna and Krakow, Poland during World War I.  With their men all conscripted in the war, the women patrolled the perimeter of the town with pots and pans through the night.  If enemy soldiers came into sight, they would start banging the pans to wake the mothers of the town, so that they could protect their children.  They walked the wall between safety and threat, and they watched.

The Gospel focuses on the word watch as a verb, calling us to remain alert.  But it also describes the four watches of the Roman system, three-hour divisions of the twelve-hour night, in the words “evening, midnight, cockcrow, or dawn.  The Palestinians, on the other hand, broke the 12 hours into three watches, and theologians liken them to childhood, adulthood, and old age. 

I found myself thinking about a line change in hockey, with five guys heading over the boards onto the bench as their replacement “line” of five come flying off the same bench onto the ice with fresh legs.  They do it so quickly because when the line changes, they are vulnerable, because the other team’s players stay on the ice, and stay in the flow without the chaos of change.

I looked around the room on Tuesday morning, I noticed the two generations of us, and I thought of the ages of man.  Half of us there are moving from child to man and half of us are transitioning from manhood to old age.   The chaos of change is within us, and all around in our society.  We’re called to watch as we are, from our own reality.  Rosina Luprich walked the hills around her town with pot and spoon, because that is who she was and what she had.  I realized as I look around the room that I’m in the chaos of line change in my own life.  I feel too young to me an old man, but too old to be a young man.  Maybe I feel the loss of my productive life as I go flying off the ice onto the bench, watching the fresh legs take the puck.  I wondered whether the young guys similarly feel the loss of the freedom of their recent adolescence, as they are called to the non-stop challenges of raising their own kids.

And I think about Rosina Luprich, who didn’t waste time with such mental games.  She just grabbed her pot and spoon and walked the wall and watched.  It would be ten years later, after my grandfather came back home from the war, that they would pack up their kids and immigrate to a farm near Chicago, a farm where my mother would grow up, where pots and spoons were for cooking, not for standing watch. 

Next: the ages of our lives

Off the Wall Comments

It’s Advent.  And boy, do I need it.

This morning I read a Facebook posting from Dave Koukal, my former colleague at UDM, about a “Homeless-Themed Halloween Party” thrown by a Buffalo, NY law firm that processed foreclosures.  A year ago the firm had encouraged their employees to celebrate Halloween at a homeless-themed party, complete with the staff dressing in costumes that made them look destitute and signs describing the various faux problems their characters had.  The story disgusted me, then saddened me, then angered me, then left me numb. 

It wasn’t until later that I read next Sunday’s Gospel (Matthew 13:33-37) that I realized that Dave’s posting prepared me perfectly for Advent.  Matthew calls us to be watchful and alert.

 

On Tuesday mornings I join a group of guys to look at the coming Sunday’s Gospel.  One of us prepares an explanation of it, and we all have a conversation.  So I took my Halloween homeless party numbed self to the gathering, and one of the guys explained the gatekeeper’s watch.  He had to remain alert at the gate because it was from that location that he could be aware of the dangers outside the town.  I thought of walled cities we have visited while with our son in Europe, and the vista from up on those walls.  Within those walls were the tightly-knit buildings of the town, the shops with their goods, the apartments above them with their bright laundry drying in the safe sun. 

I realized that I’m generally “off the wall”.  I tend to remain down in the safety and warmth of community, letting the wall hide from me the reality of evil.  Call it idealism.  Call it wearing rose –colored glasses.  I think that is why the story of the tastelessness, the collective insensitivity of the staff of that New York foreclosure firm had blind-sided me. 

I’m called, this Advent, not wait, but to watch, to take off my rose-colored glasses and stand where I am aware not only of the warmth and hope and companionship of community, but also of those equally real forces that threaten this.  And I watch for the coming of a God who is much more than a cherubic little baby.  How about you?

Next: the watches, and the ages of our lives.