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.