SLOW : andrew dowsett : collected musings
Some
days are dark days. You were never supposed to carry the weight of the pain of
the world; but you can be a stargazer: one who looks, intently, for signs of
light in the darkness – and who redirects their life to follow the light, and
so to carry the light.
Whenever
we are rudely reminded that we dwell in the long shadow of death, may we seek,
follow after, find, revere, and point others to the light that came into the
world in the incarnation of Jesus, God-with-us.
The
Third Sunday of Advent has long been associated with joy. On it, we read the poet
Isaiah’s joyous vision of a parched land transformed by the coming of the
rains:
‘The wilderness
and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing…
‘Then…the tongue
of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water…
‘A highway shall
be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not travel on it,
but it shall be for God’s people;
no traveller, not even fools, shall go astray.
No lion shall be there,
nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;
they shall not be found there,
but the redeemed shall walk there.
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.’
Isaiah 35.1-10
About
thirty-five years before the birth of Jesus, Herod the Great built a fortified
pleasure dome a parkrun’s distance (5 km, 3 miles) south-east of Bethlehem,
with commanding views over the ancient road known as the Way of the Patriarchs.
On a man-made hill, he raised four towers, the largest being his penthouse.
Beneath them, a great reception room, and Roman-style bathhouse. Below that, an
enormous pool – Hollywood did not invent the pool party – and ornamental
gardens, the edge of the desert transformed by water brought in by aqueducts (‘What
did the Romans ever do for us?’). At a superficial glance, this was a
fulfilment of Isaiah’s vision, the burning sand become a pool. (I have stood in
the bottom of that pool, now long dry, the burning sand reclaiming its own.) But
Herod co-opts the vision of Scripture – of holy writing – to justify absolute
power. It will become an early warning system against ambassadors sent from a
distant court to pay homage to the ‘newborn king of the Jews.’
The
co-opting of faith in service of authoritarian control, in favour of wealthy
men who play out obscene excess behind closed doors while the common people struggle
under the weight of injustice, can never bring forth joy. Joy is that profound
experience of being caught up in something bigger than ourselves – of a deep
sense of connection with our neighbour, with strangers, with nature, the
universe, God. It is impossible to know joy whenever we intentionally separate
ourselves from other people, from those who are different – inferior to us in
our own eyes.
We
live in days when, on both sides of the Atlantic, we see agitators promoting
the anathema which is Christian Nationalism. This is the false fulfilment of
Herod the Great (Make Herod Great Again). But joy has always waited to be
found, just as clouds wait to pour out their precious rain on the desert.
Tomorrow
– the third Sunday of Advent – we will hold our annual Nativity at St Nicholas’
church. We have invited everyone to come dressed as their favourite character
from the story – it does not matter whether we have one Mary or fifteen (the
Gospels are full of women called Mary) because there is room for everyone.
Nativities
– retellings of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus, usually pitched for children
and popular in primary schools – remain reasonably familiar, and poorly
presented. Famously, they involve Mary & Joseph turning up at Bethlehem on
the very night she will go into labour, desperately going from inn to inn
seeking a room, being turned away by innkeeper after innkeeper, until a kindly
one, deeply apologetic at having nothing better to offer, let’s them sleep in
his stable. Nothing could be further from what the Gospels actually portray.
Jesus
is born in the home of a relative of Joseph, who, some time earlier, has returned
to Bethlehem with his bride Mary, from her father’s home in Nazareth. In
keeping with custom, a newly married couple (that is, having completed the
legally binding contract of betrothal) would expect to live with the bride’s
parents for the first twelve months of their life together – Joseph may well have
been working for his father-in-law by way of a dowry – before the bride was
taken to live in the home of the groom’s parents (marked by what we would
recognise as a wedding feast). There is not space in the room allocated to the
couple – Luke uses a term we might translate as ‘guest room’ and definitely
should not translate as ‘inn’ – for Mary to give birth, attended by female
relatives and town midwives, and so Jesus is born in the main, shared living
space. He is then washed and wrapped tightly in bands of linen – all he has
known so far is the confines of the womb – and laid in a stone depression
hollowed out to form a manger in the dividing point between the lower end of
the home, where animals slept at night, and the upper end, where the humans
slept. Luke makes a point of describing he manger in detail, perhaps because it
is a relevant detail for the shepherds (possibly a particular manger in a home
known to them) but also because he is foreshadowing the stone shelf in the tomb
where Jesus, wrapped in linen strips, will be laid following his crucifixion.
The whole town of Bethlehem – the ‘city of David’ – rejoice that God has at
last restored the fortunes of the house and line of David – though their joy
will turn to sorrow within a couple of years, when Herod orders the massacre of
every male child of two years and under in and around Bethlehem.
This,
then, is a story set firmly in history, in the history and cultural practices and
hopes and expectations of a particular community. It is a story of hope and of
joy, albeit a story that will not run smoothly, because there will be powerful others
who contest the story.
And
the invitation is, where do you find yourself in the story? Not as a shepherd
or as townsfolk or relatives, but where does the story resonate with your life –
lived in a very different culture?
Where
will the God who broke in there and then, break into your life here and now?
Once
upon a time, many years in the past, there lived a young man, in a valley in a
city built on seven hills. Each Sunday, he would get up bright and early and make
the short walk to the house of the young woman he loved, stopping on the way at
the boulangerie, to pick up two fresh-from-the-oven pains au chocolat, and at
the tabac, to collect a Sunday paper, stuffed with weekend supplement sections.
Then they would sit and drink coffee and eat their pains au chocolat and read
the supplements, before walking up the hill to church. [1]
On
a street between where the young man and the young woman lived, a street that
ran parallel to the one with the boulangerie and the tabac, there was a gift
shop. The kind of shop you could not walk past without looking in the window,
for something new. The kind of shop you might turn into, at any time of year,
and find the perfect gift to hold onto, to give a friend or relative when
Christmas came around. The kind of shop that has, in cities up and down the
land, been put out of business by online shopping.
These
days, it is perhaps harder to find the perfect gift, in good time in advance,
not only because we have withdrawn from the physical world but because the virtual
world shapes us for immediacy. But the perfect gift might be in your hands:
your own, undivided, presence the best present you have to offer (and, you don’t
need to give a gift to everyone you know or have ever met; don’t need to be run
ragged by the season of More Invitations Than You Can Possibly Accept).
Advent
invites us to slow down enough to be present. But also, to plan in advance. Not
for the Christmas that is upon us, but for the days and years and times ahead. Advent
reminds us that the first coming of Christ – his incarnation – was a plan set
in motion from before the creation of the world: God’s desire to be one with us,
to be one of us, to unite heaven and earth. To savour the anticipation of
seeing our surprise and delight. Might we rediscover this for ourselves?
[1]
I know the young man and the young woman, though they are no longer young. They
married, and he brings her coffee before she gets out of bed each morning – not
only on Sundays – but they no longer live close to a boulangerie where people
queue out the door waiting patiently for the oven to be opened.
Is
your Christmas tree up yet? At this time of year we make room for Christmas
trees in our homes, gardens, businesses and public squares. As I have walked
around my parish delivering Christmas cards, I’ve seen Christmas trees of all styles
– including stylish minimalist branches, painted white, with a few brightly
coloured baubles – and sizes.
In
the symbolic universe of the Bible – in the imagination of the poets who wrote much
of what has been handed down to us – trees stand for a person or people.
The
poet Isaiah imagines a creative act of God – of the god who first created the
world and everything in it – establishing a whole, diverse ecology of trees in
the wilderness: cedar and acacia and myrtle and olive and cypress and plane and
pine (Isaiah 41:17-20). It is a vision of a new way of being human, rooted in
quietness and rest, in trust in the God who waits to meet with us, who waits
for us to grow weary of the noise, the drivenness, the distraction of the city –
of our physical and virtual, external and internal architecture.
And
it isn’t a monoculture, this new way of being human – this vision of the
Church. There are many different types of tree: some tall and thin; some
spreading out a broad canopy providing shade; each with its own properties –
this one is good for burning, for fuel; this, for building; this one, for food;
this, possessing healing in its bark, or leaves.
This
year, I have witnessed something of a fulfilment of Isaiah’s vision – biblical prophecy,
biblical sense of history, is both cyclical and linear; its poetry speaks to
events down through the ages – this year. Men and women seeking something that
the world cannot give, searching for it in the wilderness of our long-abandoned
churches. God is planting trees, creating something beautiful in its diversity.
And
this Advent, the trees we make space for in our homes might just point us to
this joyful reality.
‘Are
you feeling Christmassy yet?’ If not, that’s quite alright. Christmas – as Rend Collective sing* – is not a feeling. Christmas celebrates a truth – a reality
that Advent points to – that ‘In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from
on high shall break upon us, To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the
shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.’** In Advent we
hold on to the hope that the dawn is on the way, and at Christmas we celebrate
that it came and will come again. The dawn tells us that the darkness in our
lives does not have the final word; but it does not deny that the night can be
bitterly cold.
*We
are playing Rend Collective’s ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen / Hallelujah’ before
all our Christmas services this year. Check it out on your music streaming
service of choice.
**vv.
9&10 of The Benedictus (The Song of Zechariah) which is ‘normally said’ at
Morning Prayer.
One
of the great themes of Advent is joy. (It is especially associated with the Third
Sunday of Advent, also known as Gaudete Sunday; and this year, JOY is the overall theme for Advent across
the Church of England nationally.)
The
author Brené Brown describes ‘joy’ as ‘sudden, unexpected, short-lasting, and
high intensity. It’s characterized by a connection with others, or with God,
nature, or the universe. Joy expands our thinking and attention, and it fills
us with a sense of freedom and abandon.’
(Atlas of the Heart, p. 204)
I
know too many people whose marriages have fallen into messy divorce. (That is
not to pass judgement: marriage is hard. I am aware that singleness is also
hard, but the point is not comparison; the point stands: marriage is hard.) I
know far too many people whose lives have been touched by the death, by
suicide, of someone close to them. I know people who are living, this
Christmas, with end-stage terminal illness. People who have lost a much-loved
family pet. (this is no small thing.) And this is not to look for the wider
catastrophes of climate collapse or war that uproot and remove families from
their lives and confront the watching – perhaps receiving – world with our own in/humanity.
It is common to the human condition that we dwell in darkness and in the shadow
of death.
Joy
does not deny or dismiss this reality. Rather, it is under these conditions
that joy is utterly essential, strengthening us to face our lives. For we do
not face life alone, beneath a dispassionate void, but with the God who chose
to become God-with-us in the birth of Jesus. He is the light that shines in the
darkness, the light that grows, incrementally, to noon-day sun. But the dawn,
the dawn sky, will take your breath away.
