maggi dawn

ADVENT: dirty or clean

"they wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger"

In paces where animals are kept, there is a lot of hay. Hay on the floor, soaking up the mess and the dirt, but also fresh, clean hay in the feeding stalls.

When Jesus arrived in the world, unsurprisingly he was swaddled - wrapped up firmly in strips of cloth to make him safe. And of all the hay in the cave, it was the clean, fresh hay they chose to lay him on.

It's a nice irony that when he was born into our world in order to become totally, redemptively involved in the mess and chaos, the dirt and the distress, the first thing they did to Jesus  was to put him a the cleanest available environment, and wrapped up to make him safe and warm and quiet...

the rest of "Dirty and Clean" is in Beginnings and Endings

Advent Carols

It's always the case that schools and colleges have an end of term celebration before packing up for Christmas, but because of the way our terms fall we finish up here several weeks before Christmas.  As often as not the last Sunday of term is the first Sunday of Advent, so in our college we resolve the tension by having an Advent Carol Service instead of a Christmas one.

This year, though, our term ends on Friday, two days before Advent begins. So it was slightly odd to celebrate Advent (with a considerable hat-tip to Christmas) before Advent even started.

All the same, it was a lovely service. We packed our biggest Advent congregation ever into our unusual and beautiful Chapel, for a service of music and readings, candle-lighting ceremonies, prayers and hymns.

We began with a meditation on gifts and giving, with a reading of Betjeman's Advent 1955 in which he contrasts the unworthy giving of gifts as
       "... bribes we call a present
       To those to whom we must be pleasant
       For business reasons. "
with the gift of God -
       "A present that cannot be priced Given two thousand years ago
The Choir then sang Rosetti's poem to Darke's gorgeous setting,
       "What can I give him, poor as I am?..."

After that the service divided into five sections, beginning each section by lighting one of the candles on the Advent wreath. Each of the candles represents a character in the salvation story, and each section of our service had readings and meditations and music on the characters the candles represent (see more here if you want further inspiration on this theme).

My son and one of his friends did a reading together this year, so I was bursting with maternal pride as well as the usual Chaplainly happiness. At the end, while an undergraduate played a fab vibraphone solo, everyone lit their own candle as the lights were dimmed, and the final carol and the blessing were done by the light of 220 hand-held candles.

Beginnings and Endings

My new book is just about to be published. Beginnings and Endings (and what happens in between) looks at the big themes of Advent. The book is laid out as short chapters, one for each day from 1 December to 6 January, to last from Advent to Epiphany. But you can just read it in one go if you'd rather.

Beginnings are important because Advent anticipates the coming of Christ into the world; because candles in the Advent wreath represent the signs of new beginnings through the salvation story - the journey of the Patriarchs, the promises of the Prophets, the announcement of John the Baptist and the conception of Christ. As well as writing about these themes, I also look at the way each of the four gospel writers begins their gospel. In literary terms, what does their starting point tell us about the way they are telling the story?

Advent is also about Endings, because it anticipates the second coming of Christ, and the end of the world as we know it. That's an idea shrouded in mystery, but it reminds us that every new beginning implies an end of something else.

Most of our lives, of course, are lived in between, with dozens of small scale beginnings and endings going on in and around our daily lives. Births and marriages, deaths and funerals, promotions, redundancies, retirements, graduations... all these milestones lead us through endings and beginnings. The characters in the story of salvation also lived through these, and we can trace through their stories some wisdom as we live through our own.

This book was a labour of love; lots of stories close to my own heart, lots of ideas I have carried around in my head that never had an outlet. It was fun to write (though Kathryn, David, Jason and Caroline, who read and critiqued the drafts for me will no doubt remind me of the moments when I said "why did I ever say yes to this???). I hope you'll enjoy reading it.   

available on amazon stateside from 21 september

Poems for Christmas: BC:AD

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future's
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

U.A. Fanthorpe (born 1929)

more reflections on Advent and Christmas here

gaudete sunday

(for more on this subject, see Beginnings and Endings)

The third Sunday of Advent (that's today) is called Gaudete Sunday. It gets this name from the first word of the Introit at Mass, Gaudete in Domine Semper – Rejoice in the Lord always.

Advent was originally a forty-day fast in preparation for Christmas, beginning on the day after St Martin’s day (12 November). Advent goes back as far as the 5th century, but probably not further because there’s no evidence of Christmas being kept on 25 December before the end of the fourth century. The Advent fast was shortened to four weeks in the 9th century, and by the twelfth century the fast had been replaced by simple abstinence. Gregory the Great (~540-604) was the first to create an Office (a daily service) for the Advent season and Masses for the Sundays of Advent. In both Office and Mass provision is made for five Sundays, but by the tenth century four was the usual number, though some churches of France observed five as late as the thirteenth century. Despite all the messing about with the length and the practices in Advent, it has always had the characteristics of a penitential season – like Lent, a season for waiting on God, for purification, or in contemporary terms, a time for self-assessment and bringing your life into order under the guidance of God and your spiritual guides.

There’s another similarity between Lent and Advent. The middle (third) Sunday of Advent (that’s today), like Mothering Sunday in the middle of Lent, has traditionally been a day for breaking the fast. In Churches, flowers and musical instruments were once forbidden during Advent and Lent, but on the middle Sunday they were permitted to be used, and priests and deacons would wear rose-coloured vestments were allowed instead of purple or black. Some churches use red candles in their Advent wreaths; to me that always seems as if it’s making Christmas come too soon. I prefer the practice of using purple ones; but if you go and buy a purple set, you’ll find that the third one is usually pink instead of purple, to mark Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete Sunday is a reminder that Advent is passing, and that the Lord's coming is near. The focus today is more on the Second coming than on the first – more about Maranatha than Incarnation – and so the theme for the day is one of intense joy and gladness, and heightened expectation. So today, on Gaudete Sunday, the spirit of penitence in preparation for Christmas and the coming Messiah is suspended in favour of a joyful anticipation of the Promised Redemption – the already (even though it’s not yet) that permeates the entire mindset of the Christian believer. ..

poems for Christmas: the journey of the magi

When writing Beginnings and Endings (a book for Advent and Christmas, available from Amazon, or from the publisher ) I drew inspiration from many poets, including T S Eliot. 

This poem was written in 1927, and is believed to reflect Eliot's own journey from agnosticism to faith.

The journey of the Magi

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like
Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

more reflections on Advent and 
Christmas here

the angel and the girl are met

(Edit, September 2007: My recently published Advent book contains more on this poem and other poems and bible readings for Advent - Order from Amazon, or from the publisher

Edwin Muir's lovely poem gently suggests a deep and leisurely meeting between heaven and earth at the Annunciation, a touching intimacy between divine and human. The fear of delving into the sexual or erotic implications of the Anunciation sometimes make it a sterile sounding event. Without sensationalising it, Muir exposes the intimacy and wonder, and the physical engagement of this moment. Find the whole poem in Muir's Collected Poems. Here's an extract.

"...See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other's face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He's come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time... "

Edwin Muir (1887-1959)

More reflections on Advent and Christmas here

Advent

We have tested and tasted too much, lover - Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder. But here in the Advent-darkened room Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea Of penance will charm back the luxury Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom The knowledge we stole but could not use. And the newness that was in every stale thing When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking Of an old fool will awake for us and bring You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins. O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching For the difference that sets an old phrase burning- We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching. And we'll hear it among decent men too Who barrow dung in gardens under trees, Wherever life pours ordinary plenty. Won't we be rich, my love and I, and God we shall not ask for reason's payment, The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges Nor analyse God's breath in common statement. We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour- And Christ comes with a January flower. Patrick Kavanagh more poetry and reflections on Advent here

Advent

I shall not be writing about Advent this year. Not here, at any rate. I'm in the midst of writing a book - a real book with real pages - on the subject, and there's nothing much left over in my brain that's worthy of adding to the blog. I think trivia will rule here this Advent. The book comes out next year, sometime around September. Wish me luck.

(Edit, September 21st, 2007: the book got finished!! and contains lots more material on Advent - Order from Amazon, or from the publisher 

Advent poems for this year can be found at these links

Advent Sunday, John Betjeman

McKay Brown

The Slip, Wendell Berry

The Slip

this poem by Wendell Berry seems especially suitable for Advent:

The river takes the land, and leaves nothing.

Where the great slip gave way in the bank

and an acre disappeared, all human plans

dissolve. An awful clarification occurs

where a place was. Its memory breaks

from what is known now, begins to drift.

Where cattle grazed and trees stood, emptiness

widens the air for birdflight, wind, and rain.

As before the beginning, nothing is there.

Human wrong is in the cause, human

ruin in the effect--but no matter;

all will be lost, no matter the reason.

Nothing, having arrived, will stay.

The earth, even, is like a flower, so soon

passeth it away. And yet this nothing

is the seed of all--the clear eye

of Heaven, where all the worlds appear.

Where the imperfect has departed, the perfect

begins its struggle to return. The good gift

begins again its descent. The maker moves

in the unmade, stirring the water until

it clouds, dark beneath the surface,

stirring and darkening the soul until pain

perceives new possibility. There is nothing

to do but learn and wait, return to work

on what remains. Seed will sprout in the scar.

Though death is in the healing, it will heal.

Stir-up Sunday

The last Sunday of the Church Year is the Sunday before Advent - this year on 25th November. These days it is known as the feast of Christ the King, although at Robinson, as it's the last Sunday before the undergraduates "go down" we'll be having our Advent Carol service a week early.

The last sunday before Advent is traditionally known as Stir-up Sunday. The name is taken from the Collect for the day in the Book of Common Prayer:

Stir-up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

But the happy coincidence of the Collect with the timing of Christmas preparations has led to a double meaning here, for this is also the Sunday that traditionally is the day for giving the home-made Christmas pudding a final stir.

The pudding was made with thirteen ingredients, to represent Christ and his disciples, and the stirring was supposed to be done from East to West, in memory of the great journey of the Magi. Every member of the family would take a turn at stirring the pudding, before it was sealed up ready for cooking, and while they stirred they made a wish - and, like most wish-making traditions, the wish had to be kept secret if it was to come true.

Into the pudding would also be stirred a few more wish-making features. A coin was stirred in, either a silver sixpence (about the size of a modern-day 5p piece) or a threepenny bit, a ring, and a thimble. On Christmas day each person would hunt through their serving of pudding to see if they had got one of the good l;uck charms - the coin was supposed to bring wealth, the ring foretold a marriage, and the thimble was the sign of a life of good luck.

You see what you miss if you buy a ready made pudding in a plastic pot?

Under the Weather

I've been under it lately. Good moments punctuate the sorrows, of course, and I rejoice in them like the sun bursting occasionally through persistent clouds. Refusing to give up hope while you're wading through treacle is perhaps the epitome of Advent. Reminds me of Jeremiah whose melancholy was lifted by his stubborn clinging on to hope for the future. Here's what J had to say in Peterson's version, "the Message":

I'll never forget the trouble, the utter lostness, the taste of ashes, the poison I've swallowed. I remember it all--oh, how well I remember--the feeling of hitting the bottom. But there's one other thing I remember, and remembering, I keep a grip on hope: GOD's loyal love couldn't have run out, his merciful love couldn't have dried up. They're created new every morning. How great your faithfulness! I'm sticking with GOD (I say it over and over). He's all I've got left. GOD proves to be good to the man who passionately waits, to the woman who diligently seeks. It's a good thing to quietly hope, quietly hope for help from GOD. It's a good thing when you're young to stick it out through the hard times. When life is heavy and hard to take, go off by yourself. Enter the silence. Bow in prayer. Don't ask questions: Wait for hope to appear.
     

Lamentations 3:19-29

ADVENT: Coming, ready or not...

Just over eight years ago I was a PhD student, an ordinand (priest-in-training), and five months pregnant. The pregnancy was on course; it looked like this baby was really going to be born. So I needed the relevant information on maternity leave for Ordinands, what would happen to my funding, housing allowances etc., ... you know the  kind of thing.

I went up to see my tutor at Theological College - a kind and humorous woman, who could be formidable when necessary.  I discovered that to date, there was no policy on maternity leave or funding breaks for pregnant Ordinands. I don't think I was the first woman to have a baby mid-training, but there had been so few thus far that there wasn't any established pattern. I sat in my tutor's study while she phoned the relevant grant-awarding bodies, Diocesan and National offices, trying to get some kind of game plan together. After some long, frustrating phone calls, I heard the mumbling of a man's voice at the other end of the phone, and then my Tutor's terse reply: 'It may well be that you don't have any policies. But what you don't seem to understand is that the birth of this baby can not be postponed. This baby will be born in four months' time whether you have policies or not.'

I like the fact that the coming of God into our world was realised in something as inconvenient, unpredictable and untidy as the birth of a baby...

the rest of this article appears in Beginnings and Endings

Magnificat

The angel did not draw attention to himself.
He came in. So quietly I could hear

my blood beating on the shore of absolute
beauty. There was fear, yes, but also

faith among familiar things:
light, just letting go the wooden chair,

my knife cutting through the hard skin
of vegetable, hitting wood, and the noise

outside of children playing with their dog,
throwing him a bone. THen all these sounds

dropped out of hearing. The breeze
drew back, let silence come in first,

and my heart, my heart, was wanting him,
reaching out, and taking hold of smooth-muscled fire.

And it was done. I heard the children laugh
and saw the dog catch the scarred bone.

from Magnificat, by Noel Rowe (Australian poet born in 1951)

find more material for Advent and Christmas in Beginnings and Endings

ADVENT: Edwin Muir

The angel and the girl are met,
Earth was the only meeting place,
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.
See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other's face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He's come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.
Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way
That was ordained in eternity.
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.
But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

Edwin Muir

this poem is quoted in my book on Advent and Christmas, Beginnings and Endings

Waiting and longing

(Edit, November 2007: My recently published Advent book contains lots more material on Advent - Order from Amazon, or from the publisher

Waiting has become a bit of a recurring theme on this blog. It's a theme that comes to the fore between Ascension Day and Pentecost, when Jesus told his disciples to go and WAIT in Jerusalem. He was none too specific about how long to wait, or even what to wait for. "Power from on high" was the mysterious promise. But wait they did, and when the curious promise was fulfilled, they were in no doubt that it had happened. Lent is also about waiting, but not so much waiting FOR as waiting ON - putting the rest of life on hold to wait in a consciously devoted way for the presence of God to pervade the soul. Lent waiting has a wilderness quality to it - a deprivation of the things of ordinary life in order to become one with God.

Advent waiting has a subtly different touch to it. This is a waiting with hope and anticipation for God to break into our world. According to Christian tradition, the first waiting is for the Messiah or Saviour to enter the world - a waiting and anticipation reflected in the promises of God to the Patriarchs, the dreams of the prophets, and the prayers of generations of saints. The second waiting is for the return of Christ in glory, heralding the end of this era. Advent is waiting for Christmas, but it's also waiting for the great maranatha.

Waiting for the Messiah was not a passive waiting, but an aching, a longing, a reaching-towards.  I love the words of Simeon, a very, very old man who had spent his whole life waiting and longing for the salvation of Israel. Did he know what he was waiting for? Probably not, in exact terms. But somehow when he saw the child Jesus he just knew that this, at last, was what he had been waiting for. "Now, Lord," said Simeon, "now I can die happy. Now I've seen the thing I've been waiting for all my life. Now I am fulfilled." (Luke 2: 25-32)

There is a paradox in this that sums up so much of our faith - the drive to reach out, move forwards and make something happen is constrained by the need to wait on, wait for, the initiative of God's spirit. You can't force the work of God. Neither can you go to sleep on the job. I suppose that gives us our model of waiting for Christ in glory too - although here, perhaps like waiting for Pentecost, or for death, the promise has very little tangible shape to it because it is a matter of waiting for something beyond our experience. We have no categories or pictures with which to describe what it means that Christ will come again in glory. We just know, somehow, that while we live in celebration that God has broken into our world, yet we are still waiting and longing for something more. Like Bono said, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." Not a passive waiting though - not just lying back despondently, waiting for God to come and fix things. Living to the full, building the "kingdom of heaven" here and now, in the only life that we know we have. But doing it from a well of hopeful dissatisfaction. Waiting and longing.

see more on Advent and Christmas in my book, Beginnings and Endings

advent blogs

There are quite a lot of advent blogs or web-calendars about this year.  My favourites are - for content,  Dave Cartoon Church Walker who treats Advent with his usual wit and wisdom, and explorefaith where the actual web-page is lovely. Click on a different  date of the calendar every day for a thought provoking quote on waiting.   

One thing I've read in several places is the complaint that the dates on this year's Advent calendars are "wrong". How is that? Ever since I was a child, advent calendars have always begun on the 1st December, and run from 1 - 24. They are the same this year. Of course Advent itself usually starts a day or two either side of the 1st of December. But the calendars and candles always start on the 1st. 

Advent poems

(Edit, November 2007: My recently published Advent book contains lots more material on Advent - Order from Amazon, or from the publisher 

One of our readings on Advent Sunday was Betjeman's Christmas poem, which is warm and witty.  It's too long a story to tell as to why we had the Christmas poem at Advent, when I had meantime discovered that Betjeman also wrote an Advent poem - one of his lesser known pieces. I'll have to save the Advent one up for next year. I love the way he contrasts the gifts that we give - and the mixed motives with which we give them - with the outrageous and free generosity of God's gift.

excerpt from Advent 1955 by John Betjeman

...Some ways indeed are very odd
By which we hail the birth of God.

We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell'd go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax
Enough of these unworthy cracks!
'The time draws near the birth of Christ'.
A present that cannot be priced
Given two thousand years ago
Yet if God had not given so
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the manger.

ADVENT: Joseph's point of view

Anneke put a link in the comments below to a script of the birth narratives told from Joseph's point of view. I read it just now - coincidentally hving just had tea with one of my Autralian friends, so I could "hear" it in his accent  - this particular script needs to be "heard" in an Aussie twang. Anyway, it's a really nice script. Go read.

ADVENT 2: Let it grow, let it grow, let it blossom let it flow...

This classic Eric Clapton song begins to play itself in my head as another excellent post from Dave on Disaster Area reminds me that trying to capture what postmodern culture IS, and trying to create a church that reflects the culture, is an exercise of limited value. Not NO-value, mark you, but limited. Why? Because it's a modernist reaction to postmodern culture. To create a church that captures the cultural setting can be nothing more than a modernist, controlling exercise.

This does not mean we should blithely ignore the sort of critique that various people are bringing, and the efforts they are making to acknowledge that culture is shifting under our feet. My thought here is that what is needed is somehow to acknowledge the shift without trying to get on top of it, to live in the moment without controlling the outcome.

There's plenty to admire in new movements variously known as Liquid, emerging, cafe, alternative, etc., and I am not alone in rejoicing that such things are springing up both within and independently of traditional church structures. But there is, accompanying this nice organic kind of growth, a note of stridence, of feverishness, of over-keen anxiety to define, control, approve, and promote. I think it is a mistake to try to hard to control it, to own it, or to decide who is "in" and who is not.

I am greatly in favour of encouraging new growth wherever it is. And, despite committing large slabs of my life to thinking about doctrine and theology, I am also greatly in favour of encouraging new growth without being too immediately picky about the accuracy of the doctrine or ecclesiological "correctness" of such groups. Why? Because if you prune anything new too soon you will kill it. Even Jesus told us just to let stuff grow - the what and the tares together - and not worry about which was the "true" harvest. The tares won't stop the real thing growing, so just leave it be for now. Better to let a few weeds grow than accidentally pull up something good by the roots before it could get established.

Maybe in a sense being forced to BE transitional - to live in the moment without knowing what the ending will be, to speak with confidence but not certainty - maybe this is the most profoundly Christian vision. Like the Thessalonians, for instance, who at first looked for the imminent return of Christ, and then had to adjust their view - yes, he's coming, but not yet, and we don't know how long...