Here we go...

A little over six months ago, I wrote the following:

I've picked up some seriously good, incrediby pastoral flyers in my time backpacking around in these countries. Some of them were nothing short of life-changing, the work of local priests explaining in 15 lines that God loves you and that you're not "going to hell", how to make a confession, how to pray for someone who is sick, how to pray when you're not even sure that there is a God.

So I wonder if one of my next endeavours will be to retrieve some of them, translate them into English, get them printed on some gritty A4 paper, and see if the parish council wants to let me put them on a small wooden table near the entrance.

And then, a few weeks ago, while I was attending a playgroup at the RC church and had just asked what bits of "volunteering" needed to be done around the place, I was asked to do just that. I.e. to write booklets about Baptism, Confirmation and the other sacraments.

I've had a ball writing these in the most luminous, liberal way I thought I could get away with. They've been used with parents and even with angsty teenagers and went down really well.

If anything though, I thought this task was too easy. For, of course, my stated ambition is to sort out the global economic and cultural mess and to make some whopper difference. Everything else feels a bit cosmetic and ritualistic. I keep dismissing it as a displacement activity. Still, it was nice to flex those muscles again.

All void please

It's been one of those periods. I thought that I was so immune to the feeling of God being absent that it did not really bother me. God tangibly present? That's awesome. God seemingly not there at all? Not much of an issue. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

But this one was bad, as I didn't even have myself to fall back on. Lots of nice subject positions dissolving into thin air. Lots of new and empty subject positions clamouring to fill the void. All I could do was resist and think: actually I'll have the void. The void is my friend.

And I know it sounds sort of smug, but I've got the spiritual resources to handle this. Just because others do not have them does not mean that mine are merely a self-soothing delusion. I enjoy the void, I enjoy it when my mental constructs are crumbling apart, I enjoy not knowing where this is going.

You make no sense to us. We don't believe in a six-day creation and don't believe in the seas opening up and don't believe in supernatural miracles. We find it hard to inhabit these fairy tales as our identity. Our dead are being eaten up by worms as we speak. There was no empty tomb for the people we loved. And it's hard for us to "get" you at all.

Our mistake was to be born in this disenchanted age, with a global capitalist empire that seems to big for us to change. It's not fair. We 're not worse people than the previous generations. We are a lot more confused. We'd love to make sense of you just a bit. Just that bit which would enable us to be your people for now, and enable our children to be that too.

Joy to the world, Christmas is over !!!

Beth Anne, over at Heir to Blair wrote the following on December 19th:

I hate that for the past six years, the holidays had become a burden because of my previous employment. We pulled out dusty Christmas trees & bins of ornaments, thousands to take inventory. A week later, my day was spent decorating three, four, sometimes five Christmas trees & hanging garland until I trudged home exhausted & filthy. Then I would stand in my living room, staring at my fresh tree & wonder how I could muster another string of lights. I felt dull putting the pieces of my beloved nativity up, a present from Doug, because I had already set up two similar stables around my office. I wondered how I could bake cookies with my child when the sight of the piles of sweets, gifts from other companies, made my blood sugar & pressure rise. Last year, I did not plan or throw my traditional tacky sweater party because after two company gatherings & three resident parties, I was partied out. (& not in the exhilerated way we all remember from our twenties.)

I know the feeling. Christmas this year has been hectic, and at my 10th Christmas service in one week (all followed by socialising and answering the same dumb questions by total strangers), I thought my mind was going to explode. I'm sad to say that this has become a real drudge. We're so Chritmassed out we haven't even bothered to open our presents yet, or the kid's. I can't ever be with my family again at this time of the year because then my husband would have to be on his own. Must find a way to keep it real next year.

Quand l'enfant viendra

Moi je ferai le tour de mon quartier
Pour annoncer son arrivée
Mon enfant est né
Mon enfant est là

Et je brûlerai la nuit une dernière fois
Et les amis des jours d'éclat
Boiront à tomber
Quand l'enfant viendra

Mais j'irai dire aux hommes du monde entier
Laissez grandir en liberté
Laissez le courir à nos genoux
Laissez le partir au bout de nous

Que jamais la guerre ne touche à lui
La drogue et le fer la peur aussi
Quand l'enfant viendra poser sa vie
Dans ce lit de bois que j'ai fait pour lui

Et devant ce bonhomme de rien du tout
Serrant ses poings contre ses joues
Je dirai merci à ma femme aussi

Mais tous les chants d'amour toutes les chansons
Chanteront toujours à l'unisson
Laissez le grandir en liberté
Laissez le choisir sa vérité

Que jamais la guerre ne touche à lui
La drogue et le fer la peur aussi
Quand l'enfant viendra poser sa vie
Dans ce monde là qui n'est pas fini

Laissez le grandir en liberté
Laissez le choisir sa vérité

Que jamais la guerre ne touche à lui
La drogue et le fer la peur aussi
Quand l'enfant viendra poser sa vie
Dans ce monde là qui n'est pas fini

Another advent pic while you're all waiting...

"Story behind this? Her dad was leaving on a 2 year deployment. She was crying, and wouldn’t let go of her dad’s hand, even when he stood in line, saluting. No one had the heart to break them apart."

Source: http://beautifulwhatsyourhurry.tumblr.com/
Click for larger picture

Faithful to the wind, the hills, the olive groves...

There is an image that is often in my head. Unfortunately I can't seem to locate who first put it there. Something I read somewhere and can't remember where.

The idea is that the gospel isn't full of cities, grand buildings, red, gold, crowns, judges, priests, kings... It is full of domestic homes, gardens, green, dirt, fields, sheep, sparrows, mustard, fishermen, labourers.

I first got a tangible feel for it when camping out in Corsica years ago. We camped out in an olive grove with a friend, and because we were not lugging a fridge along, we carried food that didn't go off in the heat. Mostly dried cheese, dried meats bread and oil-based pesto. Each night we opened a bottle of red wine or two.

There was nothing to do but to look at the rolling landscape and daydream. That and find some respite from the heat under the not very efficient shade of the olive trees. I sat there one afternoon and I've rarely been this happy.

On some level, I thought that it was incredibly poetic. It felt like we were living in Virgil's bucolics, or in the early gospel narratives, out in Gallilea. On another level the heat dulled my thoughts and the hilly landscape opened my mind. I was operating on another level. Far removed from the petty moment-to-moment rattle which is my usual mental fare.

It all felt bigger. It all felt freer. Sitting under an olive tree with some bread and some cheese, and not even a book to read, I was happy. I could read the wind, read the hills, read the song of the cicadas, read the smell of warm scorched dirt, of pine trees in the distance.

Since then, I've always loved green as a liturgical color. Green like the hills, green like the fields, green grass where the newborn foals first learn to stand hesitantly and where sheep graze safely.

And when my thoughts get too oppressive and my life gets too small, I pause for a moment asking: is it faithfull to the hills? Not faithful to this or that bit of the Bible, just faithful to the rolling hills, to the smell of wild lilies and of thyme, to the clumsy new lambs, to the wind.

Clergy wife 201

After the spectacular debacle of the introduction course, we did make it to year two. What I've learnt this week:

I must be some congenial easy-to-access type of gal. I have never managed to scare anyone off. Hell, some days I can even pat the wildlife: squirels, birds, wild cats and field mice. I am just non-threatening in the best sort of way.

A lot of people who I am tempted to dismiss as not my type of Christian have huge pastoral issues. I should probably cut them some slack and be careful before saying no to their invitation to paddle in their indoor swimming pool.

I should be careful who (and when) I ask about what is going on on the community service front. If I ask the overworked busybody who is desperate for help, she would sign me up this minute while I was just enquiring and giving myself a week or two to see what I would indeed like to sign up for.