Author Archives: Christine Sunderland

We submitted our pledge cards at church today, making our financial commitment for the year.  We stepped to the altar and placed our cards of promise on a plate which was then offered, in the liturgy of the Mass, to God.

We are commanded by Scripture to give back to God ten percent of our “first fruits,” our income for the year.  Some of us do not pay much attention to these commands, but put a few dollars in the plate as it comes down the pew.  Some of us pledge a fraction of the ten percent, or what we think is appropriate after all of our expenses, needs and wants, are met.  Some of us pledge ten percent.  Some of us more than that.

A pledge is a promise, an intention of faith and fidelity.  We pledge, or make vows, to one another in marriage, and the relationship between the Church and Christ is considered one of marriage, for Christ refers to himself as the bridegroom in Holy Scripture.  The Church is his bride.

Our preacher spoke of these things today, saying that God wants much more from us than belief.  God, like a loving spouse, wants a living, loving relationship with us.  We do not come to church to mouth words and listen to empty phrases.  We come to actively partake in God’s kiss.

God’s kiss!  That got my attention, and I listened closely for the explanation.  God is not an idea, our priest continued, but a living person who desires union with his beloved, his bride.  He wants all of us.  He wants even little me.  He wants to fill us with himself in the bread and the wine.  It is a Eucharistic kiss, a kiss between the bride, the Church, and the bridegroom, Jesus Christ.

So it is fitting that the Gospel today, the story of the Wedding in Cana, is about water turned to wine at a wedding feast.  It is Christ’s first recorded miracle.  It is the third epiphany that reveals Who He Is in this season of Epiphanytide, of manifestations.

And it was fitting for us to pledge our troth (truth, faith, as is said in our Sacrament of Holy Matrimony) to our bridegroom, to step to the altar and give him our promise.  In a marriage we promise to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health.  Just so, we as his bride, promised these things, to him and to one another as members of his body.

My husband and I have found that in our thirty years of marriage, pledging to the Church has been important.  We have tried to be faithful with at least a ten percent offering, and I believe it is true that miracles happen when we are faithful.  When we are steady.  When we worship together weekly, and partake of God’s presence weekly.  When we do the hard regular duty, honing our consciences with love’s demands, feeding on sermon and Scripture, worshiping in song and prayer and bread and wine, giving of our time to the Body of Christ as well as our means, in sacrifice.  Sometimes it’s a struggle to be faithful to God, to family, to anything.  Sometimes it’s a joy.  But God is always there in the faithfulness, working his miracles.

We filled out our cards and processed with our brothers and sisters to God’s altar.  Later, in the parish hall, we celebrated the arrival of our newest member of Christ’s body, Luisa, now two months old, with a shower of food and presents.  But we were the ones showered… by the love of our bridegroom, ever faithful, to bring this new life among us.

We pledge our tithe, we are faithful, and God hears us for he is faithful too.  Only now can he work his miracles among us, embracing us, kissing us.

I am a simple person.  Raised in a bookish home, the daughter of a clergyman, in the long ago past with no Internet, no DVD’s, and limited television, I cherished reading from an early age.  Once a week, on Mondays, my father’s day off, we made a trip to the local library.  My sister and I carted our loot home, ten books (the limit), that we would cherish until the next Monday.  The worlds inside the books became our worlds, so that our growing up reflected many galaxies.

I carried that simplicity into my adulthood and the tumultuous ’sixties.  I carried the simplicity into marriage and motherhood and middle age, into what is often called our gentler years.  I continued reading, listening to the sound of the words, picturing the people and the places and the problems that threatened at every turn.

Along the way I rediscovered the Church, and began to understand the profound simplicity of her teaching, her practice, her faith.  With each year the simplicity has grown in its own deep complexity, and I continue to marvel at how this can be.  The creeds that tell of God’s love for Man. Holy Scripture which documents God’s love for Man.  The sacraments and the feasts and the seasons of the Church which all act out God’s love for Man.  Simple love.  Simple Incarnation.  Simple Resurrection.  Simplicity.

Yet the tapestry, the weave that lies within, inside and behind, these events and beliefs is so very rich, infinite in color and variety.  I know that in this life I shall never plumb the depths, never see all the shades of color, never touch all the marvel-ous textures of this faith.

I thought these things as I listened to today’s sermon on baptism.  It is Epiphanytide, a time in which we celebrate the manifestation of who Jesus was and is, meditating on the Gospel passage at the beginning of Mark where Christ is baptized in the Jordan by John. As Jesus rose from the water, “he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit, like a dove, descending upon him: and there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”  Our preacher said that Christ was baptized to become one of us; God was engrafted onto mankind.  Later, Christ tells his disciples to baptize in his name, that only those baptized will inherit the Kingdom of life.

These are strong words, and the early Church took them seriously.  Baptism became the first and most important rite for every believer.  It was soon understood that with this rite of “water and the Spirit,” being born anew, we become engrafted, become part of the Body of Christ, the Church.  A mystery.

I do not believe baptism is only a symbolic act, nor is it only a symbolic result.  The Body of Christ is more than a group, but a living breathing body.  Baptism is far more than membership in a club, and today I looked at my fellow worshipers in the pews, a part of my body of Christ.  I considered how we would soon partake of the Holy Eucharist, another sacrament making us one body.  We were engrafted onto each other and into, onto Christ, God the Son.  Because we were part of him, his resurrection would resurrect us as well, into the Kingdom of life.

Each of us journeys alone in this life, from birth to death.  We reach out to one another in friendship, in marriage, in family, in bonds of every shade of intimacy and distance, in love.  Yet we journey alone.  We are born alone and we die alone, for no one can make this final journey with us.  But the Body of Christ can.  The Body of Christ bridges the worlds, sanctifies our time on earth so that we may travel with the saints and the angels.  And not only at the time of our death and our passing into new life, but during our earthly journey as well.  Each year, day, hour, minute, even second of our time is colored, enriched, made holy by this Body of Christ, the Church.

So we journey with the Church, through the seasons and the feasts and the great acts of God on earth.  Through life into death and into life again.  With each day we are quite simply made whole, holy, and with each day we step deeper, further and farther, into the glory that God promises us.

My simplicity has become richly complex.

The twelve days of Christmas came to an end on Friday, the Feast of the Epiphany, and we celebrated in our new chapel now called the Chapel of the Holy Innocents.

The events of Christ’s birth, this great God of love coming among us, form a kind of poem or painting that tells the story of the Incarnation and its meaning for us.  We prepare for Christ’s coming throughout Advent, decorating our homes and singing carols. We gather for family meals on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, giving gifts and toasting Christmas.  We go to church.

For many folks, Christmas ends on Christmas Day.

But in the Church it is only beginning.  Throughout the twelve days of, after, Christmas we celebrate this great gift of God, until we come to January 6, Epiphany, the visit of the Wise Men, the Magi from the East, who bring gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

In the Gospels, this visit is recorded, but probably occurred much later in time than twelve days.  But the visit is important, so tradition has collapsed time to place Epiphany in the same celebratory frame, the same poem or painting, as Christmastide itself.

For it is the Magi from the East who reveal the light of Christ. They are the ones who follow the star (possibly an angel) that lights their way to Bethlehem.  Why do they follow?  They want to see, to discover, to learn what this means.  They want to be enlightened. And here we have the essence of Epiphany, that light lighting the darkness so that we can see out and in.

Epiphany comes from the Greek epiphaneia, to appear, to show forth, to see.  We use this word to mean a sudden realization, a sudden burst of mental clarity, of light shining in the darkness of our understanding.  When I have epiphanies it is as though I have tapped into something outside myself, as though the revelation has come from some outside source, suddenly inspired.  In-spired comes from the Latin inspirire, to breathe into.  To be inspired, to have an epiphany, is to have God breathing his life into me.  He lights up my darkness.

This is the light of Christ.  It fills all who welcome it so that they may in turn burn with his love and light.  They become living flames to others.  And this is what it means to be a Christian, to burn each day with love, with this light, and thus to enlighten our world.

Today at church, as I gazed on the crèche arranged in its bed of greens near the altar rail, I saw the three Wise Men kneeling before this humble baby, this king.  Something new and miraculous had come to the earth, a being that would lighten their dark.  The Gospel account in St. Matthew states that the Wise Men presented gifts, but we don’t really know how many.  Tradition has made the gifts part of the poem and painting: gold for the child’s kingship, frankincense for his priesthood, and myrrh for his burial.

This visit completes Christmastide, for these foreign travelers represent us, those not part of the People of Israel at the time of Christ.  All of us, the world, may now be part of this huge epiphany that happened two thousand years ago in a cave outside of Bethlehem, this real historical event.

Epiphanytide continues for four Sundays, and during this season we will see the other epiphanies of Christ.  Today the Gospel spoke of the child Jesus speaking with the doctors in the temple, revealing his divinity.  Soon we shall hear how his baptism revealed his divinity.  We shall follow him to Cana, where he turns water into fine wine, revealing his divinity. Each Sunday shall be another epiphany of light, a burst of inspired understanding.

So God becomes man, lighting the darkness.  St. John writes, “And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not,” so the church celebrates the poem and painting of Christmas, splashing the season with lots of light-filled epiphanies.

Happy Epiphanytide!

I was not proud of something I said this last week, in an uncontrolled outburst, and even after apologizing, repenting, and receiving forgiveness from the injured party, a cloud still hovered over my heart.  My heart was torn.  Was I carrying false guilt?

I carried the cloud to church today, and when I left church, the cloud was gone.  My heart was mended.

How did that happen?  I feel reborn.

Did the priest’s absolution really cause such a miracle to occur?  I believe it did.  When I sinned, I sinned against God as well as man.  And while I had confessed to God privately, his Church had not absolved me.  Today God absolved me through the Church, sacramentally.  The tear around my heart was mended with this blood, and I received Christ in the chalice as though receiving a blood transfusion.

Today is New Year’s Day.  It is also, in the Church Year, the Octave (8th day) of Christmas and the Circumcision of Christ, a day when we consider the meaning of this seemingly foreign and strange act.  And the meaning wove through my heart and soul, for it was all about blood and sacrifice and, yes, transfusion.

Our preacher spoke of these things.  He spoke of Christ’s circumcision.  Man from the earliest days sensed an innocent, blood sacrifice was needed to appease the gods, and a firstborn child was often offered in those ancient cultures of Mesopotamia. When God called Abraham out of this world, he ordered a substitutionary sacrifice, an animal sacrifice, as well as the rite of circumcision, the sign of his covenant with his people.  In this covenant God regulates the sacrifice to become the paschal sacrifice, the Passover Lamb, and finally himself, entering the world in the Incarnation, taking on our flesh.  He became the final and fulfilling blood sacrifice, poured into the chalice, so that we may be fulfilled, full.  Christ becomes the fulfillment of the law, not a denial of it.  All that went before prepared the way for him, prepared for this blood to be shed for us.  All of those generations, all of those centuries, prepared mankind for this one great redemptive act of God.  Circumcision, our preacher said, is an evidence of the Incarnation, God coming among us for a reason.  The law of Moses is a tutor that brings us to Christ.

My redemption this morning was real.  I was set free, at least of my selfish acts to this point in time.  They had no more power over me, could no longer weigh upon my heart and mind, no longer hover over me like a dark cloud.  And I was given a way forward, a way to handle my selfish acts in the future.  For we all fall short of perfection; we all sin.  We all say what we regret, do what we shouldn’t, don’t do what we should.  We are fallen creatures, but through penitence, forgiveness, and Christ’s blood sacrifice, the tears in our hearts are healed.  We partake of his Body and his Blood.

When, in Jewish tradition, the child was circumcised, he was named.  The blood offering became one with the identity of the child, now a child of God.  When Christ came in history, when he took on our flesh and blood, circumcision was no longer needed.  Christ’s blood sacrifice is enough for our covenant with God.  So Christians are named in baptism, not circumcision.  They are offered to God, becoming a part of his Church body in a bloodless rite of circumcision.

Who are we, what are we, as human beings on this earth, this spinning planet?  We are creatures who belong to God, and he brings us back to himself with each sacramental offering – Baptism, the Eucharist, Confession, Absolution – through his Church.  With each offering he fills us with his own lifeblood.

We begin a new year, 2012.  We consider the last year and plan the next.  I am full of thanksgiving that God loved us so that he came to us as he did, as a child in a manger, that he gave us a way out, a way forward, a way to truly love.  He makes the crooked straight; wrong turns are righted; clouds no longer hover over us; torn hearts are mended.

Incarnation.  Circumcision.  Offering and re-offering.  Penitence and absolution.  The Holy Name of…  Jesus.

Happy New Year!

He came to us, Emmanuel, God with us.

We gathered together around the Christmas buffet, twenty of us, three sons with their wives and their children.  We held hands and thanked God for being together this day.  We thanked him for the food laid before us, and we thanked him for his great gift of himself.  Alleluia.

Each of us had known both joy and suffering during the year, had met our own challenges, private and public.  Each of us had become a slightly different person, formed by the choices we had made, the path we had taken.  The changes in some were subtle – some of us were triumphant, some were weary, some were in love.  Some had grown wise.  Some had grown foolish.

I thought about my own year as I looked into their faces.  I too had known all of these things – love, suffering, joy, the challenge of choice at each turning.  And I was thankful that Christ was in the choices, in the choosing, at least for the most part.  When he wasn’t there, I generally chose wrongly, and most often became aware of sin taking hold of my heart. Then another turning, a repenting, a new beginning again with more choices.

And so I was thankful that Christ came among us as he did, that he too suffered, that he too made choices and experienced our human-ness.  He knew the love of his disciples and he knew betrayal in the garden.  He knew how to serve, to wash the feet of his friends.  He knew our hearts then and today, in each minute of our choices. He knew the love of the Father was so great that we would be brought home through himself, the Son, that we would be raised on the last day.

Incarnation.  God in the flesh.

We attended a local church for Christmas Eve Mass, an afternoon service so that our grandchildren (six and nine) could attend.  It is a historic mission-style church with dark wooden rafters and white stucco and vivid stained glass.  The sanctuary blazed with lights from two giant Christmas trees.  The Bethlehem manger scene was set out in front of the trees and I looked forward to the children’s Christmas Pageant.  The church was packed – folks stood along the side aisles and wedged into the pews.  We sang carols and listened to the Gospel accounts of Jesus come among us, born to Mary, watched over by Joseph in a humble stable.  A bright star appeared.  Shpherds knelt.  Kings offered gifts.  We welcomed Christ into our world and our into our own hearts with great fanfare, drums and song.

On Christmas Day, those golden moments hovered as I stirred gravy and heated potatoes, tossed spinach with candied walnuts and mandarin oranges.  They lingered as I spooned cranberries into white ceramic pitchers.  A platter of shrimp was set in the next room, an offering before the Christmas tree and as the guests arrived, their laughter and greetings flavored the dishes of brown-sugared yams and sausage stuffing.  The turkey lay sliced in its bed of parsley alongside platters of yeast rolls and cornbread squares.

We gathered around the buffet in the kitchen and prayed our thanksgivings.  We took our places at two long tables.  We toasted family and Christmas, Christ among us.  And I knew as I looked at the faces of three generations pulled to my table this Christmas Day that Christ was indeed among us.

Emmanuel.  God with us.  Merry Christmas!

We brought our Christmas tree home this last week and set it in the large bay window in the family room.  I poured hot water into the trunk’s basin, and stood back to look.  The tree tilted, but I thought it would be fine once it was decorated.  I opened boxes of last year’s decorations, and pulled out the mini-light string, trying to recall how it was that I had twirled them through the branches.  Slowly, with the help of a ladder, I began at the top and laced the tree with the lights, moving the ladder in a circle.  I plugged the two prongs of the cord into the wall socket.

I stood back and gazed at the colored lights, now lit, seeming so delicate against the heavy fir.  The lights would shine brighter in the dark, I thought.  They would light up the dark.

I pulled from another box a green and silver garland which was today’s version of the tinsel I painstakingly hung as a child.  My mother would dole single strands of silver tinsel to my sister and me, and we would choose a spot to let it dangle like an icicle.  One strand at a time.  It seemed to take forever, I recall, but by the end of the tinsel hanging ceremony we and the tree were one.

Today’s garland that replaced the tinsel was much easier to handle, and again I circled the tree, moving the ladder and laying the long band of green and sparkles gently the bed of fragrant needles.  I found the Styrofoam star from an old Christmas pageant – one we had covered with glittery paper and ribbon – and placed it gently at the top.

I stood back and gazed at the lights and the garland.  So far so good.  The rest of the decorations would be hung on Christmas Eve by the grandchildren.

The decoration of the Christmas tree, or trimming the tree as it was once called, marks the passage of time in our family.  I think of other trees and other lights and other garlands.  This year I had just finished writing our Christmas cards, and the names and faces lingered as I layered the lights through the greens.  Babies had been born, elderly friends had died.  Some of the names were new, some changed due to marriage or divorce.  Children had graduated, gone to college, left home.  Each name was a light on the tree, on its own journey.  My list of names was ever-changing, forming new garlands weaving through my life.  But the names that were removed from the list – those who had passed on to the next life, remained in my heart, enriching my memory as they had enriched my own passage through time.  And with joy I added new names, babies born to these blessed friends and family.

The Christmas tree is the tree of life, an ancient evergreen symbol of Christ and his body. Christ is the star shining on top.  He is the vine and we are the branches.  It is a holy wood from the Tree of Life in Eden and a holy wood from the cross on Golgotha.  The roots run deep.  Life pulses through the greens.

And so Christmas is just such a celebration of life, new life today, new life to come in Heaven, for, of course, the greatest gift of life is the birth the holy child in Bethlehem, who will come to us in the Eucharist, and who will come to us in the future to judge the living and the dead.  And as he gives himself to us, so we give to each other at Christmas.  We light candles to light the dark, as God lights the darkness of our world, now in the dead of winter.

Advent.  The advent of Our Lord among us.  In church today the children told the great story  of his coming.  They processed slowly down the red-carpeted aisle and took their places to sing carols and read lessons.  They told the story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace and the need for a Savior.  They told of the prophesies of the coming Messiah.  They told of Angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she would bear this child whom she would call Jesus, and of Joseph, and of the shepherds and the angels. As the last shepherd stepped slowly up the aisle to join the living crèche, the youngest babies, Izzy (six months) and Luisa (seventeen days), followed, cradled by grateful women.  It was a joyous moment, a time when all the children and parents and congregation joined together to praise God for his great gifts, his gift of himself, and his gift of these children to us.

And soon we received him in the bread and wine, kneeling before the high altar, uniting, aged seventeen days to ninety-five years.

Incarnation.  Birth.  Eucharist.  Miracles among us.  Christmas!

The temperatures have dropped and rain is forecast.  Will there be snow on Mount Diablo tonight?

It is the Christmas season, a time of bustle and buying, of gathering with friends and associates to share a meal, exchange gifts and greetings.  Happy Holidays we say more often than Merry Christmas, not wanting to offend other traditions.  Yet the holidays still center on Christmas Day.  The school vacations lead up to and fall away from this festival.  We as a nation still honor and live out in our culture this time of hope.

I give thanks that this remains so, although as Christians we must not be ashamed of our faith, not, as Christ said in today’s Gospel lesson, “be offended” by him.  We must live out our faith, respecting others, loving others.  We must not hide our light.  We must share the great hope of Christmas to all who have the ears to hear.

It all depends, I suppose, on who we claim Jesus Christ was, is.  In today’s lesson, St. Matthew (11:2+) describes  how John the Baptist, now in prison, sends two of his followers to see if Christ is indeed the long-awaited messiah. Jesus answers with a catalog of miracles: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up.  This is, of course, exactly what the prophets prophesied.  What did you expect to see? he asks.  Look at what I do.

In the Advent daily prayer offices we are immersed in those prophecies, and now see Christ reminding us that he truly is this long-awaited messiah.  We are also immersed in the terror of the apocalypse, the wrath of God upon the corrupt, the lawbreakers, those who hurt, lie, steal, kill.  We see a God who divides the wheat from the tares, the weeds.  We wait for our redemption, a way to be saved.  We wait for the way, the truth, and the life, the messiah who bridges this huge gulf between prophecy and judgment, this gulf of Advent.

And of course the Incarnation, Christmas, bridges this great gulf.  God provides a way out of ourselves and into his kingdom.  He provides this long-awaited messiah, Jesus Christ, who saves us from sin and thus from death.

Another time Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say I am?”  Peter answers, “You are Christ, Son of the living God.”

Today is Laetare Sunday, which means “Rejoice,” called this for the Latin introit, Rejoice in the Lord always… (Philippians 4).  Today is also Rose Sunday.  We light our pink candle and the two purple ones on the Advent wreathe, a lighter-themed day in our penitential season of purple. Today the theme is Heaven.  Advent one and two were themed Death and Judgment, Advent four, Hell.  Not many pastors preach on these traditional topics today, for some folks might be… well, offended.  But without facing death and judgment we have no need for Christ to give us the way to Heaven and not Hell.  And whether or not we face these things, they will face us.

Who is Jesus Christ?  Did he do the miracles recorded?  Did he fulfill the prophesies?  Was he born to a virgin in a cave outside Bethlehem on a cold starry night?  Did he live a life of miracles and die a shameful death, fulfilling even more prophecies?  And most important, did he rise from the dead as he foretold?

I believe he is indeed the messiah, long-awaited by the People of Israel.  I believe he did all these things described by the prophets and in the Gospels, all these astounding deeds which would, one would think, convince us that he was who he claimed to be.  Yet even after two thousand years, some believe, some don’t.  They never find the way.

Who is Jesus Christ?  The evidence, I believe, is clear and compelling.  I hold this faith close as I return to Isaiah and St. John’s revelations, as I too await the coming of God to a manger in great humility.  I hold this faith close as I sing with fellow believers, Come, O come, Emanuel, to ransom captive Israel… on this cold Laetare Sunday in the dead of winter.  I hold it close as I share meals with friends and family and wrap special gifts and decorate with pungent greenery and colored balls of glitter.  I hold this faith close as the day turns dark early and I light the fire in the fireplace and listen to calling-carols  and watch the heavy gray skies hover over the mountain.

Come, O come, Emmanuel, to ransom us.  Come, O come, Emmanuel… come and ransom little me.

The high winds sweeping northern California lessened today, and we woke to crystal clear skies, the bright sun shining this Second Sunday in Advent, a sun warming the cold air of December.

And so we bundled off to church to worship in our warm sanctuary.  The Advent wreath stood Gospel-left, near the chancel steps, and two purple candles flamed.  We listened to the poetic Collect (the opening prayer), written five hundred years ago by Thomas Cranmer and part of our Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick (living) and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal….

It is a prayer said in every Advent service, and each year, as part of my Advent rule, I try to re-memorize this wonderful summary of Christ’s coming to us.

We are a historical church, going back to Christ’s advent two thousand years ago. Through the centuries we have kept what is true and thrown out what is false, looking to the authority of Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Church year in and year out.  Part of that keeping is the keeping of words, for words are how most of us pray, how most of us touch God and hear his voice.  Words are how we make sense of our lives.  We call that keeping of words, our memory.

Much has been written recently, mourning the scarcity of memory work required in grade schools.  I recall memorizing poems, and working to root the words and phrases in my mind.  I would repeat and repeat and repeat, until finally the words became part of me, automatic.  Perhaps it was this automatic, “rote,” aspect that educators found to be without meaning, but, since I have returned to memorizing prayers and psalms, I find that the words become more meaningful, not less.  They become part of me.  And they are always there for me to hold onto, to remember, to light up the dark places in my life.

If poets and writers, prophets and preachers, from the past have captured truth with meaningful words, shouldn’t we memorize those expressions of truth?  We need to keep them close, engraft them onto our hearts and into our minds.

The children practiced the Christmas pageant today.  They are memorizing lines so that they can speak and sing the words, so that they can tell the miraculous story of Christmas to all the congregation.  God will work through our children, speaking through them to us.  Such a marvelous experience – to bring God’s words to his people.

I love re-memorizing the Collect for Advent each year.  We throw out the dark and arm ourselves with the light.  We are mortal and call upon the immortal, Jesus Christ who visits us in great humility.  We welcome this humble child born in a cave outside Bethlehem, so that when he returns in his glorious majesty, we will rise with him to life immortal.  This child wipes away our tears.  He saves us from ourselves, banishes the darkness.  Learning these words help me to hold these truths close.  They light my darkness.

I shall also keep Advent by reading Evening Prayer each night.  The Scripture lessons pair Isaiah’s prophecies with Revelation’s apocalypse.  The readings steep me in Christmas, the meaning of the Incarnation, the light transforming the darkness, no less than the redemption of man.

My new memory work this year, however, is found in our Morning Prayer office.  It is called the Benedictus, recorded by St. Luke.  It is Zacharia’s prophesy, spoken after his time of not being able to speak, after the birth of his son, John the Baptist: Blessed be the Lord God of Israel who has visited and redeemed his people, and has raised up a mighty salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spake by the mouths of his holy prophets which have been since the world began…

As I commit these words to memory, I shall pray them, engrafting them, calming the raging winds, warming the chilly air, lighting the dark.  As Christmas draws near, I will carry these words in my heart, just as Israel carried their hopes for the promised messiah.  The words shall be calling words, first spoken by Zacharias so many hears ago, words now spoken by little me, bringing Christ among us in this Year of Our Lord, Christmas 2011.

We call him and he comes.  We hold onto our memory, carried into the present with words.

In this time of war and rumors of war, of government intrusion into our lives on so many levels, it was good this week to pause and give thanks for our country, for our freedom of worship and speech.

I gave thanks.  I considered those who fled religious persecution to forge a new nation under God, guaranteeing each of us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The United States of America remains that nation as we struggle to protect life and ensure liberty so that we may indeed pursue happiness.  I gave thanks that I was lucky enough to be born in America.  I gave thanks that I am blessed to still be living, at the gentle age of sixty-four, and living in this exceptional nation.

I thought about liberty and its corollary, responsibility.  And with responsibility, I thought, comes a standard by which we measure our lives, define our duties to God, family, community, country.  With responsibility, comes self-examination.  With self-examination, hopefully, comes penitence and repentance, a turning.

The “I’m okay you’re okay” culture will not support liberty.  “That’s just me, just my thing, just the way I am” will not protect freedoms.  We must, as individuals forming culture, return to an acknowledgement of guilt, make our confessions – if I may be so bold to use the unpopular word – of sin.  Without this examination, we have little hope of ensuring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And so we enter Advent, that marvelous, mysterious, miraculous season of hope.  A four-week preparation for the great intersection of the eternal into the finite, the immortal into the world of the mortal.  The Incarnation.  In the flesh.  Christ-mas.  We recall that two thousand years ago God took on flesh and walked among us.

We celebrate with rich symbols: an evergreen tree laden twinkling with lights and fantastical ornaments, candles aflame, gifts expressing our love for one another, holy-day foods and drinks that sweeten the tongue and warm the heart.  We sing the stories of Christ’s coming so long ago so that we will not forget.  To prepare for his coming we sing calling-hymns, in minor keys, “O come, o come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel….”  The Messiah is coming… the one promised to the prophets!  As we draw nearer to Christmas Day we tell the story in our pageants and Gospel lessons.

Keeping Advent prepares us for Christ’s coming to us again and again in the Eucharist and coming to us in our daily prayers.  We prepare for his bodily Second Coming to earth, when a new world will be formed under his rule.  How do we prepare our hearts?  We clean them out to make room.  We examine our lives and throw out the clutter.

We simplify.  Not easy to do in our commercial culture of noise and bluster and busyness.  But we try.  We increase our daily prayer life; we go to church.  We pause in the stillness to hear him speak to us.

Even in our secular culture the great story of the Incarnation rises from our common consciousness in symbols, rituals, and stories.  Good Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop of Smyrna, appears to us as Santa Claus.  He drives a sled through the starry heavens full of gifts.  He brings hope and cheer, and a sort of justice, a rustic memory of God the Father.  His steadfast reappearance each year is, I think, for the most part a good thing.  In Santa we honor laughter, love, and sharing, not to mention responsible behavior.  Santa is making a list and checking it twice.  He is keeping a moral scorecard.  Examine and repent, Saint Nicholas reminds us through our children.  Will we listen?  Perhaps we are too grown-up to believe… too grown-up to bear freedom as it must be borne.  Perhaps we are not grown-up enough.

Because I am so very thankful for our freedom, I take this holy season of Advent to examine my heart, to turn to the light and away from the dark, to prepare for the child born in Bethlehem, the child that will save my soul.

O come, o come, Emmanuele.

I just finished Abby Johnson’s astonishing account of her move from being Director of a Planned Parenthood Clinic to a Coalition for Life spokesperson. I treasure so many moments in this book. I heartily recommend Unplanned.

I did not plan on encountering such a sympathetic, understanding portrait of the pro-choice, pro-abortion movement coming from one who had chosen to leave it. Abby clearly knows what it is to love your enemy. Or perhaps that is going too far – for she wouldn’t use the word enemy.

Since she was once on their staff, she can truly empathize, and she does. In this way Unplanned is a different kind of pro-life apologia. And, I think, she is on the right track, just as the prayer vigils outside abortion clinics are a better approach than showing graphic photos of aborted babies and name-calling.

One of the remarkable insights I received from Abby’s book, and there were many such flashes of sudden understanding, is how language is used to promote a viewpoint. As an avid reader and novelist, I have been long attuned to the use of language. But the power of word substitution such asfetus for baby, or termination for abortion, struck me forcibly. When we call that person growing in the womb a fetus and not a baby, a mindset change takes place. When we call the taking of life a medical proceduresolving a disease-like problem, a mindset change takes place.

I considered how we all lie to ourselves, how we all avoid some of the hard truths of life. We avoid thinking about our own deaths, for we might need to examine our own lives. We avoid examining our own lives, for we might need to admit fault, an admission that suggests, even demands, change. We avoid God, sliding away from proofs for his existence, for we might need to obey his commandments, beginning with regular Sunday worship. We slip and we slide, many times without being aware of it. And often our culture encourages the sliding.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said. While I would argue that every life is worth living, I see his point. Man needs meaning and direction, and such meaningful direction comes from an examined life. We become whole when we understand where we are going and why. We experience joy when we come to know the author of that path. Without God, we wander and we wonder. Eventually, we despair.

The Church’s season of Advent approaches, the four weeks that prepare us for the coming of Christ, Christmas. Some call it a “mini-Lent,” although our culture discourages such observance, particularly in the December frenzy of shopping and parties. Even so, it is a time to examine one’s life. It is a time to return to God, to seek order and meaning in our choices each and every day. It is a time to go back to church to find him.

I find that Advent and Lent pull me into reality, return sanity to my life, particularly if my time on earth has not been recently examined. They are seasons of preparation for the great acts of God among us – the Incarnation in a cave outside Bethlehem, the Crucifixion and Resurrection on a hill outside Jerusalem. Advent is a time to examine my life, hold it up to God’s standards and repent of the slips and slides that I may not have recognized during the year.

As I read Abby Johnson’s powerful and sympathetic first-person account, I gave thanks to God for his working among us. I was reminded that each of us can be manipulated by words, propaganda, and societal pressure. Do we want to be blown about by others? I think not. Only God can give us the strength and wisdom to live a true life, an examined life, a life-welcoming life, a life planned by God, if perhaps unplanned by us.

Thank you, Abby Johnson.