Wondrous and Mundane: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

Space is still filled with the noise of destruction and annihilation, the shouts of self-assurance and arrogance, the weeping of despair and helplessness. But round about the horizon the eternal realities stand silent in their age-old longing.  Alfred Delp

The thing I love most about Advent is the heartbreak. The utter and complete heartbreak. Jerusalem Jackson Greer

Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.  Remy de Gourmont

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. Laurell K. Hamilton

We don’t heal in isolation, but in community. S. Kelley Harrell

We were refugees from ourselves.  Chris Cleave

One should be kinder than needed.  R. J. Palacio

The science behind nudging is little more than a thin set of claims about how humans are “predictably irrational,” and our policies and systems should heavily divest from its influence. Leif Weatherby

This mere snippet of our Milky Way, for me and others, serves as a daily reminder of the incomprehensible vastness of our universe as well as the extraordinary “constellation” of ingredients – including our relative planetary isolation – which has given life on this “third rock from the sun” at least a “puncher’s chance” of sustainable survival.

For me, images such as the one above courtesy of Hubble and Webb, speak to both the nature of Advent and to the complexities of our human condition.  Somehow, someway, we are the beneficiaries of life-permitting distance from the black holes, massive meteor incursions, supernovas and other solar instability which punctuate our galaxy and which could easily hasten the end of life as we know it.  That we have not treated our planetary abundance with the reverence that our galactic positioning warrants is yet another example of our genetic and temperamental limitations, one more reason for all of us to pay closer attention to who we are, what we long for, what we actually cherish, and who we might still become, timing, courage and intention permitting.

Little of the above, of course, would make sense to those long ago, praying under galactic illumination for something or someone to come and redirect the course of humanity, any more than would the eventual, incarnate embodiment of this redirection – a child of cosmic implications and modest means huddled in a barn.

This Advent as with others, I have tried to highlight what for me is a compelling image of a figure in “lonely exile” sitting on the edge of hill beholding the vastness of space in a world without artificial light and the conveniences and distractions which it brings to our own time. How do we make sense of the brilliance and awesomeness of the firmament juxtaposed against the drudgery of much of life then as now, drudgery punctuated by the longing that something or someone can come to us – to our families and communities – providing balm for our seasonal heartbreak while restoring our largely broken hope, a hope that many of us have almost given up believing we have what it takes to bring it home for ourselves and those we cherish.

This “lonely exile” motif highlights some of the complexities of our earthly sojourn, reaching for the stars and yet compelled to attend to some oft-mundane human needs, scanning the heavens for signs of hope while remembering to plant the crops, feed the livestock, prepare the meals, wash the utensils, and change the diapers (or whatever passed for diapers in those times).  Even in Advent, for some of us especially in Advent, we are constantly being dragged back into the habits of our pragmatic busyness, our preparations for the season of the manger which are more about material satisfaction than about spiritual consumption, more about getting our worldly goods in their preferred alignment than honoring the one we had long had the temerity to anticipate, the hope for humanity born into a thinly veiled chaos of social discrimination, straw bedding and bitter cold.   

There is little that would help most in times past to anticipate or even make sense of THAT child in THAT manger at the end of a sequence of longing, reflection and even heartbreak. For more than a few, it makes even less now as we have more or less resigned ourselves to our addictive and even counter-productive politics and diplomatic convenings, accepting the production of ever-new weapons that can kill ever-more antiseptically, threatening the future of the children we proclaim to love in order to satisfy current cravings, and introducing ever new technological manifestations such as “Artificial Intelligence” which among other things underscores the failures of humans to fully cultivate the full range of our indigenous capacities, the memory, reason and skill which constitute our inheritance- — genetic and divine – and which should have placed us long ago on a saner, kinder, less predatory, more just and peaceful path than the one we now routinely tread.

My personal “path” to Advent has not always been as aware nor as productive as it could have been.  I often spend Sunday mornings in New York engaged in a combination of activities which help to cleanse my often-clogged, spiritual palate, and which almost always include skype calls with friends and colleagues and a visit to a nearby farmer’s market with my best neighbor. But another Sunday ritual with Advent implications involves a walk to a neighborhood park to take in the bells of Riverside Church. Sitting under a rendition of Gabriel and his trumpet, I often find myself wishing that the stone could magically turn to flesh and that the trumpet could finally sound out its urgent notes, signaling some desperately needed backup from the beyond, some fortification of our now tepid and at times even duplicitous efforts to reverse climate impacts or halt our various predations and the conflicts from which they stem.  Even I who have thrown my life (alongside so many others) into an unsettled pot of policy and service can at times give in to the temptation – indeed the heartbreak – of fearing that we (and I) just don’t have what it takes to straighten out the messes we have made, that the elements of our cognitive and emotional inheritance are simply insufficiently practiced and cultivated to save us from ourselves. 

But save us we must, with whatever human capacities we can bring to bear, hopefully to include the full range of skills and intelligences that we have been endowed with but have yet to fully energize.  To help this process along in my own life, when I am able and when the darkness enveloping me grants opportunity, I join the “lonely exile”in peering into the vastness of space as a means of recovering my sense of place in all its blessings and limitations, perceiving light reaching the end of its unintentional sojourn to earth spanning many thousands, even millions of our earthly years, light emanating from celestial bodies which now bear only provisional resemblance in real time to what the light reveals to us in our own time, light which also suggests that maybe we are not so imposing a species after all, indeed as much of our treatment of the natural world (and of each other) would already suggest.

For me, such revelations from the great void tend to shake me to my core. For is it not the miracle of Advent that despite our “failure to launch” as a species, despite our often lazy and self-referential engagements with our otherwise formidable capacities, despite our persistent bouts of “self-assurance and arrogance” in the material plane which routinely call out the demons of greed and indifference but less often the courage or the wonder, is it not a miracle of sorts that the vastness of cosmos and divinity has been mindful of us, has bothered with us in this time and place, has perhaps even taken us to heart at times more than we seem to have taken ourselves?

Indeed, is this not also the wonder of the manger from the standpoint of faith, this incarnate blending of the divine and the mundane, the peace which passes all understanding informing a peace to which we only occasionally give expression and which we often do not know how to effect even in our most intimate spaces? We have, to quote a Christian prayer book, “erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” But even more, we have set ourselves on the path to become “refugees to ourselves,” unsure how to fuse the wonder of the heavens and the chores of our immediate circumstances; how to reach for the stars and fetch the waters essential to this life; how to integrate humility and show kindness beyond that which is immediately required; how to heal wounds — together — which are often deep but which never physically show themselves; how to incarnate, cultivate and sustain skills and capacities which our world still needs and which we still have at the ready, albeit in forms too-often reminiscent of beautiful gardens overcome with weeds or sumptuous foodstuffs contaminated with mold. 

This is too much about we refugees and our limitations perhaps.  But if so, Advent can serve as a reminder to ensure that our reflections on the season are also about the best of us, the best of what we can imagine, the best of what we can desire, the best of what we can accomplish. The longings and mysteries of Advent and the coming of the manger child, for me at least, bear witness to many things, perhaps the most significant of which is that our collective best of skills and capacities remain as a formidable conduit for mercy and healing, for peace and caring. And somehow, by some measure of the grace we can barely comprehend, all this lies still within our grasp.

Storm Tracker: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

Mercury

You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.  Dejan Stojanovic

Once they’ve rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.  Kouta Hirano

So long awaited that its coming was a shock.  Mohsin Hamid

One who is fed on promises feeds from an empty bowl.  Marsha Hinds

For unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.  Françoise Sagan

You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.  Dejan Stojanovic

It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough.  Charles H. Spurgeon

It is Christmas Eve morning in a deceptively-sunny New York.   Deceptive in that the temperature is 7 degrees F, the winds are howling through windows that leak more than a typical Congressional aide and that have so far resisted all my efforts to tape their edges. The heat now comes on and off and the ‘hot” water is tepid at best.

I am blessed.

Blessed because there is oatmeal and apple in the house. Blessed because we were able to track the impending blast from an unstable Arctic and had some time to prepare.  Blessed because I am not sitting in an airport after a long night of searching for food and explaining to increasingly unsettled children why they might not make it to grandma’s house after all.  Blessed because the leaks in my home, much like the leaks in my life, are much more likely to be plugged than those who will face another holiday in prison or trying to steal some rest in the far corner of an empty subway platform.

Blessed because I did not have to spend an icy night tending to a newborn child in a barn.

But as in years past, despite our endless predispositions to violence, our ever-hardening hearts and our well-practiced capacity to look away from the storms we well have the capacity to track, the newborn child comes as “light and dream;” as a reminder that the life we have built is not necessarily the life to which we are now called; that the storms which we face – and the storms we make – are still within our remedial range; that the promise of that birth is not just another “empty bowl” but rather as grace to as Stevie Nicks once wrote, to allow the “child in our hearts to rise above,” such that we might “handle the seasons” of our lives” with greater generosity and dignity, with a firm gratitude for blessings that can survive the cold and all the other storms with which we are currently afflicted, blessings as represented in that manger which we pretend to anticipate each and every Christmas year but which somehow still come to us as a shock.

As most of you know, we are still engaged on a regular basis at the United Nations, though this past year of access has made us wonder a bit about our value, real and perceived.  While change at the UN can be even more glacial than waiting for teenagers to vacate a single family bathroom, we have witnessed some shifts in attitude – a growing sense that a UN which has been too much about promises as “empty bowls,” anticipating storms with considerable skill but then playing politics with responses which do not take seriously the expectations of constituents, that UN is increasingly incarnating a practical recognition that forecasts must be accompanied by active preparations and, when needed, emergency accompaniment.  More and more, whether on biodiversity protection, poverty reduction in the Sahel, online hate speech or gang violence in Haiti, UN agencies and their leadership are genuinely starting to “fill the bowls” with tangibility, with something more than endless rhetorical aspiration, condemnations which have long-lost their impact, or emergency provisions from often-remarkably dedicated humanitarians mostly accessible only after some of the proverbial horses have already left the stable. 

Especially during this holy season, I often wonder what exactly is wrong with us, is wrong with me? Do we truly lament that “we cannot love enough?” And if so, what do we do about that?  What’s our plan to energize that skill? And what are the signposts indicating that we are making progress on perhaps this most essential of human attributes, signs that we are truly commited to caring beyond our current capacities, loving better despite ourselves, pushing harder to balance the world in lieu of some of our modest, even petty personal aspirations?

Those of you who regularly consume these posts (I feel for you) recognize the predisposition to equate loving with attentiveness and discernment.  Despite my own limitations, I remain firmly committed to the task both philosophical and practical set out by my graduate school mentor Maxine Greene who hopefully suggested that “we want ourselves to break through some of the crusts of convention, the distortions of fetishism, the sour tastes of narrow faith.” Such “crusts” and “distortions” simply have no place in institutions devoted to the care of human souls nor other aspects of the global public good in a time of intersecting crises.  Such “narrow faith” has no place in a season calling us to “fill the bowls” with goodness and mercy; calling us to resolutely discern the times and supercharge our attentiveness; calling us to eschew any and all forms of resignation and be the light that a shivering child in a manger gave us sanction to be.

The temperature outside has risen to 9 degrees.  The water in the sink is getting warmer.  The winds are still compromising what passes for apartment windows, but now more like a knife through hard cheese than soft butter.  And the baby in the barn is calling out to us once again to be that light unto the world, to be the dreamers who can flip our global storms into fresh and sustainable possibilities for future generations of humans and the species on which our very lives depend. 

We can do this.   Happy Christmas.

Muscle Pain: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.  bell hooks

All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.  Charlotte Brontë

Your gentleness shall force more than your force move us to gentleness.  William Shakespeare

An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.  Ayn Rand

Everything precious was also vulnerable.  Mary H.K. Choi

While most of us are, at some level, guilty of creating what some scribes and religious texts refer to as “graven images” of deeper and more challenging spiritual realities, our imaging has taken a particularly sinister turn as this season of Advent transitions into the season of the Christmas manger.

Many have seen for ourselves images of smiling elected officials and others sitting around Christmas trees while holding deadly weapons and asking Santa for suitable ammunition. We have also heard preachers, not always from obscure denominational backgrounds, urging a brand of “godly” violence in an effort, or so it seems, to drag an otherwise disredited version of Christianity out of the shadows and on to the pedestal of governance. It is as though we never abandoned the aspiration of “holy empire” nor ceased to honor the (mostly) men who perpetuated it.

Putting forth a notion of a “muscular Jesus” is not a new phenomenon in our culture, but in some circles it is clearly poised to make some fresh noise.  An article this week in the Washington Post by Peter Manseau cited the desire in some “Christian” quarters for a “viral and manly Jesus” on the basis of which weapons and other threats of force can be justified, necessary to the “preservation of the good,” including the good of restoring a more testosterone-laden version of Christianity which, as they see it, had been allowed (by liberals mostly) to get too soft, too gentle, too “feminine” as it were.

This relishing of muscular force as a global (and even religious) good has a long and checkered past.  While taking a break from weekly posts, I came upon a commentary on the iconic “Iliad” by the illustrious Simone Weil, one in which she reminds us of the deeper truths embedded in that seminal work, truths about ourselves including our almost genetic obsession with violence and its justifications.  As she navigates the text, she is clear throughout that the “center of the Iliad is force,” force that enslaves, force before which our “flesh shrinks away,” force which “turns anybody subjected to it into a thing,” in essence making “corpses” of all of us.

This is sobering reflection, made more so by the accuracy of its portrayal.   As a species we have long been addicted to the allure of force, which includes the assumption (until proven otherwise) that our choices are only between the projection of force and its receipt, that we have little recourse in this life aside from being on one end of a weapon or another, creating things out of people or, alternatively, enduring the experience of being turned into things by others.

This dystopian view generates plenty of supporting evidence, and we often seem surprised by how shallow are our collective alternatives, our practical commitments to the values of peace, dignity, compassion and tolerance. Weil notes that in the Iliad there are moments of grace to be found, but these are often buried along with the corpses of those fallen in battle or through siege, signaling the likelihood that the cycles of violence to which we have become all-too-accustomed are poised to flare up yet again.

And yet amidst the pain and carnage of our weapons and muscular mindsets, a child is born, a son is given, a manger barely fit for livestock has become the stage for a different way of engaging the world, one less involved in pumping iron and packing heat, and more interested in demonstrating that, even in this force-addicted world, another more peaceful course forward is possible.

The manger, after all, is more than a humble birthing location; it is a metaphor for what is to come: a life spent bringing dignity to outcasts who might otherwise have been ignored; a life bearing forgiveness in settings where many of us would likely succumb to bitterness; a life showering compassion on the sick and hungry beyond the influence of any comfort zone; a life rejecting the very violence and self-reference which some in his name would have you believe is a core component of a proper, “manly” faith.  We hear the testimony of that divine life: Give him your cloak as well.  Put away your sword.  Cease your elbowing for honor and recognition. Understand that the ways of the world – embracing the coerciveness of muscular force – will not be your way, must not be your way if we are to have a way forward at all.  

That same manger also sends a message to those who fear above all their own vulnerability and insufficiency, who measure strength by their ability to coerce others and even make them beg for mercy, who seek to double down on the terms of the current world rather than the terms which the ministry of Jesus embodies, a message that there is grace, dignity and forgiveness to be found emanating from the most extreme and forlorn places, even from a barn at the edge of town on a bone chilling night.

The late senior pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, William Sloane Coffin, used to speak of the essential Christmas choice as one between “shoving and loving.”  This always struck me as hopeful but not uncomplicated phrasing.  For we have constructed a world where the threat and use of force is, for many, the wallpaper that covers their world, an expectation that literally envelops their reality with its overly-muscular and militarized imagery, its inflexible bureaucracies, its self-refereential supervision, its stubborn power imbalances. It is hard for many now, as perhaps it has always been, to imagine a world suggested by the manger – vulnerable beginnings which transition into lives which are threatening only to those whose influence in the world is a byproduct of what we at the UN refer to often as “coercive measures rather than of commitments to compassion, forgiveness, dignity and equity.

And the “loving” option is certainly no simple matter either.  Indeed, it is a matter much more easily professed than discharged, a claim too often drowning in intangible sentiment that sounds perpetually better in theory than in practice.  Love is, for most of us, an easy choice, but as we soon find out is one fraught with missed connections and self-deceptions.  We tend to forget (or ignore) how much of our being is earmarked for competition, possession and, yes, force, and this is increasingly true in some measure across lines of gender, culture and ethnicity.  We are generally not as loving as we profess to be, surely not towards ourselves, certainly not towards others.

But having made the choice to eschew a life defined by “shoving” is an important transitional step, a step in keeping with a humble manger and the divine spark which emanated from it. While loving may ultimately offer “no place of safety,” as the late Gloria Jean Watkins (bell hooks) reminded us, it does offer us a path to follow, one suggested by humble origins and a subsequent life of divine purpose, a path which can take us to places where muscular force and the pain it inflicts has a measurably declining impact on how and why we live, what we can reasonably and hopefully aspire to for ourselves, our communities and our progeny.

The manger signifies more than merely tickling our sentiment.  It suggests a fresh way forward, a path towards higher levels of dignity and service; a path towards reversing the self-inflicted decay which now envelops too much of our planet, a path wherein we are moved to both protect what is most vulnerable and invest in what is most precious such that others can also share in the remaining manifestations of abundance which we who are most privileged so often prefer to horde.

Let us be clear: the Jesus we revere especially on this Christmas Day did not advocate violence nor find it attractive; did not spend his precious time on earth working on his abs; was not to be found “packing heat” (or the biblical equivalent) on the donkey that carried him ultimately into Jerusalem; did not conveniently turn away from acts of compassion and healing, even unto death.  And while he apparently turned over a table or two in the temple and had more than a few harsh words for those who represented or enabled a coercive empire, his cheeks always seemed to be turned.

Despite the contentions of some muscle-bound, force-challenged Christians, the Jesus who emerged from the Christmas manger is not “masked death” but unmasked life, offering guidance towards a world where the pain from coercion is no longer coin of the realm, and where what is most precious is duly acknowledged, protected and shared.  This is why the wonders and aspirations of Christmas still matter to me.  Perhaps to you as well.