Things that Fit Together

Let me hear what God will  speak, ... Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. God will give what is good… from Psalm 85

Did you ever ponder how some things in life just fit together – like Advent and Christmas, mustard and baloney, bread and butter, popcorn and movies – you know what I’m talking about – some things just naturally seem to go together. However – because life is what life is – the things that go together don’t always remain together. Like all the plastic food containers without their lids or that one lonely sock in the bottom of your suitcase.

I’m sure – you – if you are 7 or older, realize that sometimes throughout the days and months and years some of the things that belong together – for whatever reason – get separated, become alienated and lost. Maybe you - and your best childhood friend - or your lover - are estranged. Perhaps you are separated from someone you love – someone who has had great impact on your life and now you aren’t speaking and it feels too hard or hurtful to reach out for renewal and reconciliation. Well, this is a good season for you.

As we move through Advent - waiting, preparing, reflecting and repenting, we are reminded once more that this journey offers expectation of a time when God will embody within us the realm of God – the kingdom of God - which is now and still to come. The Psalmist from today’s reading forecasts a time when things and places in our lives that appear to be  separated will be healed and reconciled. The Psalmist tells us of a glorious day of salvation when love and faithfulness will meet together, righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

Difficult to imagine isn’t it – difficult to discern this time of peace and hope within the world we know and experience. I think that’s why we need Advent and Christmas – a period of expectation and reflection as the season points us again and again – year after year – to the birth of Jesus. I don’t understand this but what I believe is - the birth of Christ changed creation and the order of things as we have known them. His birth put something new into motion – into action – God’s plan to bring together the things that belong together and have throughout time become separated – you know – you and me, our neighbors and friends - us and God. The Psalmist sings and rejoices for the day peace and righteousness will reign throughout the universe.

As you reflect upon your life and loved ones this season – upon the things that belong together but are separated, may you find love, hope, joy and peace in God’s never failing promise that what has been broken can and will be made whole.

We tend to manage life more than just live it. We are all over stimulated and drowning in options. We are trained to be managers, to organize life, to make things happen. That is what built our culture. It is not all bad, but it you transfer that to the spiritual life, it is pure heresy.– Fr. Richard Rohr from Preparing for Christmas

Growing up I didn’t know Mary much. She was that lovely, flawless Madonna, Jesus’ mother, and that was about it. As I developed a new understanding of Mary theologically, Mary has been a companion and model of Christian servanthood. As Mother of Sorrows, she has walked with me in my own loss and prays with me for the grieving. As advocate for peace, she guides my prayers for those victimized by violence.

Each liturgical year we return to the Mary of the Annunciation for what she can teach us:   her humility, trust, obedience, her powerful “Yes,” risking all that she is to become a vessel of the holy will of God. This season, though, it is a certain kind of receptivity to what life brings her that I want to try to understand, that I want to shape me. In whatever form the divine “messenger” came, it was a staggering experience breaking into her life with astounding words about her future. But rather than doubting, feeling unworthy, or running screaming into the hills, she is described as “perplexed”—puzzled, bewildered, wondering. She listens deeply, her fears stilled, and she begins to “ponder.” This meditative and reflective stance, different from needing to discount, decide, manage, judge, keeps her open.  She asks a question, but it is not like Zachariah’s desire for certainty and proof in his own divine encounter—“how shall I know”; it is a wondering question: “How can this be?”

Mary’s receptivity requires a kind of spaciousness in the self that doesn’t urge us to quick conclusions, that allows us to hold uncomfortable oppositions together without canceling one out, that bids us stay in the midst of all that is swirling around in us. It involves, according to Fr. Rohr, a “gradual emptying of our attachment to our small self so that there is room for a new conception and a new birth. There must be some displacement before there can be any new ‘replacement.’ Mary is the archetype of such self-displacement and surrender.”

Prayer

I need this Mary right now. And many I know do. Rather than acting out of fear of the uncertain future or painful loss or trying to control God’s movement in our lives with a worthiness contest, may we pray into the spacious expansiveness of waiting, in the full trust that the grace-filled birth already begun in us will indeed become a holy child. Amen.

Meditation on World AIDS Day 2009

They remembered that God was their Rock, that God Most High was their Redeemer. Psalm 78:35

Today is World AIDS Day, observed every year on December 1st. The yearly remembrance and awareness day was established by The World Health Organization in 1988. Today, over a million Americans are estimated to be living with the disease and worldwide well over 33 million people are living with HIV. It is a day that governments, many faith traditions, community organizations, and individuals are provided with an opportunity to focus attention on the global AIDS epidemic. 

I remember the first time I saw the AIDS quilt in the mid 1990's. Even in those days, there were enough panels that together covered an entire convention center floor. It was a sobering sight, more profound than viewing acres of headstones in a cemetery, because each of the panels was a personal product of love, carefully sewn together by those who made valiant attempts to sum up entire lifetimes in small rectangles of fabric. They varied as much as the personalities of those memorialized, and I noticed that the most repeated phrase in the religious ones often made reference to God as the Rock, the one immovable source of comfort and stability in the early days of the sudden epidemic's unexpected tragedies.

Most visitors that day were either silent or spoke in hushed tones and as I said my own silent prayers remembering many dear friends memorialized in cotton and felt, I began to realize that, whether we knew it or not, were not on a cold convention floor at all, but were reverently strolling on that same Rock that is always there to bear us in times of our greatest losses; the Rock of peace that passes understanding holding up those with faith as well as those without.