Deliver us from the presumption of
coming to this table for solace only and not for strength, for pardon only and
not for renewal.
-- BCP Holy
Eucharist Rite 2 Prayer C
Grace to you and peace from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ as we begin a new liturgical year with this holy
season of Advent.
The liturgical year is our practice of acting out the Christian meta-narrative of salvation over the course of 12
months. It begins with the prophesies of longing and hope, progresses through
each stage of the life of Jesus, and culminates in the Feast of Christ the
King. This seasonal ritual is one of our most controversial Episcopal practices.
It is constantly under attack by those who want to dumb down the Church into
religious entertainment and psycho-spiritual analgesic. From their perspective,
I grant that the liturgical year just gets in the way. It evokes feelings that
they’d rather repress and does not always allow for the religious pick-me-up
they want each week. But Anglican Spirituality is not religious entertainment
or psycho-spiritual analgesic. If we want those things, Anglicanism is not for
us. It can only offer a second rate knockoff of what the big box churches do
better. Anglican Spirituality is about something else altogether – something we
cannot hope to achieve in a dumbed down way.
I respect the right of other Christians – ok,
many Christians, maybe most Christians – to disagree. But my argument for the
liturgical year isn’t just an aesthetic preference on my part. If life is a
spiritual journey with ups and downs, joys and sorrows, regrets and
aspirations, all steps toward a holy destiny, then we have to liturgically
support all those things. To turn worship into religious entertainment or
psycho-spiritual analgesic is to say one of two things about life: 1. This hard
thing we are getting through is all there is, so the best we can hope to do it
cheer each other up on the way to the gallows; or 2. There is redemption in the
next life, but how we have lived this earthly transitory existence does not
matter for that. God will save us – or not – without regard to our spiritual
transformation through the years. One way says life is tragic. The other says
it is irrelevant. Both of those views amount to despair over any meaning and
value in the struggle that now occupies our time, our attention, and our
passion.
When we plan a liturgy out of that despairing
assumption, it just doesn’t even work to do what it is trying to do. The
liturgical and musical attempts to be upbeat all the time have a hollow ring
that breaks my heart for the people. The leaden core of despair shows thorugh
the thin gold plate. One cannot write a symphony with just one note or paint
much of portrait with only bright colors.
Anglican Spirituality, however, is about a
lifelong journey of transformation – “from glory unto glory” we say – as we are
changed step by step into the likeness of Christ, as we become little by little
the person we were always intended to be, as the fragmented parts of ourselves
are pieced together into a coherent whole. This is an entirely different
project. It is getting ready to meet God, whom “I myself shall see, him who is
my friend and not a stranger.”
In his classics The Will To Believe (1896) and Varieties
Of Religious Experience (1902), William James, the father of American psychology, wrote before dumbed down
Christianity was so widespread. (Even the Great Awakening had real content. Read
Jonathan Edwards!) So when James talks
about Christianity, he has something mainline in mind. Speaking strictly psychologically,
he found Buddhism and Christianity to be the two most effective world religions
at equipping people for life. Their adequacy rested on their capacity to
acknowledge and work with the breadth and depth of human experience, including
the parts of human experience we might be tempted to deny, ignore, or repress.
He contrasted these psychologically adequate traditions with something he
called “the Religion of Happy Mindedness.” I don’t know who was espousing that
brand of religion in James’s day, but it would later be promoted as “positive
thinking” by Norman Vincent Peale and “expecting a miracle” by Robert Schuller.
Liturgically, much (not all) of the charismatic renewal movement pushed aside
the more emotionally nuanced and multi-toned traditional liturgies for the
consistently upbeat style that came to be known as “happy clappy.” James said
the Religion of Happy Mindedness was ineffective and ultimately made things
worse by adding to life’s hardships the burden of perpetually pretending
everything is “fine thank you.”
When Churches shift from Anglican
Spirituality to the Religion of Happy Mindedness, the liturgical year ceases to
make sense for them. In fact, it becomes decidedly inconvenient, much as
reality is inconvenient to anyone who hopes to stay in the same mood or mental
state all the time. The liturgical year is part and parcel of Christianity’s
way of addressing and working comprehensively with all of life. It is also part
of bringing us along step by step in a process of lifelong transformation.
Before explaining how the liturgical year
works, I need to acknowledge that its effectiveness depends on how it is
implemented. The liturgical year includes seasons of solemnity, which some
clergy, musicians, and congregations render as dreary, mournful, and gloomy.
Our liturgy is meant to be emotionally nuanced, rarely grim, boring, or
mournful. I have, however, heard lilting consolation songs like “My Shepherd
Will Supply My Need” played and sung as dirges. That is not what I am
espousing.
The underlying assumption of the liturgical
year is about how change happens. We are clipping along with a particular understanding,
in a particular way, at a particular level. As long as that is “working for
us,” we will probably just keep clipping along that way. For any change to
happen, any deep transformation, there must first occur a falling apart, a disintegration.
The old ways no longer work as they once did. So the first movement of change
is downward. It is a kind of falling.
The (Season After) Pentecost is called
“ordinary time.” We will say more about that season later, but for now, think
of it as clipping along in our ordinary way, believing what we are accustomed
to believing, feeling our usual way, praying the old way, doing what we do.
Then Advent comes and tells us God is still a long way off. There is something
missing. We come up against the experience of exile, of alienation, the sense
that we are not at home here. Things are not all right. The ordinary no longer
works for us. We read Isaiah’s lament, “O that you would tear open the heavens
and come down!” We sing in a minor key “O come O come Emmanuel and ransom
captive Israel that waits in lonely exile here.” It is not a song of grief or
sorrow, but of longing for God who is not so present in our lives as we might
wish. The Kingdom has not yet come. There is dissatisfaction in that.
Dissatisfaction is not popular. We’d rather
pretend it away. So it is common for people to object to Advent worship, to
skip the expectation and go straight to the celebration – a birth with no
pregnancy. Yet, look at the sky. This is the time of year when days grow short
and nights, long. There is darkness in nature. It is a quiet time, a reflective
time in nature – but not at the Mall, where Muzak plays “it’s beginning to look
a lot like Christmas,” ergo “buy,
buy, buy.” I sometimes suspect that the upbeat commercial message that “it’s
the most wonderful time of the year” when nature is telling us to “be still and
wait” is part of the psychological disjuncture that drives so much suicide and
domestic violence come January. Perhaps I overstate my case, but the spirit of
Advent does accord with the rhythms of nature while the happy clappy sales
message is discordant.
This Advent 1, I worshiped in a church that
had a crèche up front. But the crèche was empty – for now. It reminded me of
how my battle for the liturgical year began at the first church I served as a
priest. Rationally, you might think I could have solved this with a
straightforward conversation. Trust me. That would not have worked. So I
engaged in a mischievous game of subterfuge instead and enjoyed myself a great
deal instead of getting grouchy about the desecration of the liturgical year.
The Altar Guild would put out the crèche
complete with Baby Jesus and the Wise Men on Advent 1. I would steal Jesus and
the Wise Men and put them back in the closet. The Altar Guild would put them
back out. I would put them back in the closet. And so it went until Christmas
Eve, when I would leave Jesus in the manger. The 2nd day of
Christmas, the Altar Guild would put the crèche away in the closet. I would dig it back out and set it up again.
They would put it away again. I would dig it back out again, until we got to
Epiphany when I would return the Wise Men.
Downward movements in the liturgical year are
always a falling onto a trampoline. We bounce up to something new, something
happier, something with more hope than we had before. That is the Christmas
Season – for emphasis Christmas Season. It
last 12 days because it takes that long to take in the miracle.
Christmas comes at last as an encounter with
the Divine in human form. After acknowledging God’s absence from the world,
Christmas calls our attention to God’s presence in ourselves and in each other.
This is the most humanist of seasons. It is the most material of seasons.
Putting Advent and Christmas side by side is a way to ritually express and
experience the great paradox in our belief about God. We say God is
“transcendent” meaning God is so far beyond us we cannot even grasp who God is.
We don’t have a clue. That is awesome but also lonely because the transcendent
God is so “way beyond the blue” that we feel alone. That is the theme of
Advent. But we also say God is “immanent” meaning God is present everywhere, in
each grain of sand, in each moment, in each situation – “No, never alone.” God
is here in us and all the people we encounter. We meet God made small for us.
We can’t do that in one day while opening presents and eating a feast. It takes
a little time to soak in a miracle that changes the very meaning of being
human. By walking the road of human life, God makes it sacred.
The spiritual pattern below shows Ordinary
Time (Pentecost) collapsing into the poignant longing of Advent, rebounding
upward through the 12 Days of Christmas, then being appropriated into the “new
normal” of the next ordinary time (Epiphany).
/---------------
/
------- /
\ /
\ /
\ /
Christmas roughly coincides with the Winter
Solstice when light begins to return to our world. So the rebound is into a
season of light in which we take the new experience of Christ’s incarnate
presence into our normal daily awareness. “We proclaim Christ as Lord ourselves
as your servants for Jesus’ sake for the same God who said ‘Let light shine’
has caused his light to shine in us . . ..” “This little light of mine, I’m
gonna let it shine.”
That season of light lasts several weeks
culminating in Transfiguration Sunday; but then our new normal falls apart just
as our old normal did. The light that revealed Christ eventually reveals what
remains sinful and wounded in our hearts. We plunge again, this time much
deeper, into the regret and the chaos of Lent. The 40 day Season of Lent
recalls Jesus’ 40 day fast in the wilderness, which in turn recalls the
children of Israel’s 40 years wandering there. It is a time of deconstruction,
when beliefs are questioned – especially the self-serving beliefs we have
constructed about our own characters. It is a season of purgation, cleansing,
bio-spiritual detoxing. Awareness of mortality hangs over our Lenten
discipline. Ernest Becker’s old classic The
Denial of Death argued that most of our neurotic patterns of feeling, most
of our behavior that is destructive of self or others, most of our numbness to
life stems from our resolute denial of death. So just as the discovery of his
own mortality sent Gilgamesh on his spiritual journey, we face our mortality
and it wakes us up.
Lent is a deeper darker plunge than Advent,
but it springs back higher than Christmas when we rebound into Easter. Holy
Week brings Lent to a bloody violent crisis (yes, it is a messy faith to match
our messy life – it ain’t all pretty adorned with lilies). Then the Great
Easter Vigil erupts into “Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord Is risen indeed! Alleluia!”
bell-ringing exuberant singing of the Gloria. And so the Resurrection Season
begins leading upward, upward, upward into the Feast of the Ascension, then
Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. Death has been defeated, life has been
vindicated, God is revealed, and we are empowered/inspired to a new life, the
life for others.
Then comes the long season of ordinary time,
the season after Pentecost, when we have something so large to assimilate into
our lives, it take the longest season of the year to do it. Finally it
culminates in a picture of our destiny, a glimpse of what awaits us at the end
of our journey, the Feast of Christ the King. But lest we rest in that
triumphalism, the next Sunday is Advent 1 and it all begins again.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
will be
To arrive where we started
And know the place for the first
time.
T S Eliot
Our individual spirituality isn’t usually
precisely in sync with that of the Church. But the Church’s inclusion of a rich
tapestry of spiritual experience, including “the dark night” of no experience,
validates us “wherever we are in our faith journey.” It creates a narrative structure
on which we can hang our random feelings, attitudes, moods, hopes, and shifting
beliefs. A narrative structure invests our experience with meaning and that
meaning guides us along our path.
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