Sanctuaries of Christmas - Day 12: COMPASSION

In thinking about my final Christmas sanctuary, a lot of ideas came to mind of qualities and experiences we seek out and embrace particularly during this season.  Three came to mind that seem to get at some similar things:  Kindness, Love, Peace.  In the midst of what often seems like a myriad of threats, anxieties, selfishness, unrest in the world, we yearn for some space to reconnect with benevolence and trust in our humanity.  I will call this last of our sanctuaries COMPASSION.  We yearn for a space where we can share compassion – giving it to others and receiving it for ourselves.

Our Christmas season often focuses us on those ideals: love, kindness, empathy, forgiveness, transcending differences and divisions, overcoming our violent tendencies and conflicts, but sometimes, quite frankly, it gets sappy.   That’s why I like the word “compassion.”  It means a kind of connection or affection using “com-” which means “with,”   but we’re “with” each other in our “passion” – or suffering. 

Now, we might identify what we’re going through at the present moment as suffering… but often not.  We may just be going though our usual stuff. Yet how much of our yearning for affection, for kindness, for forgiveness, safety, for easing of conflicts and relief from fears or violence, has to do deep down with ways we are suffering - maybe in big ways, maybe only in small ways – but things that add up over time?  Compassion sums it up for me. I want someone to be with in my passion and in theirs.

We know that burdens feel lighter when they are shared.  We know when we feel a sense of safety with someone who understands us.  We know when we feel the companionship of someone who loves and accepts us. We know fears subside, challenges are minimized, and we feel strong and capable.  We all need a sanctuary where we can be authentic and vulnerable.  And, perhaps this is the most profound sanctuary of all.   Christmas offer us this sanctuary with the promise of Jesus’ birth being a sign of “God-with-us.” 

One thing I’ve realized in my months of “personal sabbatical” is that my ministry in churches has been the primary means, the framework, for the way I offer and experience compassion.  It is the way I have shared with people my and their passions. For some reason, God has given me this time without the church, and I’ve been confronted with the question of how do I offer and receive compassion now?  What framework do I use?  How can I find and create the sanctuary of compassion for myself and others in a new way?  I haven’t figured it out yet.  This is the question with which I enter 2014. 

 

One ending note now on my Christmas sanctuaries. These sanctuaries of  Tradition & Remembrance, Home, Mystery, Wonder, Darkness, Light, Hope & Joy, Giving, Meeting God, and Compassion, I relate to Christmas only because this season, its story and significance, gives us an excuse to concentrate our yearning for these sanctuaries.  But, they are sanctuaries we all need and seek all year round, throughout our lives. We short-change ourselves and each other if we somehow store them away like our Christmas decorations in the garage until we can haul them out again.  My hope is that both you and I might remember to open the doors a little wider to those sanctuaries for each other when we meet. Perhaps we can help each other to recognize when we are in particular need of one of these sanctuaries, and offer it to each other.  Hmm, is that a New Year’s resolution?  Maybe.

Sanctuaries of Christmas - Day 11: MEETING GOD

The angel appearances and messages remind us that our Christmas sanctuary is about meeting God in the flesh.  God loves this world and everything in it so passionately, so immensely, that God showed us who God was in the flesh and blood of a tiny baby.   That’s our party line…but, what that exactly means - how that exactly happens…well, that falls into the neighboring sanctuary of Mystery. I don’t have any scientific data on the matter. I just know that when I think about it, when I contemplate it, something very deep and very authentic stirs within me.

We love Christmas, because in its deepest, holiest part – we somehow can find ourselves in the sanctuary where we are reminded that God can be met face to face.  For me this is a possibility because I believe we’re made of the same stuff.  I believe God and me…and all of us… are deeply and truly connected.  We’re all the same stuff.  But, it’s easy to think we’re not.  Our individual lives are like islands poking up above the surface of an immense ocean. If we can’t see other islands, we feel isolated…and even if we do see other islands, we still feel autonomous within ourselves.  It usually takes a pretty hefty canoe to paddle over to the nearby island and say hi.  Yet, deep beneath the surface of the water, the stuff of all the islands – the earth’s crust, still connects everything. The islands aren’t separated at all..it’s just that the bowls we call oceans, are holding the water and covering up the ways we are connected.

And, since you are reading my blog, I’ll let you in on a little of my Christology that lies a bit beyond the standard doctrines.  Jesus wasn’t the only one that incarnated God.  Jesus was the revealer of how we ALL incarnate God.  Remember…we’re all the same stuff.  The baby-boy-in-a-manger who grew up to be the teacher-rabbi-savior was exactly the same stuff as you and me.  That’s why no matter what I’m feeling at the moment – the lowest lows or the highest highs, I can think about what I know of him and usually figure out something – some perspective, some wisdom, some compassion, some grace that relates to me.  I can’t think of any other one person that does that for me.  You may have someone or something else…the Buddha, Mohammed, the cycles and seasons of the earth…whatever.  But, whatever/whoever it is, it can show us God face to face. We’re all the same stuff.  To me, it less important that somehow, in some inexplicable way, God incarnated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, than it is centrally important that God incarnates – every moment of every day in everything and everyone.  We are not left alone in our islands of isolation.

To me, that is some good news.

Sanctuaries of Christmas - Day 10: GIVING

“Good works is giving to the poor and the helpless, but divine works is showing them their worth to the One who matters.” 
― Criss Jami

Another hard subject for me these days…the sanctuary of GIVING.  I can’t avoid it though, Christmas is a primary time in the course of our year that most embraces the sanctuary of Giving.  Why is it hard for me right now?  I’m not sure, except that I feel like I’m in a season of such introspection that it easily borders on, and slips and slides into self-centeredness.  That’s my fear, anyway. 

To help me, I googled quotes on giving.  There’s a lot of good stuff that we all know about fullness of life, the value of giving over receiving,  the joy of selflessness and relinquishing things we tend to want to hold tight to.  But, I particularly liked this one by post-modern poet and philosopher Criss Jami. It reminded me of the Wise Men in our Christmas story.  They are the ones after all that remind us of the sanctuary of giving. 

We don’t know much about them except they came from somewhere East, they liked to interpret the stars,  they evidently were quite comfortable  looking up a local king in the phone book and asking directions – which probably placed them in the upper tier of the rich and famous. Somehow, in their cosmological studies, they figured out a great king was soon to be born.  So, they loaded up the caravan with some interesting and quite expensive gifts and headed out, pointing the camel noses west.   When they finally reached their destination, we see that their gift-giving was primarily a way to give honor to a life they deemed to be of great value and significance. 

This is a little different than the way we usually plan our Christmas giving, isn’t it? What if we were to make our Christmas lists…checking them twice…but to figure out what gift would best honor the great value and significance the lives of our friends and family represent to us?   The Magi’s gifts weren’t about what they personally liked…and they weren’t about what Baby Jesus would like, or need, or was age-appropriate to him, or even about Mary and Joseph (although the gold probably came in handy!).  Their gifts were to mark what they believed the future significance was of this newborn life to the world and to the “One who matters.”  No one quite understood the gifts at the time, I’m sure.  Yet, to this day, I would guess that most people with some passing acquaintance to Christianity can still name the three gifts.

Gold:  the substance of greatest human value; Frankincense: the good-smelling incense that mingled the aroma that signified spiritual world  and worship with our mortal senses; and Myrrh: the perfume for anointing the dead – an ominous symbol of sacrifice and death.  So, not exactly toys you’d likely find in a baby’s crib!  But, gifts that demonstrate this baby’s worth to the One who matters, and to the whole world.  What would it be like to consider our Christmas gifts with that criteria? Hmm.  Dashing into Target or Walmart and hitting the gift card display doesn’t quite make it, does it?

Sanctuaries of Christmas - Days 8 & 9: HOPE & JOY

As this New Year’s day came and went, I confess, I’m having a bit of a struggle with my next sanctuaries, HOPE and JOY.  This year, they are a stretch. They feel a bit elusive to me.  These are sanctuaries I am yearning for, but not necessarily finding.  If you are blessed to be experiencing the joy of the season and looking toward hopeful possibilities for the new year…thank you, God! You’ve been given the gift of these sanctuaries.  You don’t need to read any farther today. See you tomorrow!  But, if you are a bit more like me at the moment, you may be searching for the keys to unlock their doors. 

Hope and Joy are common sanctuaries we think of at Christmas, We often acknowledge them together, sort of like a foyer and a living room.  One brings you in and the other is where all the parties are. Hope looks forward to what is not yet, but what might be and could be, envisioning it to be good.  Joy looks back at what was, and around at what is, and feels the fullness.

But, as I look back, I feel more the weight of anxiety and uncertainty than joy: six months now unemployed.  I look around, and wonder what’s here?  What do I have to offer?  (Or does anyone WANT what I have to offer?) Where am I going?   I look ahead with a bit more fear than hope: what if I can’t find a job, what if I feel more depressed than I do now?  I trusted God, but where is God now?

I don’t want to be a New Year’s humbug, but I don’t think I’m alone in this, so I’ll push forward. I believe in Hope and Joy, even if at times we feel lost to them. The truth of these sanctuaries, particularly as illustrated by the Christmas story, is that we detect them a whole lot more in hindsight, than we do in the present moment.   I doubt that in the midst of the Christmas story there was a lot of hope and joy!  Those only came years and even centuries later looking back at the event knowing all that followed. I read a lot more anguish, exhaustion, uncertainty, fear, frustration, confusion, and eventually even downright horror and tragedy!  The story only made it into TWO of the four gospels…and even those two didn’t agree on the details or timelines.

It’s only much later the Christian tradition is able to put a little cultural tinsel on the story from various corners of the world, add St. Nicholas’ embellishments, and then of course we particularly add a century or two of American sentimentality and a dusting of consumerism, and, voila! Hope and Joy!    

The Angels of scripture are most often the ones that point the way to these sanctuaries and open their doors, but we kind of forget what their “good news of great joy” might have really sounded like.  To say “For unto you, is born this night, in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. You shall find the babe wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger,” has a little different sense when you think about it from the shepherds’ point of view.  They were probably half drunk on the hillside, suddenly thinking they were hallucinating.  “Good news of great joy, guys!” says their tequila apparition. “The savior of the world has just been born tonight in Phoenix.  You can find him wrapped in a towel, laid in a bathtub, in a motel down on Van Buren Street. Glory to God in the highest, yo!”  Hmm. Right. Good news…?

So, I guess where I end up is, let’s not be too hard on ourselves if we can’t find those doors that lead to Hope and Joy…at least for now.  Whatever is happening in our lives, we may not quite be ready to see or understand the strangely mysterious dynamics God seems to present to us as Hope and Joy.  It’s only when we can step away and see it from a distance, like a great painting, that the image comes clear. Let’s give it some time.