From “December 24, 1971”
Emptiness. But as soon as you think it
you see something like light out of nowhere.
As if knowing the stronger Herod is,
the more certain, the more inescapable the wonder.
The constancy of this relationship
is the fundamental mechanism of Christmas.
– Joseph Brodsky, trans. Jenn Cavanaugh
Christmas Green
Just now the earth recalls His stunning visitation. Now
the earth and scattered habitants attend to what is possible: that He
of a morning entered this, our meagered circumstance, and so
relit the fuse igniting life in them, igniting life in all the dim
surround. And look, the earth adopts a kindly affect. Look,
we almost see our long estrangement from it overcome.
The air is scented with the prayer of pines, the earth is softened
for our brief embrace, the fuse continues bearing to all elements
a curative despite the grave, and here within our winter this,
the rising pulse, bears still the promise of our quickening.
– Scott Cairns in Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected
This photograph was taken by Jim Peaco of the National Park Service 10 years after the 1988 Yellowstone fires Lodgepole pine forests reestablish themselves amongst standing dead trees.
A little change of tempo for today’s reflection….
Dave Brubeck died yesterday, old and full of years. Today would have been his 92nd birthday. He was a jazz great who knew his classical stuff and a consummate performer to the end. He never planned to be a musician. He went to school to study veterinary science until the head of the program convinced him to transfer to the conservatory, even though he didn’t read music. He was ordered to form his first band while serving under Patton in WWII. Coming home from the war he decided “something should be done musically to strengthen man’s knowledge of God.” He joined the Catholic Church after a full orchestration of the Lord’s Prayer setting he was working came to him in a dream. Brubeck brought all the joy and freedom of his jazz stylings and innovative time signatures to bear in his sacred works. His wife handled the texts. Together they wrote one of my favorite Christmas songs. It’s much more a Christmas Day celebration than an Advent reminder to wait, but musically and lyrically it wells with the hope we’re invited to live into and celebrate this week.
The music in the video is actually two pieces from Brubeck’s La Fiesta de la Posada – the finale, called “La Piñata,” followed by “God’s Love Made Visible.” Some of the lyrics by Iola Brubeck:
God’s love made visible! Incomprehensible! He is invincible!
His Love shall reign!
From love so bountiful, blessings uncountable make death surmountable!
His Love shall reign!
“Let’s not deceive ourselves. ‘Your redemption is drawing near’ (Luke 21:28), whether we know it or not, and the only question is: Are we going to let it come to us too, or are we going to resist it? Are we going to join in this movement that comes down from heaven to earth, or are we going to close ourselves off? Christmas is coming – whether it is with us or without us depends on each and every one of us. Such a true Advent happening now creates something different from the anxious, petty, depressed, feeble Christian spirit that we see again and again, and that again and again wants to make Christianity contemptible…. Advent creates people, new people. We too are supposed to become new people in Advent. Look up, you whose gaze is fixed on this earth, who are spellbound by the little events and changes on the surface of the earth. Look up to these words, you who have turned away from heaven disappointed. Look up, you whose eyes are heavy with tears and who are crying over the fact that the earth has gracelessly torn us away. Look up, you who, burdened with guilt, cannot lift your eyes. Look up, your redemption is drawing near. Something different from what you see daily will happen. Just be aware, be watchful, wait just another short moment. Wait and something quite new will break over you: God will come.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Advent
The wind in the winter wood
Drives the snowflake flock like a shepherd.
A fir tree, sensing how soon
She will be lit with holiness,
Strains to listen. She stretches wide
Her branches to the white paths,
Braced to brave the wind, growing
Toward that glorious night.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, born this day in 1875,
translated by Jenn Cavanaugh
“Hope” by Thiago Elias
“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons…. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
– Vaclav Havel
“It came to me, recently, that faith is ‘a certain widening of the imagination.’ When Mary asked the Angel, ‘How shall these things be?’ she was asking God to widen her imagination.
All my life I have been requesting the same thing – a baptized imagination that has a wide enough faith to see the numinous in the ordinary. Without discarding reason, or analysis, I seek from my Muse, the Holy Spirit, images that will open up reality and pull me in to its center.
This is the benison of the sacramental view of life.”
– Luci Shaw in Wintersong
“Numinous River” by Virginia Sandman
Homespun 