Reflections on the Daily Gospel for Advent, 2009

Luke 21:5-19
When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, "As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down." They asked him, "Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?" And he said, "Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, 'I am he!' and, 'The time is near!' Do not go after them. "When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately."

Then he said to them, "Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. "But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls."

Tummies still pleasantly full, and our minds quietly hazed by the turkey coma, we are jolted to attention as the season of Advent begins. The message is certainly not the one that is captured in the small mountain of department store flyers that fill out the Sunday morning newspaper. It’s difficult to imagine what we might want with a new GPS, cologne gift sets, golf clubs and tennis rackets if earthquakes, famines and plagues are our lot for the near future. Emergency rations, stockpiles of fresh drinking water, and lots of batteries, perhaps. You might make a justification for soft, snuggly stuffed animals to help you make it through long nights of war and insurrection, but Wii’s, if the story is to be believed, are expendable at best.

We know that a part of what we read between the lines of this Gospel for our first furtive steps into the season is the real-life experience of that first century church who took the stories and images from the life of Jesus and fashioned them into a narrative. Times did get terrifying for the generation to follow the One, especially after Nero fiddled away an empire and pacifist Christians seemed a likely patsy for the fall, but that was a long time ago, and Constantine’s sword was fairly effective in forging an unholy alliance that would grow the church into something resembling the first Multinational corporation before too many centuries had passed. From time to time it has been dangerous to claim the faith, and even in the world we share there are corners where a cross around your neck could lead to significant challenges, but if we’re being real, the dreadful portents and great signs that may unfold in the heavens are far more harbingers of the fragile threads of secular promises lost than any reflection of something requiring a defense of our faith. For most of us, believing in Jesus is at worse a quaint reflection of lost innocence. We’ll die of old age long before we might face a sword of religious persecution.

So what to make of it all? I do not pray for any sort of Holy War, but I do wonder if we need to ponder, at least for a few moments, the possibility that the progress of faith is made less on roads of tinsel and bright packages, and more precisely at those moments when we have the most to lose. As I write this, the nation waits for our new President to announce his strategy in the continuing debacle of Iraq, and pundits on both sides are lining up to assure that no matter what he offers will be rejected out of hand. The notion that we might need more American lives put on the line is about as repugnant a thought as you might allow to tarnish your Christmas stars, but it is difficult to deny that the hole we’ve dug for ourselves will demand some filling before we can step out with any kind of dignity. Could it be that the peace we long for will not come in a slow steady arc of “every day in every way we’re getting better and better”? could it be that the princely peace we long for will require loss, and sacrifice, and long suffering?

We live in an age of quick fixes, and so much of the teaching of this One whose birth we await has been burnished and dissected to fit the longing of our hearts for stories that come to a happy ending within an hour’s time, with commercials included. The Gospel reminds us that the coming of the Lord will indeed threaten the lords and ladies who cling to illusions of power in a world gone mad. There is much in this world that longs for salvation that will have to be set aside, wrapped and burned, melted and refashioned if it is to bear the true image of this One who is to come. It will be a fight to bring this child into the world, and once born, it will be a real battle if he is to emerge victorious, which is to say, “crucified, dead, and buried.”

This first Sunday of Advent we are advised that the road before us will demand more of us than we might actually be ready to give. There’s no gentle encouragement in Jesus’ tone—no soothing of our furrowed brow, no quiet whisper in our ear…”Don’t worry, it all looks frightful but cling to me and all will be well”…”You will be hated because of my name!” We do not make the journey like the winning Olympian, wrapped in his flag while the adoring crowd cheers. We make this journey because it is more true than any of the other convenient and comfortable lies we might otherwise embrace. We make this trip because the One who has gone before us has told us it is the only way. “If any would come after me let them deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)

Gracious God, we come to this season with visions of sugar plums, voices tuned to Joy, Peace, and Love. We know this is where you lead, but we pray that we might see your promised land where it truly lies, on the far side of our fears and hopes, through trial and terror, beyond, but not apart from the suffering of this world you love and long to save. Still our hearts, and slow our steps, that in the season that stretches out before us we might begin not only to see the One who Comes, but our own deep need for his touch, heart to heart, by the redemption of your precious blood. Amen.

Peublo Pottery

I've been drawn to the black on black pottery since I first saw it on the shelves at Parson's Indian Trading Post in the Wisconsin Dells many years ago. Tucked onto the shleves behind dusty cases filled with arrowheads and sacred pipes, alongside rows of Dells kitsch, my eye was drawn to the shiny black pots inscribed with geometric patterns. It was on my first visit to Santa Fe, scouring the shops along San Francisco Street with Bruce Rigdon, that I got the first inkling that this was not just a pretty object designed to separate tourists from their money. Bruce was in search of a small pot to bring home to his wife as a birthday present, and that day I heard the name of Maria Martinez, though to be honest it did not sink in. The pottery that bore her name was far more expensive than many of the other pieces, and Bruce explained that Maria was one of the finest artists in the genre. She had died in 1980, and her work was valued by collectors. It added up in my mind to "expensive pretty pot."

But this time to Santa Fe, with a little more time to explore beyond the old city of Santa Fe, I had the opportunity to learn more. We were headed back from Los Alamos (a posting for another day!) and had our eyes open for a peublo that we might be able to knock around in a bit, to taste a little bit of the modern Native American culture after climbing about in the ruins of their ancestors at Bandalier National Monument. Denise had read about San Ildefonso, and when we saw the sign, it seemed worth the detour.

We arrived at a little bit before four in the afternoon, and at the museum and cultural center I saw those familiar pieces of pottery, and the name of Maria Montoya Martinez, and the pieces started to link together. The pueblo was closed to visitors at 5, and so we had to decide whether it was worth the investment for so short a time. A few of the shops might still be open, the woman behind the counter said,and our flight left early enough the next day that we knew it was now or never. Plunking down our money, we got a map and started on our way.

The streets and common areas were mostly deserted, and a beautiful church commanded the center of the scene. Valenti-Hein vacations tend to be drawn to cemeteries, and at the front of the church was a quiet place of repose for former residents of the village, with crosses, mounds, and colorful carvings. We made our way around the corner, and into one of the shops that was open...more a room off the kitchen of the artist than a studio, really. And there, on the table, six or seven pieces, several a deep orange-red, and the rest black.

The gentle man in attendance encouraged us to look. They were to be fired the next day, if we wanted to come back and see. The reddish orange pots were the color of the clay, and the black would be created by firing the pots with horse manure. He showed us the piece of obsidian that was used to laboriously buff the pots to their high gloss, and explained how the designs, that looked like bas relief, were drawn on with a fresh slurry of clay, painting in what to my eye was the background.

It was after I got home that I started to scratch the itch of my curiosity. The pottery, it seems, was first discovered in archeological digs in the early part of the 20th century. Edgar Lee Hewitt, a professor of archeology, had found shards of black on black pottery dating to the neolithic era. Hewitt wanted to reconstruct the pottery for a museum exhibition, and heard about San Ildefenso and the artists who worked there. He brought them the challenge--to not only create the pots, but to try to understand how neolithic people could have acomplished such fine artistry.

Enter Maria Martinez, at the time a young potter who spent the rest of her life trying to understand and recreate the work of her ancient ancestors. She knew about the red clay, and her traditions had preserved the cave-like geometric drawings, but how is it that such a fine luster, and a deep black color were archieved before the alchemy of modern pottery?

Smoke was the obvious answer, but it took years of experimentation to find the right temperatures and mixture of heat and manure to fire the pot just so. The neolithic dating gave away the most likely process of burnishing the pots to their lush gloss: stone on stone! And so, for hours on end the pots were rubbed stone on stone, then set into fires banked with manure in order to produce what the Native people of the pueblos had done before recorded time.

So, it seems, my new little pot is a resurrection story of sorts...an art that grew in the villages tucked into the valleys beneath those dwellings I had crouched into earlier in the day. Stone against stone produced the luster that caught the archeologist's eyes, and a modern artist working away in a modest pueblo while not thirty miles away some of the greatest scientific minds in the world were gathered in Los Alamos working their own alchemy with atoms and isotopes in order to unleash a devastation on the face of the earth that would end the war with a force that would for a generation threaten to end the planet.

Why is it striking to me that the critical ingredient was horse manure? That it was out of a smouldering fire, smoking away on the remains of the horse's day, that such beauty would emerge? That at the same time that Western science was unleashing unconcievable devastation, Maria Martinez and her husband were squatting around the fire behind their pueblo in order to bring back to this earth the pottery of a forgotten age?

We live in a world of contrasts, I decided as I unwrapped that black pot I brought safe home--a world in which beauty is the result of hard labor, saving all the parts, smothering the fire with manure, laying fresh slurry in delicate lines that end up looking like the background.

Such, I suppose, is our lives: shaped and shined, colored by what we might otherwise bury and avoid. In its simplest beauty we find ourselves really only trying to reclaim the traditions lost as we stumbled into "modernity" with a ferocity and pride that really can consume us.

If I head back to New Mexico, I'm not sure I want to see Los Alamos again, but trust me, I will want to see San Ildefenso. I might even spring for the photography permit, and I suppose if I really wanted to be the best steward of my gifts, I would make the investment in one of those pots, still rubbed and fired as they were thousands of years ago. Maybe it's in the sheen of that black on black pottery that we learn the most about our humanness.

Minding the Gap

With a traditional church potluck to send me on my way I waded into the Post-Memorial phase of my life on October 25. What better way to mark such a transition than to spend three days in Santa Fe with Thomas Moore....no, not the Thomas Moore of Henry VIII, but the contemporary writer/post-Jungian/mystic known for many books including Care of the Soul. It was an intriguing mental journey into shadows and archetypes, drifting past many themes that have been so much a part of my personal spiritual journey for these past four years. It's pretty nice to be able to do it in Santa Fe, as well, albeit the weather in Wisconsin was much nicer than in New Mexico for most of the days we were there, but the sun shone bright as Denise and I had the opportunity to crawl around the cliffs of Bandelier National Monument, and I climbed into the darkness of the Kiva at the top of the climb at the end of the trail.

Shadows figure prominently in Jung's thought, and for Moore, too. As I wrestled with what to make of the rich mythological imagery that Moore uses to illustrate his understanding of the soul's journey, I realized how much of my personal journey for oh these long years has been a wrestling with shadows, mostly to the end of keeping them in the dark. "Be perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect" is without a doubt one of the most troubling sayings of Jesus in my book, and it has brought me to my knees more than once. In the last few years it is a saying that has been illumined by the story of Jacob, preparing to be reunited with his brother Esau, who spent the night on the far side of the Jabok, wrestling with an angel. You remember how Jacob fought all through the darkness, until that sneaky angel touched his hip and dislocated it, leaving Jacob holding on for his life, but still pleading for his blessing. He got it--but he limped away.

Shadows, it seems, never go away, at least not in a three-dimensional world. You wrestle, and stuggle, and limp away, but the depth and truth of a soul is not measured by the shadow's vanquish, but by its marks, carried, and forgotten only at great peril. So, yes, I bought Moore's book, and yes, I asked him to sign it for me, and yes, I have the requisite picture of me and him smiling at a camera. And in the book I read more about his understanding of those critical archtypes that shape our soul...Mother, Father, Child...and the disturbing possibility that the telos of this existence is not to wrestle yourself free from your past, but to find the ways in which shadow and light, good and troubling, gentle and hard, are woven of steel cords in order to provide the skeleton on which God's image is hung in mortals. You cannot run from your past, it seems, but if you carry it gently with you, maybe you can make some peace with it.

Darkness and light, gardens of good and evil all growing like wheat and tares, are not the fault of human nature, but the nature of human fault. As we closed out the seminar, we did the unthinkably oogly, holding hands and sharing how what we'd experienced in these past days might filter into our lives, and I found myself thinking of that voice that fills the stations in London as trains come and go: "Mind the Gap." That, it seems to me, is the work of the next months for me, and I find myself wondering if it is not a part of what the church needs to wrestle with as it continues to limp into the 21st century. It's in the shadows, the gaps, the nights of wrestling that our true identity will begin to emerge.