Hello, 2013.

I found it really difficult to post anything after my last post... so I just didn't.  I hope anyone reading this had a beautiful Christmas, even if that beauty came wrapped in a painful package.

The resetting of the calendar, the beginning of a new year - it's contrived, something we human beings invented.  But that doesn't mean its significance to many is invalid.  I've never understood the idea of bidding good riddance to one year and saying, "I can't wait until 2013" - after all, unless you're involved in some contract that binds you to suffering of some kind until 12am on January 1, 2013, the changing of the calendar doesn't suddenly, automatically make things better than they've been for the last year.  However, I do understand the appreciation for symbolically turning a page and beginning a new chapter.  Most of us make the biggest deal of doing this at the beginning of a new cycle in the Gregorian calendar (it's the Gregorian calendar, right?).  So while I hope that those of you who felt the need for a change sometime this year didn't feel the need to wait until New Year's Eve to dictate resolutions, I also hope that this new year sees the change and growth that you need and desire.  Keep revising, keep exploring, and never believe that you've "figured it all out".  Happy New Year.

We'll build new traditions in place of the old

'Cause life without revision will silence our souls

--Sleeping At Last, "Snow"

Advent Music: A Lamentation

"When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before you."

That's from Psalm 73 (verses 21 and 22), and that's exactly how I felt yesterday as I tried to digest the news of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.  I couldn't put together a coherent thought on the matter.  There was just anger and frustration.  I felt like a senseless, brute beast, with no understanding of how this could possibly make any sense and only the ability to fall back on instinctual reactions. I've been trained, essentially, my whole life not to use certain words because they are "bad words", so my instincts don't involve saying them out loud, and I only ever do so with much deliberation, but because I have ears and have had them consistently for nearly 29 years, I know these words well, and my thoughts were a blue streak.  What is wrong with people?! was the overall gist and was quickly followed up by God help/have mercy on us... Then How do we stop this?  How do I stop this?!  What must I do to "be the change I want to see in the world"??  I don't know...  These and a sigh are all I can give voice to as I think about what happened.

I think that even if we weren't in the middle of Advent, this song would have come to mind.  It was the first one I thought of yesterday.  A Mannheim Steamroller rendition.  Veni, veni Emmanuel...

 

Advent Music: Part Deux

So many standard Christmas songs can be easily written off as boring, cheesy, clunky, all of the above...  I find that going through them and reading the lyrics as if I've never sung them before helps me find the value in them that may have seemed lost over years of repetition and countless renditions by various pop stars.

Joy to the world! The Lord is come. Let earth receive her King...

Even the first couple sentences of this song are enough to give me pause when I take the time to savor each word.  It is time for joy; our Creator, our King, our Love is here.  Like, HERE.  Joy.  Not just happiness that comes and goes with changing circumstance, but joy that lasts through the heartaches we'll still need to suffer as we become who we were made to be.  Joy in the fact that he is here - in the trenches with us.  Joy.

What also helps me tremendously in my quest to renew old songs of Advent to my mind and spirit is creative re-imaginings of these songs.  Last year, I discovered a version of "Joy to the World" done by Future of Forestry, a band out of beautiful San Diego, CA.  It's become my favorite version.  This, like many other traditional Christmas songs, is a grand tune, usually sung to grand, orchestral accompaniment, but this band open with a sparse electrical sound, a bit of a beat, and what I think is a glockenspiel.  Then a simple, solo vocal comes in and is joined by a lone cello (ugh, I LOVE string instruments).  After the first verse, the drummer comes out to play some, and the track is sort of waking up.  As soon as the second verse is finished, we get the kick-drum heartbeat and more strings which lead to a surprise - a few lines of a classic hymn, "All Creatures of Our God and King".  Not normally associated with Christmas, but that doesn't matter, because this suddenly makes all the sense in the world.

Thou burning sun with golden beam, thou silver moon with softer gleam - o praise him.  Hallelujah.

Maybe this is meant as an unpredictable replacement of an original verse that they don't sing:  "Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns... Let men their songs employ while fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains repeat the sounding joy."  Even the less animate members of creation acknowledge the Awesome.  Then the song comes to its end with a return to the title lyric and an added admonition:

Joy to the world...
The Lord is come...
REJOICE!

Rejoice.  He's come for us.

Advent Music

I see music as a tremendous gift.  I love making it, listening to it, talking about it.  Recently, I told a friend that if joy were the sun inside me (cheese alert), it goes solar-flare crazy, shooting out of every part of me when I'm singing and thinking of nothing else.  I geek out about music.  Since I also geek out about Christmas, music having to do with the Advent season tends to be among the top-rated of my list of personal favorites.  I subscribe to the rule that says to only listen to Christmas music during the Christmas season.  The Christmas season for me officially begins the day after Thanksgiving and ends... eh, sometime after December 25 and before I go back to work in January (the end date is, um, flexible).  Since I only give myself about a month each year to listen to some of my favorite tunes, I ONLY listen to those songs.  It's a little neurotic, but it works for me.  Among my top 15 Advent songs this year (and since last year, when I first heard it) is Hillsong's "Emmanuel", from their 2011 Christmas album Born Is the King.  Here it is:

The name Emmanuel translates to "God with us".  If you read my last post, I think it'll make sense to you that this is my favorite name for God/Jesus.  God's "with us"ness is the part of who he is that blows my mind the most.  It's the part I love talking about the most.  His awesomeness and infinity give me psychological vertigo, but those serve to make the fact that he is with us that much more heartrending - in the best way - to me.  This song, I think, paints a beautiful picture with its music as well as its lyrics.  As I listen and sing the lyrics as if they actually originate from me, I see myself in old Bethlehem, finding my way to that stable where Mary bore Jesus, in awe of the juxtaposition of the humbleness of the scene with my knowledge that I'm witnessing Divinity in flesh.  Then I'm just overcome by it all.  My shepherd-king, you're watching over me.  Emmanuel.  The song moves on through verses and choruses to a simple bridge that repeats the words "Holy, holy, God almighty - there is none like you," and I'm really moved by this point.  There is none like you... no one, no one.  Then the music surges and the strings carry me away and threaten to bring me to tears (onions... onions everywhere...).  At the end of it all, the music quiets once again, and I'm mercifully laid back down beside the manger-turned-crib, brought back to the ground to look at this thing God has done, and to cling to it.

So amazing... You have named the stars of the deepest night.  Still you love me... You have called my name.  I will follow you...

He came for me

Advent.  This is my favorite season of the year, hands-down.  I've always believed Christmas to be my favorite holiday, but I find that I love the weeks leading up to Christmas, and then Christmas Day itself is a bit of a bummer - sort of a, "Well, the fun's over now."  As I've grown and learned more, I've discovered there are seasons in the traditional church calendar, like Lent (which I deliberately explored for the first time this year).  I've discovered that what I love so much about Christmas is the anticipation.  It's what may be best described as Advent.

The Christmas season has always enchanted me because of the way everything seems to feel at this time of year.  The "warm fuzzies" were stronger in my younger days, and I've become ever so slightly less naive about the world as I've gotten older, but somehow, the magic and goodness of the season is still very real to me.  I don't see myself ever growing jaded about all that.  As I've been thinking through what this magic and goodness could be for now, now that I've stepped into adulthood and am letting go of some childlike (or childish?) innocence, I keep coming back to one thought concept.  I celebrate Christmas to personally acknowledge the birth of Jesus thousands of years ago.  This birth was not just a birth of a will-someday-be-great-man.  This wasn't even merely the birth of the Son of God.  This birth was God coming for me - for us.  That's the thought concept to which I always gravitate back when I pray and thank God for the joy celebrating the season gives me, for the amazing story recounted by it all.  As I talk with God and exhaust all my flowery language, letting it fall away to be replaced with the simplest and most honest of words to Him, generally, all I end up saying and thinking and feeling is, "Thank you for coming for me."  Over and over again.  Not just sending your Son or some proxy.  No... if the Father, the Son, and the Spirit truly are one in some cosmically bizarre, unintelligible-to-the-human-mind type of way, and if he became fully human and yet remained fully God in a similarly incomprehensible manner, then he came for me.  Not only that, but I think he did something drastic to himself in this process.  In becoming human, the Father/Son/Spirit oneness remained, but it was not the same.  I think Jesus' suffering began not at his arrest at the age of 33, or even in the garden beforehand as he sweat blood in desperate prayer, but when he stepped into the human realm.  When he came for me.  He came for me.  Unreal.

Saturday

Yesterday was Good Friday. Tomorrow is Easter. Good Friday would be horrifically pointless without Easter. Easter would be lacking in joy and nowhere near as poignant without Good Friday. Both days would have greatly diminished meaning without today.

Friday was awful. For years, until that day, we had our Super Hero, our Savior. Someone had come to make things right, and He was incredible - unlike anyone the world had ever known. We didn't think the person who'd come to save us would look quite like Him. He shunned military and political recognition and involvement and wasn't quite the warrior we'd come to expect, after all. But that was okay. Things were right now that He was around. With Him here, no matter what things looked like, we knew we'd be okay. Then they arrested Him. "Maddening... but He's still here. He's walked on water, healed the blind, raised the dead. Hope is not yet gone." Then they flogged Him to within and inch of His life. "I know He can stop this; why doesn't He?! But... He's still here. Things must turn out okay." Then they nailed Him to a cross. "He can get off that cross anytime He wants. He must." Then... then... He wasn't breathing anymore. The earth literally shook and the sky went dark. Even creation knew the gravity of things. I went numb. He wasn't breathing anymore...

Can He come back from death? He's raised the dead before, more than once! He can't be gone, I mean... He was our HOPE. They're taking His body down. I see no movement. They're putting Him in the tomb. The tomb has been sealed. Hours pass... nothing. The sun's rising. Time to start another day. Time to start another day?! He can't really be gone. But He is... He hasn't come back yet... that tomb is sealed tight. Mid-day. Nothing. The sun sets. Nothing. We're deep into the night, and I haven't seen my Super Hero since He died yesterday. He died yesterday. Hope died with Him, because now what do we do? We bet everything on Him...

Thousands of years removed, I experience Good Friday with the knowledge that "Sunday's coming." But those people couldn't see Sunday coming. Can you imagine?

Lent

Tomorrow is the first day of the season of Lent in 2012. Before a couple of years ago, any of the few times in my life I had ever thought of Lent, I categorized it as a “Catholic thing”. I occasionally saw people with ash-black marks on their foreheads on a certain day of the year and never gave mind to the possibility of having anything to do with whatever it was they were observing. About two years ago, though, after meeting and becoming friends with some people new to me, I saw that some of these people, non-Catholic people, made a decent-sized deal of Lent in their own lives. This was the beginning of my mind and heart being opened a little wider. I started really asking questions the following year. I wanted to know why my friends – any of them, Catholic or no – observed Lent, what it was, what it meant to them. I think I had an itch for it but didn’t know.

Since last year, I’ve been set on observing Lent when I next got the chance. I’ve had a whole year to think about how I would do it and what I would give up. At the beginning of this year, I started praying deliberately about this. I asked what I needed to give up for a time, what might be something in my life on which my dependence is unhealthy or somehow surpassing dependence on God in my mind. The first thing that came to mind was food. Ha. I do love food. The idea of not eating for 40-ish days straight, though, was… um… daunting. Plus, I had actually begun to sense a strange overdependence on food for comfort some months before, and I was now able to say that it wasn’t my biggest issue. I decided giving up food (oy) or meat or pancakes or whatever wasn’t going to be it. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine who was raised Catholic let me know that Lent isn’t necessarily about giving something up. It’s about enacting discipline. Interesting. She told me she used to promise to make her bed every morning for Lent when she was little :) Now my prayers shifted from, “God, what do I need to give up?” to, “God, what do I need to just do?” A few days ago, I arrived at the answer!

Music is one of the biggest passions God has given me. I love listening to it. I love making it. I’ve said for years that I want to be good at the making part. I often daydream about writing amazing songs – enough of them to put out a solid, lyrically and musically breathtaking album. However, while I am probably one of the best dreamers in the world, I am not very good at the actually-doing-something aspect of it. I’m in awe of some of my favorite songs, but I tend to turn this awe not into motivation to write like these artists I admire but into discouragement at the “fact” that I’ll never be able to write something as epic or clever or honest as what I love to listen to. This is a problem. I need to grow out of it. SO! For my first observation of Lent ever, I will commit to writing about any topic for 10 minutes straight every one of the 44 days of the season. There’s a specific exercise I’ll do, where I’ll literally write for 10 minutes straight – the pen will not leave the paper for 10 minutes, whether I think I’ve run out of things to write or not. 10-minute sessions every day for the next month-plus will be great, much-needed practice. It will also give me more written raw material than I’ve ever had in so much time before. Because of this, I’ve also set a more fluid goal of completing 2 new songs by Easter, when Lent ends. An even more fluid “goal” will be to update this poor, neglected blog as I go. I do not plan to update every day. Not in the least bit. But if I update just once during Lent, that will make two blog posts within a month and a half of each other, and that’s pretty good for my record.

Here goes!