Homecoming

I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go to the house of the LORD!"
Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.
Jerusalem built as a city that is bound firmly together.
To it the tribes go up, the tribes of the LORD, as was decreed for Israel,
to give thanks to the name of the LORD.
For there the thrones for judgment were set up, the thrones of the house of David.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: "May they prosper who love you.
Peace be within your walls, and security within your towers."
For the sake of my relatives and friends I will say, "Peace be within you."
For the sake of the house of the LORD our God, I will seek your good.

Psalm 122; lectionary text for Sunday December 1, 2019, Advent 1

The first Sunday of Advent. Thanksgiving cooked and eaten and cleared away (and several packets of turkey in the freezer, hurrah). The Advent wreath set round with fresh candles, bright cranberry red. Not the liturgically correct purple or blue, but my husband found the box of tall, unburned candles in the thrift store, the price was right, and their color is festive and pleasing. We lit the first candle last night. Again, not liturgically correct, being the Saturday before rather than the first Sunday of Advent, but the girls (this the collective noun applied to the two young women who are our daughters) were home then, and not now, so we lit that first candle together.

‘I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD!’

The girls were home by Tuesday dinner. Tuesday night I lay in bed and rehearsed that verse in my mind — silently reciting each word in turn — and heard as I did the voices of the girls earlier in the evening. It was a mental polyphony: the voice of the text with the voices of my grown daughters together looking at a toy catalog which for some reason still arrives in our mail. Why did those voices weave together? Something about homecoming? About being glad in it? To whose gladness is the counterpoint keyed? Is it the gladness of coming home (being welcomed and even, a little, cosseted)? Is it the gladness of welcoming (me in the kitchen so enjoying the sound of their voices rising and falling in conversation that I delay calling them to do dinner chores)? Or is it all these gladnesses themselves coming together as welcomed and welcomer sit down to eat together at the table?

‘I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD!’

Psalm 122 is a ‘psalm of ascents’ according to the superscription. It is a pilgrimage psalm, evoking the gathering of God’s people, all of them together going up to Jerusalem, ascending the city’s heights, entering the house of the LORD. The first verb of the psalm is singular — I was glad, I rejoiced — but the trigger for this personal joy is plural — ‘when they said’ — and its experience is communal — ‘let us go.’ Was the psalmist’s gladness unique or did the whole ascending body share it? Did the gladness rise with the group’s ascent or was it something that they claimed in rote until they reached their goal and stood there, within the gates of Jerusalem, and recognized that the complex of physical sensations — bodies tired, legs aching, feet firmly planted within the gates — included the wild, rising, unreasoning conviction of joy. Pilgrims and city bound firmly together in this intention, in this arrival, in this jubilee.

‘I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD!’

Whose gladness is evoked? Whose welcome is anticipated?

What has this psalm to do with Advent?

The psalmic summons is closely paralleled in the prophetic text: ‘Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD’’ (Isa 2:3). The suggestion of David’s ‘thrones’ (why plural?) and of judgment connects with the other texts assigned for this day (Isa 2:1-4; Matt 24:36-44), echoing the theme of God’s purpose for all God’s creation approaching its intended end of peace and security. ‘I will seek your good,’ the psalmist promises — this promise the culmination of the earlier declaration, ‘Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.’ The city as a person, an other with whom speech may be had, an addressee not just an object. The city as a conversation partner. The city and the LORD? God does not speak in this psalm; the psalmist prays but does not explicitly address the prayer to God. Yet God is present throughout: it is the prospect of going up to God’s own home, the singular, unique space in which the LORD condescended to dwell — where God’s name and eyes and heart are forever (1 Kings 9:3) — the occasions that opening profession of joy. Can the psalmist’s delight be any less than the LORD’s?

Tuesday night I wondered at the possible connection of my gladness and God’s. I imagined the LORD working in the kitchen to prepare a table for all the sons and daughters coming home, God’s own heart warmed by the presence and voices of God’s adult children in God’s own house. Then I shied away from my own audacity — it cannot be that. The psalmist sings joy at the anticipation of ascending to the LORD’s house, the joy of entering in, not the joy of inviting in. Now, though, I wonder if the joys are not intertwined after all. The gladness of being welcomed finds an equal measure in the gladness of the welcome given. Hearts reunite in mutual affection, the desire for peace, the intention for each other’s well-being. The Advent promise of arrival is expressed in this anticipation of mutual joy, this the ultimate aim of the judgment referenced in the texts: God’s joy in God’s people; our joy in our LORD.

We extinguish the first Advent candle at the end of dinner. ‘Now the light which was in one place at one time can be in all places and all times,’ one of the girls intones with joking seriousness. The joke is that this is a line from the Godly Play** lessons, and neither girl has been in a Godly Play classroom for years and years, and this is our dinner table and not Sunday School. The seriousness is that ritual embeds itself as deeply as that. And that the words recited are true.

‘I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD!’

I was glad when I realized again that the LORD is coming to be born anew on this God’s own earth. I was glad when I realized again the joy of inviting God to make a home in me and of me, and not just me alone. And — when I feel it entire or when I recite it by rote — I am glad when I realize that through the climb in the company of others, there will come the wild, rising, unreasoning joy of God’s own welcome table, set for all places, and all times, until time ends, and begins again, in the house of the LORD.I was glad when I realized again that the LORD is coming to be born anew on this God’s own earth. I was glad when I realized again the joy of inviting God to make a home of me and not me alone.

** Godly Play: An Imaginative Approach to Religious Education, by Jerome Berryman

Wisdom Calling

Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?

“To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. …

The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. …

When he established the heavens, I was there,

when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, …

then I was beside him, like a master worker;

and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”

Prov 8:1, 4, 22, 27, 30-31; from the text for Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019;

for full text see: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Prov+8%3A1-4%2C+22-31&version=NRSV

Wisdom calling. Wisdom standing at the crossroads and raising her voice.

I have a crush on this woman. I don’t aspire to be her — such attainment is ‘too high for me’ (as the psalmist might say). I want to be near her, to spend time with her. Sit at an outdoor cafe and chat as we watch the passers-by. Then find ourselves occupied by our own conversation — leaning in, bodies turned towards each other, intent on our communion. Laughing aloud together for the very humor of being alive.

I want to be friends with her.

I imagine Wisdom so strongly. She calls to all, here and now. She stands at the crossing — that one, just there, where they’ve shifted the lane-lines over to make room for the new transit line coming in, and the buses lumber crowded in the construction-narrowed road (picture the bus with its shoulders hunched in, like the passengers that stand crammed in its aisle). Wisdom talks in high flights of poetry and with a well-grounded gumption. Wisdom talks to me.

I am driving that very road, held by the red light, a bus just beside me. The weather is drab and damp, not even poetically so, yet I am aware of delight rising with me. I turn the feeling over and realize Oh, it is because I get to spend the week with Wisdom. It is because I am headed to the library, where I will pull commentaries and lexicons off the shelves, and look up words and learn from others’ insights. Pay attention to that joy. It’s telling something.

Wisdom calls. Heard or unheard — the very mention of crossroads suggests all the traffic that passes by without even pausing; now the light turns green, and I turn left — Wisdom cries out to all who live. And for all the seeming playfulness of her proclamation, Wisdom’s delight is not ignorance or avoidance or petty weakness. Wisdom knows creation. She was there before its beginning and through every step of its coming to be. Wisdom’s hymn trumpets deep awareness and full engagement and potent strength.

Wisdom sings her birth from the LORD — not just created but gotten, in the old English sense, begotten; the verb in v.22 the same as in Gen 4:1, in Eve’s exultant joy at the birth of her first son. The birth image echoes again in v.25: ‘brought forth’ is a verb suggestive of the writhing and travail of childbirth. The LORD in labor, bearing and bringing forth Wisdom, keeping her near, delighting in her daily delight. Wisdom hymns her identity as joy; joy before the LORD, joy in the world, delight in humanity. She is entirely herself, and the self that she so freely rejoices in is not solitary but relational.

I come home from my library delving and pick up the ‘Outlook’ section from Sunday’s Washington Post (a day late) and see the cover article, ‘Changing Channels,’ about women after 50, stories from eight women who’ve reinvented their lives, themselves. The article opens with the line, ‘When women turn 50, the world starts to tune them out ….’ Woman Wisdom! I think, standing on that street corner, calling to the passers by. As the article continues, the women describe an ‘energy shift,’ a new sense of freedom to be themselves, to discover anew who those selves are. This is me, I realize as I read. Second calling (or third, depending on how you count). Wandering and wondering and recognizing again and again that I myself (and at my age too!) am in-process. And the freedom to claim that becoming, is that not also Wisdom?

I am in-process, still being created, still being born. As Wisdom — way back before the beginning of it all — once was. And as Wisdom even now delights in the joy of that eternal and daily newness, so might I.

Wisdom stands on the corner, and she looks me full in the face and smiles warmly and stretches out a hand and says, ‘Come and see…’ (John 1:39). She shows me wonders vast and tiny. She shows me how to see and how to hear. How to laugh. And — please God — how to tell.

I am being born into friendship with Woman Wisdom. A laughing thought, indeed! Yet that is the promise. ‘I love those who love me; those who seek diligently will find me’ (Prov 8:17). The promise is plural — not just to me, but for each of us, all of us. Be attuned to the delight that signs the encounter.

Birth involves writhing and travail. But — oh! — then comes the light, and the shuddering gasp and intake of breath, and the life.

And ‘the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy’ (Job 38:7).

Drone Tones

The LORD is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The LORD is the stronghold of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?
Psalm 27:1

Sunday March 17, 2019; Psalm 27 full text linked below:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+27&version=NRSV

I am reading Iris Origo’s Italian War Diary** this week. On July 11, 1943, she woke to the sound of booming. Her diary records the noise of naval bombardment, the reports of allied landings in Sicily, and the ‘little festa’ celebrating her newborn daughter’s christening. ‘A day of strange contrasts,’ Origo wrote, adding, ’The introit [for the Mass] is appropriate: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? … Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident…’ I read Origo’s journal and wonder how people are able to live, when dailiness itself is warped by being woven with the weft of war.

I do not suffer the shudder of bombardment punctuating the introit to Mass, nor — as Origo heard through the waves of her own labor pain — the groaning of an injured airman in the next room. But I read the news. Last week’s Ethiopian airplane crash. Yesterday’s massacre in the New Zealand mosque. Other events, less traumatic, but closer to home.

There are times I am overwhelmed with it all: the scale of suffering, the number of needs, the amount of things that must be done, that I could and should do. I am pulled askew, taut and thin, stretched as if to breaking. The present pain of the world sounds a drone tone to my life — as the sounds of bombardment were to the sung introit of Origo’s daughter’s Christening Mass. An untimely syncopation, pulling any sense of melody off-key. Such days I cannot even recall hope, much less sense it. If only I could fix myself towards some single point, I think, if only so, then at least I could claim it.

‘One thing I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple’ (Psa 27:4).

One thing only. One thing enough.

The psalmist knew the same trouble as I, as Origo, as any. The psalmist is similarly pulled. The psalm does not strike a single note but many, it is woven through with a whole gamut of emotion, of need, of desire. The psalmist is battered by circumstance, aware of enemies, even, at times, feels forsaken by the LORD.

‘Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud … Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help. Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation!’ (Psa 27:7a, 9).

Yet the drone-tone through the psalm is not, in fact, the world’s pain, nor even the psalmist’s. Those are named, and truly, and held up to God. Attention is paid, as it must be. But the sustaining tone behind the noise is the singleness of the psalmist’s conviction of the LORD’s beauty, of the LORD’s succor: ‘he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will set me high on a rock’ (Psa 27:5). The warp is kept taut and true despite the varied weft by the singleness of the psalmist’s hope in the LORD’s hearing and the LORD’s goodness.

‘Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD’ (Psa 27:14).

Step to that beat. Not because it is easy nor even obvious. But because it is the only way to keep walking through the valley when hope cannot be felt nor recalled but only claimed. One step. The next. Wait for the LORD. Claim the LORD my light and my salvation. Claim the LORD my goodness through all my days. Claim the LORD claiming me.

May the days be woven straight, even when the path runs slantwise to sense, to justice, to grace. May the days be woven true with and into love. May the sum of all the weaving be the pains eased, the hurts healed, and the world returned to wholeness as all shout together with joy.

** quotes from Iris Origo, War in Val D’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1044; London: Pushkin Press (2017), pp. 63, 59.