Advent Reflection: When Waiting Is Not Enough

This may come as a surprise to some of you considering that the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has well passed, but we are not in the Christmas Season right now.  If you take seriously the traditions of the Church, the period shortly after Thanksgiving and before Christmas Day is the Advent Season (Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas).  While I am sure many people would say, “Whatever.  Who cares?” I believe it is important for the witness of the Church and the spiritual formation of Christians to recognize and take seriously the difference.

Advent matters because it teaches us not only to wait, but to wait in hope of Jesus Christ.  Admittedly, I am not very good at this.  It is not so much the waiting part that trips me up.  Certainly, like most Westerners, I have gotten used to instant gratification.  With Netflix I can watch nearly whatever I want whenever I want.  In a world of cellphones I can call or be called in my car, in a restaurant, or even in a pristine national forest.  It does drive me crazy, too, when it takes more than half a second for a webpage to load.  But in spite of those examples—in the big scheme of things—I have gotten better at waiting.

For me, it is what I am waiting for that I still struggle with.  If you asked, I could tell you a nice, orthodox cognitive response about how what I am waiting for is the final day when Christ comes and fully restores all of creation, makes everything right, and I get my full head of hair back.  However, in my day-to-day life and the way I live it, I am waiting for all kinds of things, but God is quite often not one of them.

What I find myself waiting for is something amorphous and unclear called “better.”  And I sometimes fear that “better” is not coming.  As a single person in my late 30s, I am waiting to meet a woman that would be dumb enough to marry someone like me.  I am waiting to feel like I am doing something meaningful with my life (I am also waiting for clarity on what that might be).  I am waiting to find the motivation to do more with the gifts and opportunities that I have before me, instead of squandering them as I frequently do.  I am waiting to no longer feel so lonely.

Aside from my self-center, middle class white people problems, I am also waiting for people to stop starving in a world with a ridiculous amount of food and resources.  I am waiting for governments and political militants to stop using violence and killing—most of which they get young poor and working class folks to do—to achieve their goals.  I am waiting for children to stop being molested and beaten and for men to stop raping women.  I am waiting for people to treat animals a little more like responsibilities and less like things and commodities.  I am waiting for me to actually do something about the things for which I am waiting.  And when the sense overwhelms me that none of these things will ever come, I find myself waiting to die; if nothing else comes to pass, this surely will. 

What the above self-indulgently dark words show is that I am waiting and wallowing in my own story with little reference to God beyond lip-service platitudes about “seeking God’s will” that I do not mean but have to say because I am a Christian.  I end up waiting in a fragmented life that will end like every life ever has.  And this is precisely why Advent matters.

Advent is the ultimate reminder of what is worth waiting for.  That it is called Advent—Latin for “coming”—reminds us that life is not simply “one damned thing after another” heading nowhere.  God is coming to finish making what is wrong right.  We as Christians have faith that God already started this 2000 years ago at the first Christmas with the birth of Jesus the Messiah, God incarnate.  He came to live among us, show us more fully the nature and character of God, and to liberate humanity from sin, which has manifest itself both in individuals and corporately in the deification of empires, the love of money, and domination games that the powerful play over the weak. 

While this in-breaking of God into the material world has thus far not eliminated sin, it did conquer the inevitability of Sin’s power and its resultant eternal death and separation from God.  That God will not abandon humanity to decay and nothingness is evidenced in God’s son, Jesus.  What has been done in him and through him in his new life and resurrection body will be done for those who are in him and for creation (cf. Rom 8; 1 Cor 15). 

Of course, we must wait till the return of Jesus for this current age to wrap up and be followed by a new one in which all of creation is whole, in communion with God, and death, suffering, and selfish ambition are no more.  But perhaps the supreme beauty of the first Advent is that it means not having to wait for the second one to start living under the reign and healing power of God that will eventually complete what God started in Christ’s resurrection.  In God’s imperfect Church—through the power of the Holy Spirit—loneliness, fear, greed, lying, and idolatry can begin to end now.  

And that is what Advent is all about, Charlie Brown.

When God Only Knows: Theological Reflections on Alzheimer's and the Day My Grandfather Forgot Me

In September televangelist, Pat Robertson, stirred up controversy on his show, “The 700 Club,” when he suggested it would be permissible to divorce a spouse with Alzheimer’s to marry another as long as the ill partner was provided for. When questioned about how this fit with Christian wedding vows, he responded, “If you respect that vow, you say ‘till death do we part.’ (Alzheimer’s) is a kind of death.”

Robertson’s assumption here—not an uncommon one—is that what fully makes us “persons” and our lives worth living is our cognitive understanding of ourselves and our stories. However, there is a problem with Christian leaders viewing personhood and social-spiritual commitments this way. It does not match up with how God has created and operates in the world and the Church. Our individual lives and stories do not end when we start to forget who we are.

This issue became personal to me this summer when for the first time in my life my grandfather forgot who I was. For the last several years, I have taken the week of my birthday off from my job in North Carolina to visit my grandparents in their small Michigan town. We have always been close as they raised me from infancy till age 8 when my mother remarried.

This particular visit was different from the previous ones. I had scanned hundreds of old family photos from ca.1903 and onward with the purpose of sitting down with my grandparents and typing out the names and stories behind each one. For a history geek like me that wants to preserve where we come from, this documentation is important. So, in edition to eating lunch and dinner, running errands, and watching “The Price is Right” together, the first several days we also spent a lot of time on the back porch chatting about family history and going through photos while I played scribe. Then midday on Tuesday, July 26, 2011, it was like a switch was flipped and reality changed.

Having been on the porch for about 10 minutes with both grandparents going through pictures, my grandmother and I got up and went into their backyard storage shed to try to find some old records that my grandfather had recorded. (In addition to his day job, he was a country musician in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. We were shocked to recently discover that an MP3 from an extremely rare 7-inch record he did in the early 1960s called “Skid Row” is on a radio station’s website. It is the 6th song listed, by Conrad Stoneburner.  He is the one singing and playing guitar. Click here to listen.) After being in there just a few minutes, my grandfather came in, pointed right at me and said angrily to my grandmother, “I want him out of here now! I don’t know who he is, but he needs to go away.” I stood there stunned and quiet. On one side of this moment stood his disorientation and on the other side mine. Over the next several days he would try to throw me out of the house four times, only to be stopped by my grandmother’s emphatic reminders of who I am.

My grandfather is the one on the left, Conrad Stoneburner. This picture is from the early 1960s.

In an instant I became a stranger to the man who taught me how to tie my shoes and to ride a bike. He is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and my grandmother is taking care of him. The experience left me disoriented and wondering who this man is now that he has forgotten me. Looking to Scripture, the answer became clear: he is still my grandfather.

One of the most fundamental realities that the Church can learn through the Bible is that we are known, loved, and cared for by God first (e.g. Ps 139; Jer 1.5; Gal 4.9). This is reflected in the very shape of life. We all start out as infants whom are known by our parents and families before we know them. To be known when we are not able to know makes our lives possible.

Our individual stories—which carry and convey our personhood and lives—do not end because we start to forget them. This is true because they have never been just our own. Each of our stories is interwoven into those of others, as wife, husband, son, daughter,  grandson, neighbor, friend, etc. God has others around to carry us and to remember our stories when we no longer can; each of us becomes part of the narratives of others. In this, our finite connected stories are taken up into the larger story of Christ.

A person does not ultimately exist as a person in her or his cognition, but rather in a story, a story told by God through communities of people. In this, faithfulness to a forgetful grandfather who knows not what he does becomes a reflection and a playing out of the faithfulness of God through Christ to a forgetful world that does not remember where it comes from, that it is loved, and that it is ultimately heading toward being beautifully restored. Someday grandpas will no longer forget and will be rescued, because God has not forgotten them and will never leave them behind like faded memories. This is something that even televangelists should try to remember.

This is I, my grandmother, Betty, and my grandfather, Conrad, in front of their place in Michigan

Losing Your Way: A Reflection on Good Friday, Easter, and Uncertainty in Life

I am not going to lie.  I have had easier Lenten seasons.  I find myself in a place of doubt and uncertainty about what I am doing with my life and where it is heading.  What is disconcerting is not that this feeling is new, but that I still find myself in such a place after all of this time.  I find myself walking, but not actually sure if I am heading anywhere.    However, while I am not particularly confident that I will find the clarity or answers that I want anytime soon--since most existential problems are not “built” in a day, they are not deconstructed in a day either--I am at least hoping that the Good Friday and Easter stories that we have just remembered and walked through as a church will remind me of where and who God is and what my relationship is to him.  

Compared to real problems in the world like starvation, weather disasters, and revolutions, my troubles are pretty common and bourgeois, but right or wrong, this is where I find myself.  What I had hoped for my life during my 20s and early 30s is not panning out.  

I am 36 years old.  I had hoped to be married by now and yet find myself single again and recognizing that the problem is really not them but me.  And for more than ten years I had wanted to get a PhD in New Testament and teach.  I have two theological masters degrees, two bachelors degrees, and an associate’s degree thrown in for good measure.  I am not suffering from a lack of formal education.  Yet what I have is not enough.  For a variety of reasons--many being economically related--I decided not to pursue a PhD and have spent the last several years coming to terms with what this means; I have not been doing a great job of emotionally letting go of this one.  It had been Plan A and I had never made a Plan B.  I have been frozen for three years, uncertain of what to do next.  I am in that fun place that everyone over 50 warns you about, but you never quite get it till you are there: this is the time when you realize that you are not going to be all of the things you had hoped and dreamed you would be.  In “Fight Club” parlance, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all a part of the same compost pile.”

This is where I look in desperation to Good Friday and Easter.  Admittedly, the fabric of these stories does not provide me with particular answers to the problems haunting me.  Nowhere do I see three easy steps to not being a mediocre boyfriend or guaranteed ways to discover a new fulfilling career path.  Instead, what they show is a picture of God’s unbounded love meeting and absorbing humanity’s unbounded fear and cruelty. From this comes a perspective, and a reminder of who and what is important.

If you want to talk about dashed expectations and dreams, from the point of view of Jesus’ disciples, Good Friday initially must have been utterly hope-shattering.  Having bought into the idea of Jesus as the messiah, they had expected he would violently throw the Romans out of Israel and that the day of the Lord would be there making them a free people again.  Instead, all of the dreams that they had left their fishing nets, homes, and families behind for vanished.  Their messiah did not overthrow the pagan Roman state, but was executed by it, and they went into hiding, cowering in fear, afraid that they would be next.  Their one way out to freedom and a life without fear was shot.  And let us not forget, poor Jesus was abandoned by his closest friends and even for a moment was forsaken by God the Father himself.

But then the most bizarre, unbelievable comeback and reorientation from disorientation of all time: the resurrection.  Despite what 20th century liberal theology has suggested, this was not a fictive metaphor for overcoming nor for the triumph of the human spirit or even of faith or hope.  Jesus was bodily raised from the dead, declared that the same would same day happen to us and creation, and said that he would always be with us.  He did not avoid, sidestep or even destroy the Roman politics that confronted him, but rather offered a proto-politic of the Kingdom of God to be lived out now in the Church and fired it up and empowered with the Holy Spirit.

After seeing the resurrected Christ, did the disciples go on to have fulfilled and successful lives that were absent of pain and doubt?  No.  They were promised suffering in ways akin to Jesus’ suffering (John 15.20; 2 Tim 3.12).  Between the post-Easter ascension and the return of Christ someday, in some paradoxical sense life got both better and harder.  In Scripture you read of people living faithfully and with more hope and love, while being ridiculed by those around them.  The apostle Paul spent plenty of time in jail and at points talked about despairing of life (2 Cor 1.8-11), and yet he found hope in his faith in Christ and the faithfulness and life of his fellow Christ followers and the new age to come.  

What I am wanting to learn and accept from this past Lenten season is that I may not get any new, vibrant dreams anytime soon; I will have to struggle for them against the backdrop of my own dysfunctions.  But in spite of this, Easter shows something very real.  Jesus was raised from the dead into a new kind of life, eternal and inseparable from God.  In our baptisms and in the Church, he is now with us and for us as we imperfectly follow him.  This is a sign that a new world and a better future is coming for people and the universe.  And until then, in my failings and whatever I do not know about myself and where my life is heading, I am not alone; God is with me even when I do not notice him.

I would also be lying if I said that faith felt like enough; it often does not.  But, while how I feel is not nothing for me, it is also not everything either (There is a life at the center of the universe making all of life and existence possible and it is not mine).  This is where a poem written in prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian that was executed by the Nazis, speaks calmly and best:

Who am I?  They often tell me
I step out from my cell
calm and cheerful and poised,
like a squire from his manor.

Who am I?  They often tell me
I speak with my guards
freely, friendly and clear,
as though I were the one in charge.

Who am I? They also tell me
I bear days of calamity
serenely, smiling and proud,
like one accustomed to victory.

Am I really what others say of me?
Or am I only what I know of myself?
Restless, yearning, sick, like a caged bird,
struggling for life breath, as if I were being strangled,
starving for colors, for flowers, for birdsong,
thirsting for kind words, human closeness
shaking with rage at power lust and pettiest insult,
tossed about, waiting fro great things to happen,
helplessly fearing for friends so far away,
too tired and empty to pray, to think, to work,
weary and ready to take my leave of it all?

Who am I?  This one or the other?
Am I this one today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once?  Before others a hypocrite
and in my own eye a pitiful, whimpering weakling?
Or is what remains in me like a defeated army,
Fleeing in disarray from victory already won?

Who am I?  They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am yours.

(Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers From Prison in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol 8.  Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. Pp. 459-460.)