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| Cherries in the Sun by Doris Lee. Take a minute to appreciate the happy details in this painting. |
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I’ve got my safety pin on, my hashtags ready, an all-female Ghostbusters t-shirt, an AR-15 strapped to my back, my Merry-Christmas-Not-Happy-Holidays latte, and a bucket O Chick-Fil-A! And if nature calls, you better believe I’m ONLY using a LGBTTQQIAAP friendly bathroom and you know I’m not using any microaggressions, baby! Wait. Is baby a microaggression? Okay! We’re ready for Ironic Advent MediCATION #3!
Alright, I’ve got some splainin’ to do. Yesterday I wrote this gem:
If waiting isn’t your strong suit, let me lay a quote on you from a co-founder of Anarchy Hospital, Leo Tolstoy, “All really great things are happening in slow and inconspicuous ways.” That’s how healing works. Come to think of it, that’s also how growth works. In fact, probably the only thing that doesn’t work that way is destruction. Bulldozers and bombs make quick work of homes. Ice cream melts in the sun in minutes or seconds. But healing, that takes time. And the greatest healing takes a loooooong time. Ironic, huh?
Well, no. It’s not ironic. Great things take a long time. There’s nothing unexpected about that. What I meant was this: great power is made manifest in small, still, slow, and steady things and ways (the 4 Ss), contrary to what we might expect (there’s the irony!) In this culture, where “demanding justice” applies as much to an innocent man being freed from prison as it does to a Taco Bell employee buying a new TV and a pair of Jordans every Advent, we’ve become accustomed to power as something that solves problems quickly, like protests/demonstrations, legislation, and technology. Small, still, slow and steady things, things that grow, things that take root, things that leach out into the soil and into our lives, they don’t get much press in a technocracy. We celebrate Christmas because LIGHTS and PRESENTS, but Advent? This is the first time I’ve ever properly observed this season and I get why we don’t. It’s about waiting and fasting and preparing. That stuff don’t sell and it don’t keep the kids entertained.
I preached a sermon at my little Mennonite church a few weeks ago. It was about politics and, like a good, un-ironic Mennonite, I might have mentioned the Kingdom of God. It’s a Mustard Seed kingdom (or a Mushroom kingdom, if you prefer). Christian politics don’t have no business in high places and, despite what Rachel Held Evans might say, the end all be all of Christian politics ain’t leftist identity politics or “standing in solidarity” with the groups we white folks find it fashionable to look down upon. “Solidarity.” Bosh! This isn’t the USSR and you ain’t fighting the communists. Dial it back, girl. (Is girl a microaggression?) The Mustard Seed kingdom is slow. It’s close to home. There’s a place for activism, but it doesn’t roll with the latest Twitter hashtag and or throw itself into Facebook’s weekly anger porn orgie (unless it’s Harambe, which, by the way, is one of the great ironic movements of 2016 and I’ll definitely be writing about that soon).
The earth is slow. The seasons are slow. Advent is slow. People are slow. We change slowly. We get better slowly. Sometimes we get worse slowly. I like people. I like weird people, especially. I like watching people change and get better, slowly. People care about people. People want to help and they need to be needed. I want to help and be needed and I like to feel as though I belong someplace. But technocracy doesn’t like people. Technocracy likes technology and the things which make technology good are not the things which make people good. People need rhythm, people need slowness, people need stillness. I took an afternoon nap today. In this culture, that’s damn near forming a coup and maybe something of a sacrament. Sacraments, anarchism, and naps. That’s what Advent is all about.
A Thoreau quote for you:
I am again struck by the perfect correspondence of a day - say, an August day, and the year. I think a perfect parallel may be drawn between the seasons of the day and of the year. Perhaps after middle age man ceases to be interested in the morning and in the spring. Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourselves to the influences of each. In August live on berries, not dried meats and pemmican, as if you were on shipboard making your way through a waste ocean, or in a northern desert. Be blown by all the winds. Open your pores and bathe in all the tides of Nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons. Why, "nature" is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health.
(And I didn’t just pull that off the web, though you might recognize the ‘live each season as it passses’ line because some yoga studio you went to once and liked on Facebook threw it up against a picture of some trees, ran it through a filter, and posted it. No, dear reader. I own Thoreau’s journals and I copied that out of a book made with paper and glue because HU taught me better.)
My brother’s got a line, “Shut ‘er down, Ethel, she’s a-suckin’ mud!” That’s a little Advent mediCATION for you. RX: shut ‘er, down. The air has a new chill, the trees lack the strength to hold their leaves, the grass alongside roads and old barns is golden, wavy, and wheat-like, the sun, after shining bright and hot in mid-summer and in August, now retires early, and the blue sky is hidden by gray clouds, which wrap around the countryside like a mother hen's wing around her baby chick. The earth is shutting down, and maybe we should, too.
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A brief epilogue. Isn't it something that God, in his/her way, is small, still, slow, and steady; and the earth, in its way, is small, still, slow, and steady; but people, we aren't so good at keeping to this, though we are, in truth, the slowest and smallest of them all, we scurry about, hustling, bustling, "running" errands. For my part, tomorrow, and during the rest of Advent, I'm going to walk my errands. Maybe even saunter my errands. Advent stretches time waaaaayyyy ooouuuuuttt and folds time over upon itself. We're waiting for a God who is coming, already came, and will come again, to save a world that's already been saved, is being saved, and will be saved. If God can play fast and loose with time, you can too.
Be well.
Be well.
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