On Being Blog: Archive

The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi Krista Tippett on Being

Rumi’s Continuing Emergence in Our Culture

by Krista Tippett, host

A young man from Islamabad, Pakistan expresses himself through photography and the poetry of Rumi. (photo: “Spirit” by Esâm Khattak)

We’ve created a memorable hour of listening that’s fresh and lush with the sounds and the texture of the great Sufi poet, Rumi.

There is no formula for our shows, no template. Each begins with the raw material of a conversation, and we shape its pace and sound and elements around that. I think great productions emerge when the whole feel of the experience seems at one with the words being spoken, taking the listener more deeply into the passion and intent of the voice being heard. Creating this show around the life and words of Rumi has felt a little like having magic to work with.

I take away many gems of idea and image from my conversation with one of Rumi’s delightful 21st-century interpreters and successors, Fatemeh Keshavarz. Rumi saw human life and love as the closest we come to tasting and touching transcendence, and he approached all experience with his whole mind, heart, and body.

Keshavarz describes Rumi’s “whirling” around a column as he recited poetry — a habit that inspired the Whirling Dervishes of the Mevlevi Sufi Order — as a way to “stay centered while moving.” He believed that, as searching and restlessness propel us to keep learning, plowing the ground beneath our feet, they are themselves a form of arrival. In Rumi’s way of seeing life, perplexity is a blessed state, sometimes a necessary state. This idea has special resonance, perhaps, in the 21st century when so many basic definitions and institutions of previous generations seem to be up for grabs.

But Rumi’s recent “discovery” in the West also holds no little irony. I found this best expressed in my research by a British journalist, William Dalrymple. “It seems almost unbelievable in the world of 9/11, Bin Laden and the Clash of Civilizations,” he wrote, “but the best-selling poet in the U.S. in the 1990s was not Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, nor Shakespeare or Dante. … Instead, remarkably it was a classically trained Muslim cleric who taught Sharia law in a madrasa in what is now Turkey.” Yet as Rumi has been translated and popularized in the modern West, the religious sensibility behind his beautiful, best-selling words has often been lost.

Fatemah Keshavarz is adamant on this point: Rumi was steeped in Islam. He represents and speaks to “an adventurous and cosmopolitan Islam.” The generous, cross-cultural appeal of his words reflects ideas at the core of Islam that are muted by the extremists and headlines of our time. But to the extent that Rumi would deny or subvert those, he does so through his grounding in Islamic tradition, and his profound love for it.

Keshavarz, who was born in Iran — the center of the vast civilization that spawned Rumi and where he remains to this day a household name — takes special solace in Rumi’s insistence that we can create worlds and possibilities by way of language itself.

Where that part of the world is now concerned, Keshavarz says, U.S. political culture has adopted a language of fear. Rumi champions and models a language of hope. This is not tepid and naive but full-blooded view of human reality, fully aware of the double-edged sword of the passions and pulls of real human experience. In this, Rumi speaks to those of us on both sides of a real or imagined “clash of civilizations.”

As we conclude this show, I hear Rumi as a perfect voice for the spiritual longing and energy of our time. With his vigorous and challenging language of the heart, he reminds us that we need poetry as much as we need science, alongside our politics and within our diplomacy. We need passionate searching words, not just logical decisive words, to tell the whole truth about what it means to be human, and about the past, present, and future of our world.

Here is one passage of many I’ve seen quoted of Rumi, which I’ll now hear with new layers of relevance:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

~

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

There are many English translations of Rumi’s poetry available today. But, the craft of translating is a delicate art, one that calls for sensitivity and understanding of the Sufi master and his culture. The Rumi Collection, edited by Kabir Helminski, serves as a good introduction that includes translations by Coleman Barks and Robert Bly, as well as Helminski himself — a Shaikh, or master, of the Mevlevi Order — and others.

We’ve also provided a page of translations by Fatemeh Keshavarz on our website. Not only can you read the text of each poem, but you can listen to it in Persian or English too.

Jan 1, 2011

#Rumi #Mevlevi Order #Sufism #poetry #Islam #Muslim #Turkey #Iran

Learning Through the Eyes of Others

by Ann Milliken Pederson, guest contributor

When I first lived in the upper Great Plains, I did so as a freshman at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. I still remember the day when my parents’ car pulled away and I was standing by my dorm wondering why I had decided to move almost 800 miles from my home in Montana. While I would miss my parents and friends, I began to miss the mountains almost immediately.

I felt like Beret, the female protagonist in Giants in the Earth who left her home in Norway and moved to Dakota Territory. The vast grasslands and harsh climate nearly drove her mad. When I would look outward, I would think, “There’s nothing to see.” Flat land seemed to stretch everywhere and yet nowhere. Corn fields and soy beans.

Almost 15 years later, I moved back to the Dakotas, this time as a professor in a small Lutheran college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Once again, I found myself reading Giants in the Earth, wondering if I would go insane from looking at “nothing.” The prairie winds blew hot air all summer long, and in the winter I found it difficult to ski or be outdoors because as soon as it snowed the snow was blown into crusted ice piles.

Then, bit by bit, we became acquainted with new friends whose love for the prairie challenged my notion that it was “full of nothing.” My husband and I began to walk the prairie landscapes with our friends Janet and Ross, who is an environmental biologist and knows the names of every plant, bird, and tree.

I learned about the mating dances of prairie chickens, about the oak stands in Beaver Creek Nature area, and how to listen to the multiple calls of cardinals. Naming the multiplicity and buzzing life forms on the Dakota prairies drew me into what I now see as a change of view. “Nothing” has become “something.” And that something has slowly become a perspective on the Dakotas that has me calling this landscape “home.” It’s a different home than the mountains. But it’s home.

My eyesight has changed — thanks also to my friend Sheila. She’s an artist whose recent works feature the upper Great Plains. I have several of her paintings in our house, including two large prairie landscapes in my home office. When I write or prepare for teaching, I need to have “space” — openness where ideas can move around, where I can take a deep breath.

Since the actual office space isn’t very large, I find that her paintings create that space for me. The painting right above my computer is my favorite of hers. Large boulders are in the foreground of a prairie horizon. Two tree trunks frame the view through which I look into a receding horizon. I have always thought it was late summer or early fall when the ground is browned by the sun and the sky is dotted by a few white clouds. I always want to enter that place, sit on one of the rocks, and look into the spacious expanse of prairie. The view begs one to take ample time, time that is as plentiful and full as the panorama. When my life gets full of too much — iPods, voicemails, emails — then I come to this view to redesign my life, to change my surroundings.

Sheila’s views have become my spiritual lens for a geographical restructuring and transformation of my life. I hope that while on sabbatical I can find more views, and maybe even offer to others what Sheila has offered me.

Who we are is where we are. Or at least where we have been and where we are going. I think about time: When? How long? I have been thinking a lot about the boundaries, borders, situations, dimensions, and locations of our lives. When and where are interrelated. When and where is a complicated plot between local and global, then and now, over and under. What are the maps that we take through these journeys? What does it mean to map the human genome? What are the cartographies of our culture? What are the maps that bypass the “underground” places? Recently, I drove to such a place.

It’s true that you “have to see it to believe it.” Or in other words, to step into this place is to step into the stories it tells. A few months ago, I drove to the golf course in Canton, South Dakota. Between the third and fourth hole on the Hiawatha Golf Club is a small cemetery with the bodies of those who had been kept as inmates in the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians.

I’ve read a lot about this place, but still had not been to the site. It’s not easy to find. Surrounded by a split rail fence is a large grave marker with the names of dozens of American Indians who died at the asylum. There are 121 bodies buried in the graveyard — in the middle of a golf course — on the outskirts of Canton, which is the seat of Lincoln county. In 1899, a local U.S. senator, Richard Pettigrew, brought the federal funds to start this institution. A large historic district in Sioux Falls is named after Pettigrew. When the newly developing field of eugenics was coming of age, many people in the United States believed that one way to rid the country of “troublesome Indians” was to claim that they were “insane” and could be sent to the asylum. Hundreds of American Indians from around the U.S. were sent to the Canton asylum.

The Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians was intended to be a hospital dedicated solely to the “mental illness problem” among Native Americans. What it became was a kind of warehouse for storing “problem” Indians. When the asylum was visited in its later years, the following was noted in a report from Minnesota Public Radio: “The Indian affairs commissioner under President Roosevelt called reports of the asylum reminiscent of the terrible indictments Charles Dickens leveled against English poorhouses and schools.”

More information about the asylum’s operations came from the writings of Dr. Samuel Silk, the clinical director of the country’s premier psychiatric hospital, St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C. He wrote that children were abused; adults were secluded in isolation for years. The asylum did not even meet minimum standards of care.

On the fairway between the third and fourth holes on this golf course, I wondered how my ancestors (Norwegian Lutherans) could live nearby and not know what happened to all these people at the asylum. “Good Norwegian Lutherans.” A “good South Dakota senator.” A history that is painful, ominous, and only 30 miles or so from where I live.

Where do I walk today, in these times that I don’t want to know about? That I turn a blind eye to? Shame won’t do me any good. But a guilt that is confessed, that motivates me to tell this story might help me to do something about all of those whose lives are hidden, not made visible, covered by those in power who don’t want to know. Maybe this wound on the South Dakota landscape can somehow become an anchorage — a reminder of where we are, who has lived here, and most importantly, the suffering of those who went before and whose stories need to be told. I’m learning a lot about the stories that this prairie landscape is telling me.

Ann Milliken Pederson is a professor of Religion at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran in America. She loves to walk with her dogs in the country, hear stories about middle school band students her husband teaches, and read mysteries.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

Dec 31, 201036 notes

#religion #Great Plains #prairie #Native Americans #history #justice #asylum #submission

“What could be better than to hold your hand out to people less fortunate than you are.” —

— Paul Newman, from a 2007 interview broadcast on today’s PBS Newshour.

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

Dec 30, 20102 notes

#philanthropy #giving

Play

Dec 30, 201034 notes

#bird #flight #sky #video #video snack

Top Twitter Trends of 2010

by Shubha Bala, associate producer

Twitter recently released its top trends of 2010. It’s a relief to see that the Gulf oil spill finished ahead of Justin Bieber. Interestingly, three of the top trends had to do with soccer’s World Cup. (Pulpo Paul was the “psychic” octopus that predicted World Cup match results.)

And if you love top 10 trends, check out Google’s interactive top 10 for 2010.

Dec 29, 2010

#best of #Twitter #World Cup

Play

Dec 29, 2010

#dance #choreography #Alvin Ailey #spiritual #music #video

Sitting Bull's Legacy: Strength in Culture and Family Krista Tippett on Being

Sitting Bull’s Legacy: Strength in Culture and Family

by Patrice Kunesh, special contributor

Louis Primeau (seated, far right), the uncle of my grandfather, served as translator and tracker for James McLaughlin (leaning against tree), the U.S. official who ordered Sitting Bull’s arrest in December 1890.

As a law student studying the tragic history of the federal government’s unwarranted removal of thousands of Indian children from their families, I told my mother of my intent to fight for the right of Indian tribes to secure the well-being of those children. She replied, to my utter surprise, “No child should have to grow up on an Indian reservation.”

My view of the reservation had been constructed around stories from my grandfather, Theodore Kelly, a Hunkpapa Lakota who grew up on the Standing Rock Reservation in the early 1900s. He spent summers running with abandon through the prairie grass, fishing along the banks of the Missouri, hunting and relishing tachupa, the bone marrow, which he said was the best part. Seldom did he hear shi’cha (“naughty”), only hoksila seka (“good boy”) and hoksila washte (“good girl”).

My mother then told me about the precarious side of his childhood: the grinding poverty, the disease, and the despair that had become rooted into every part of the reservation. Often there was not enough food for the family or fuel to heat the house. His brother, along with scores of other children, was sent far away to a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as part of the federal government’s assimilationist policies aimed at breaking up families and severing their ties to the land. Like so many other Indian children, he grew up confused and angry about his identity and indefinite place in American society. I was not dissuaded by my mother’s response — only more resolved to work for the rights of American Indian tribes to be self-determined and self-sufficient.

I found my inspiration in the words of Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader of the Lakota people who also grew up in a territory that became the Standing Rock Reservation. Sitting Bull is renowned for his prowess as a warrior and visionary spiritual leader; but, later in life when pressed by the army, he would look first to the children, the old, and the sick. He would seek to secure their safety and consistently would give away his possessions and meat to feed and clothe them. He gained a reputation as the most generous man in a society where generosity was the ultimate virtue.

Even in the face of defeat, Sitting Bull’s primary concern was for the children. On the threshold of the passage of the General Allotment Act — one of the most pernicious pieces of legislation leading to the utter destruction of the traditional tribal way of life on the plains and prairies of the Dakota Territory — Sitting Bull finally surrendered to the U.S. Calvary to save his people from starvation and further degradations.

Years of fighting a losing battle against the government’s confiscation of Lakota lands and confinement onto reservations had reduced the Lakota to a pitiful state of privation and dependency. In 1883, just seven years before his tragic death, Sitting Bull addressed a committee of U.S. Senators at the Standing Rock Agency. While the senators insisted on more land cessions from the Lakota in the sacred grounds of Paha Sapa (the Black Hills), Sitting Bull reminded them of their treaty obligations for compensation and supplies. His pleas were not for himself, but for the children.

He said to the U.S. Senators who were visiting Standing Rock:

“I am looking into the future for the benefit of my children, the Sioux, and that is what I mean when I say I want my country taken care of for me. My children will grow up here, and I am looking ahead for their benefit, and for the benefit of my children’s children too; and even beyond that.”

Sitting Bull addresses a federal commission with James McLaughlin at Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory. (photo: D. F. Barry)

After years of conflict and the painful transition from an unencumbered life to a life as reservation accommodationists, some tribal people began to rethink what it meant to be Lakota, indeed to be part of the Sioux nation. To Sitting Bull, the true survival of his people meant cultural survival and the endurance of the tiospaye, or family relationships.

The foundations of his prominence as a leader and his spiritual powers were derived from his tiospaye, which nourished the Lakota lifeways and a culture that valued children and ensured their future well-being. Sitting Bull insisted on preserving the collectivity of the land and family through tribal customs and ceremonies.

Despite my mother’s faltering view of reservation life, she constructed her own life around the family as a sacred circle. In her home and in the homes of her 13 children, there is always a place for grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and grandchildren. We often have a complete family circle at one time. The land we hold at Standing Rock also remains an essential cultural connection for us. It reminds us of Sitting Bull’s enduring legacy, which implores: “Let us put our minds together and see what future we can make for our children.”

Patrice Kunesh teaches federal Indian law at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. She also directs the university’s Institute of American Indian Studies.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

Dec 28, 2010

#Lakota #Native American #Sitting Bull #South Dakota #Tatanka Iyotake #history #public radio #treaties #family #Sioux #Standing Rock

“Yeah I’m Arab, yeah I’m very American, and yeah I’m very Islamic, but you put those things in the blender and I’m no longer just a thing. I’m a new thing.” —

— Najah Bazzy, an American-born nurse and founder/president of Zaman International, as quoted in “Muslim Women Gain Higher Profile in U.S.” for the International Herald Tribune’s series, “The Female Factor.”

Photo by Edward Marritz.

by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer

Dec 28, 201013 notes

#Muslim #feminist #Islam #women's issues

“Yeah I’m Arab, yeah I’m very American, and yeah I’m very Islamic, but you put those things in the blender and I’m no longer just a thing. I’m a new thing.” —

Photo by Edward Marritz.

by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer

Dec 28, 2010

#Muslim #feminist #Islam #women's issues

Dec 28, 201022 notes

#Christmas #Flickr #Santa #outtakes #photography #first person outreach #Advent

Play

Dec 27, 201046 notes

#Bikram #yoga #time-lapse #video

Dec 26, 2010

#Christmas #Flickr #Santa #outtakes #photography #first person outreach #Advent

Joe Carter and the Legacy of the African-American Spiritual Krista Tippett on Being

The Negro Spiritual’s Sophisticated Theology

by Krista Tippett, host

I once met an American tourist who went to Siberia — and was peppered with questions about Joe Carter. Joe had made one of his riveting educational presentations about the African-American spiritual there, and had indelibly impressed his audience. His would forever be the glorious face they put on all people and things American. Joe’s presence — his voice, his spirit, and his life — made the world a more generous place.

And I love hearing Joe’s voice and sending it out into the world again — resurrection by radio. This show was special from the first. We sat in a spacious chamber where orchestras record — Joe and his pianist and I. And as we talked about the spirituals, Joe periodically stood up and sang to illustrate his points. We enjoyed ourselves immensely, and that enjoyment is audible in the final production.

It was revelatory to take this staple of American culture, as the spiritual has become — musical lines we can sing without thinking — and ask questions of it. It was painful to be reminded, foundationally, that this music had its genesis in slavery. Anonymous bards authored the body of work of some 5,000 songs that we know as the spiritual. Each song typically expresses a single sentiment or message, often born of grief.

These melodies and words, as Joe helped me understand, convey a sophisticated theology of suffering. It is a theology that leans into suffering — and in surrender, transforms and rises above it, if only in moments. Such moments are nurturing and sustaining. Human beings across the world have experienced this directly through hearing and singing the spirituals, generations later and in radically different contexts.

“The thing we find,” Joe said, “is that in the midst of all of the most horrible pain, some of these powerful individuals lived transcendent, shining lives. They were able to be loving and forgiving in the midst of it all. Mammy was taking care of master’s baby. She could have smothered that child. But she loved the child like it was her own child, because there was something in her faith that said, ‘You’re supposed to be loving, you’re supposed to be kind, you’re supposed to be forgiving — and there’s no excuse if you’re not…’ The ancestors knew that the worst kind of bondage is that which takes place on the inside. And when we look back to the slavery days we were bound, but it was the master who was really the slave. And I think some of us understand that now.”

I asked Joe whether he — himself a grandson of slaves — couldn’t reasonably begrudge the way in which white Americans have appropriated the spiritual, embraced it as their own. But that question was mine, not his. In Siberia and Africa and Wales, he says, these songs speak directly to the human will to survive precisely when the worst has happened. They have become symbolic of a universal yearning for freedom — “that part of us all which says, ‘I will not be defeated.’” We rebroadcast this hour in celebration of Joe Carter’s gifts of wisdom and music that echo vitally beyond his death.

And, if you’re interested in learning more, I recommend reading The Books of American Negro Spirituals by James Weldon Johnson. Joe Carter brought a battered, treasured early volume of this work with him to our interview. There is a 2002 combined volume of the two seminal collections of sheet music, history, and commentary that Johnson published in 1925 and 1926. They remain among the most significant reference resources ever compiled on this musical genre. Johnson’s prefaces are elegant and moving. Chapters are devoted to the most significant known spirituals. “As the years go by and I understand more about this music and its origin,” Johnson writes, “the miracle of its production strikes me with increasing wonder.”

Dec 26, 201029 notes

#spiritual #African-American #music #history #public radio

A Well-Rehearsed Ritual

by Anna Lawrence Pietroni, guest contributor

A Christmas tree stands a month after Christmas last year. Ashley, who had recently overcame thyroid cancer, kisses her son Trey, who was undergoing treatment for tuberculosis.
(photo: Fred Erlenbusch/Flickr)

Advent Tea was invented by my mother 40 years ago. My brothers were young and knocking over furniture in their pre-Christmas fervor. Mom needed to find some way of marshaling their excitement, so she built a little ritual around the lighting of a candle on a Sunday — something to pull them back to here and now and to take their eyes off December 25th. She took a few simple ingredients: cream crackers (frugal, brittle squares of air and flour), a jar of home-pickled onions, and a slab of cheddar cheese. She lit a candle, and that was it: Advent Tea.

Now my young sons are knocking over furniture, and I welcome Advent Tea as a slower, settled time on Sunday afternoons. My boys’ religious education is a little patchy. When I asked them what Advent meant, they told me “it means crackers.” But Advent Tea does what all good rituals do: it’s a simple, repeated practice that has worn grooves into our years; it brings the weight and depth of shared experience to the moment.

Last December we were far from home, living in Boston, Massachusetts. Back in England, my parents were nursing my grandfather through the final stages of cancer. Advent was about a different kind of anticipation: not of birth, but of death. We knew Grandad did not have long to live. My parents were fully occupied with making his last weeks as comfortable as they could, and yet my dad found time to buy the makings of Advent Tea and ship them in a shoebox to the States. I felt the separation keenly — daily Skype calls are no substitute for being in the room. But Advent Tea connected me with them; I ate what they ate, we all lit a candle, and this invoked a little of their presence.

I’m back home now and don’t need the shared practice to draw my loved ones close. This year, the ritual of Advent Tea is serving us in an unexpected way. We face our first Christmas not only without Grandad, but without my father too. He was vital, active, in his mid-sixties and struck down this summer by a stealthy, aggressive cancer that shocked everyone with the speed of its progression. I got home five days before he died. Our family is depleted: we’ve lost two tender, generous men who blessed the lives of everyone they knew. It’s all too easy to dread Christmas, to seek out all the gaps and silences their absence has created and fill them up with weeping. I find myself angry when explaining Advent to my children; that it’s more than cheese and crackers. I discover that the ecclesiastical construct both baffles and irritates me: the baby’s already been born. Not only that, he’s lived; he’s died; we’ve had the Resurrection. We know the story. So why all this faked ‘waiting’?’ And don’t get me started on the Second Coming.

My rant leads me to look for definitions. (What does it mean, anyway?) Advent, meaning “coming,” leads me to parousia, the Greek word used in the New Testament in connection with the Second Coming. It means “presence.”

And this is what the ritual of Advent Tea fosters: a gentle coaxing to be fully present, to cultivate what John O’Donohue calls “soul texture.” It’s a well-rehearsed ritual, so we don’t need to think about what to set out on the table. The meal is simple. There is no cooking, no performance. We laugh. We eat. We light a candle. My sons fight about who gets to blow it out. As with my brothers, 40 years ago, Advent Tea helps us all to sit still. This year, more than ever, it coaxes me to be right here right now, with all the sadness and the gratitude and joy.

Anna Lawrence Pietroni started writing fiction when she was training to be a prison warden. She currently lives in Birmingham, England and published her first novel, Ruby’s Spoon, this year.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

Dec 25, 201032 notes

#religion #ritual #Christmas #Advent #cancer #submission

La Vida es Esperar, or Life Is Waiting

by Meagan Howell, guest contributor

“Waiting for a Train” in Régua, Portugal (photo: Rosino/Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons)

I nearly stood up my very first client on the first day of my first job in social work. Graduate school had not prepared me for the intricacies of the scheduling system at the community health center where I was working. By the time I figured things out, I was nearly half an hour late for the appointment.

Mortified, I found my client, a sixty-year-old woman recently arrived from Puerto Rico, sitting placidly in a folding chair. She didn’t say a word when I greeted her; she just followed me back to my office. She sat down opposite me with her coat on, holding her purse firmly in her lap. When I apologized for the wait, she looked at me steadily and said: “La vida es esperar.” Don’t worry about it. Life is waiting.

Then she told me about all the waiting she’d already done that day: waiting for the bus, waiting for the connecting bus, waiting at the social services office, waiting for a dental appointment, now waiting for me. After this she’d go wait for the bus some more. The upshot was: Did I really think I was so important? I was just another stop in between waits.

Oh, her manner was grim. She had steeled herself to endure the kind of waiting that comes with poverty and it had made her fierce and passive at the same time, if that’s possible. She was pissed, she was resigned. I have never forgotten her, because she was right about la vida. But there are other ways to wait.

These days I spend less time social working and more time taking care of my kids, who are five and two years old. Waiting for small children can be maddening. And interminable. I wait for my daughter to tie her shoes with great effort and focus, for my son to walk ever so slowly up the stairs at the store, for the nap to end (or begin!). But the greatest moments of intimacy and love with my kids find me when I can accept the waiting and become present within it. There is no such thing as killing time for little kids, and when I am able to enter into that kind of time with them, I open up to all the possibilities of right now. Waiting with intention helps me to feel the present moment, and all the unexpected gifts it brings.

Advent waiting is like that. It is the opposite of the sort of dehumanizing waiting that my first client described. It is active waiting, a waiting I choose with my whole heart, which makes the world around me new and strange. Intentional anticipation clears a space for the present moment. There is nothing burdensome about it, though it is hard to do.

During Advent, we are waiting for God. But when you start to pay attention, you realize, When aren’t we waiting for God? The paradox is that within that yearning, that focused waiting that catapaults you across the open expanse of not yet, you feel God to be always already here. How beautiful. How impossible! I am waiting for God, and while I do, God is waiting with me.

I grew up in a Unitarian Universalist-Jewish family. We observed a whole lot of things, but Advent wasn’t one of them. As an adult, I became an Episcopalian. My husband was raised Catholic. We were both religion majors in college. In short: we have a lot of material to work with. Yet when it came to Advent, we weren’t sure what our new family traditions would be. I know from experience that waiting for Christmas can feel like the worst kind of torture to a child. I wanted to find ways to wait together as a family that would help us to clear that space, to open ourselves up, and not be afraid of what we are yearning for.

We began with an Advent calendar. After Thanksgiving last year, the four of us made one from squares of felt that we decorated using all the crafting materials I could find in the house. We painted, glued, stickered, and markered the 24 squares, which are covered in lentils, sequins, ribbons, and googly eyes. Once they were decorated, I affixed them to a large rectangle of white felt and set about embroidering a number beneath each square.

I had very little experience with embroidery. I didn’t realize how ambitious the project was when I began it; last year I only made it to 7. After Thanksgiving this year, I unrolled the calendar. I sat down in my mother’s living room, listening to the sounds of my kids playing and my husband unloading the dishwasher. In that rare quiet stretch, I made it up to 12. That might be it for this year, but I hope not. In letting go of my urgency to get the thing done, I was able to experience the painstakingly slow work of embroidery as a fruitful Advent practice. Each stitch matters.

Plus, you know, waiting for God isn’t easy. It’s nice to have something for my hands to do. Our developing Advent rituals slow me down and make me a little more peaceful.

It is a gentle time, after all. I feel a new openness as we move into winter, like the birds’ nests that are newly exposed now that the leaves have all fallen. There is a stillness in the season, a hush in the air that whispers: don’t be scared. Don’t be discouraged. Just wait.

Meagan Howell is a freelance writer with a background in social work and public radio. She blogs about family life at Home Made Time.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

Dec 25, 2010

#religion #ritual #Advent #Episcopalian #craft #art #waiting #submission

La Vida es Esperar, or Life Is Waiting

by Meagan Howell, guest contributor

“Waiting for a Train” in Régua, Portugal (photo: Rosino/Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons)

Plus, you know, waiting for God isn’t easy. It’s nice to have something for my hands to do. Our developing Advent rituals slow me down and make me a little more peaceful.

Meagan Howell is a freelance writer with a background in social work and public radio. She blogs about family life at Home Made Time.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

Dec 25, 201037 notes

#religion #ritual #Advent #Episcopalian #craft #art #waiting #submission

The Secular and Sacred Spirit of Christmas

by David True, guest contributor

photo: Stuart Pilbrow

It’s become customary this time of year to hear concerns expressed about the loss of Christmas spirit. Sometimes these fears are more about one’s cultural identity — and the sense that one’s group is losing power and influence — than they are about the actual meaning of Christmas. At other times, one hears something that sounds less reactionary and more like a thoughtful: Have our Christmas rituals lost some of their meaning? Have they become old and tired or do they pale in comparison to more novel inventions?

Questions like these may be prompted by our experience or by polls like this one by the folks at Gallop, “Christmas Strongly Religious for Half in U.S. Who Celebrate It.” These headlines, like all headlines, tend to be written provocatively, which appeals to the culture warrior in all of us as well as the thoughtful social critic who resides deeper in our hearts. The story seems to be one of a divided culture in which one half of us sees a profound meaning in Christmas and the other half is engaged in one long shopping frenzy. The reality is very different and as luck, fate, or grace would have, a good bit more comforting.

Our culture, despite its doses of divisiveness and superficiality, continues to bear meaning. Oftentimes this is explicitly and traditionally religious. The Gallop poll, for example, indicates that “a majority of Americans [incorporate] specific religious activities or symbols into their holiday celebrations. This includes 62 percent who attend religious services on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, 65 percent who display decorations with a religious meaning, and 78 percent who take time to reflect on the birth of Christ.”

This is a good story, but it is not the entire story. Inspiration and meaning are not confined to our traditional Christian rituals. Meaning is born by an amazing array of rituals and novel experiences, some of which may strike us as superficial or simply non-religious. The Gallop poll, for example, defines gift-giving as “secular,” as if the giving and receiving of gifts isn’t capable of being a religiously significant event.

Modern culture is confusing in this way because so much of life has been removed from the control of the church. These areas may simultaneously be experienced as both secular and sacred, depending on the participants. Gift giving is a nice example, because it allows for different interpretations. I use the word “sacred” here, rather than “religious,” as a way to try to get at a sense of reality that is full of meaning, luminous, and profound, whether it be explicitly religious or not.

This view of reality shouldn’t come as a surprise to those of us who do celebrate Christmas religiously. Indeed, it is in keeping with the spirit of Christmas, that holy day of the hidden, in which a holy mystery is said to be revealed in a newly born baby, born not to a king and queen but to a very ordinary couple, hardly noticed at all, except for some rather ordinary shepherds. Praise be to the new born king and to mystery and meaning, hidden and revealed this Christmas season.

David True lives in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and is Associate Professor of Religion at Wilson College, where he teaches courses in religion and ethics. He co-edits the journal Political Theology and regularly blogs at Tea Leaves.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

Dec 25, 2010

The Secular and Sacred Spirit of Christmas

by David True, guest contributor

photo: Stuart Pilbrow

It’s become customary this time of year to hear concerns expressed about the loss of Christmas spirit. Sometimes these fears are more about one’s cultural identity — and the sense that one’s group is losing power and influence — than they are about the actual meaning of Christmas. At other times, one hears something that sounds less reactionary and more like a thoughtful Have our Christmas rituals lost some of their meaning? Have they become old and tired or do they pale in comparison to more novel inventions?

Questions like these may be prompted by our experience or by polls like this one by the folks at Gallup, “Christmas Strongly Religious for Half in U.S. Who Celebrate It.” These headlines, like all headlines, tend to be written provocatively, which appeals to the culture warrior in all of us as well as the thoughtful social critic who resides deeper in our hearts. The story seems to be one of a divided culture in which one half of us sees a profound meaning in Christmas and the other half is engaged in one long shopping frenzy. The reality is very different and as luck, fate, or grace would have it, a good bit more comforting.

Our culture, despite its doses of divisiveness and superficiality, continues to bear meaning. Oftentimes this is explicitly and traditionally religious. The Gallup poll, for example, indicates that “a majority of Americans [incorporate] specific religious activities or symbols into their holiday celebrations. This includes 62 percent who attend religious services on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, 65 percent who display decorations with a religious meaning, and 78 percent who take time to reflect on the birth of Christ.”

This is a good story, but it is not the entire story. Inspiration and meaning are not confined to our traditional Christian rituals. Meaning is born by an amazing array of rituals and novel experiences, some of which may strike us as superficial or simply non-religious. The Gallup poll, for example, defines gift-giving as “secular,” as if the giving and receiving of gifts isn’t capable of being a religiously significant event.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

Dec 25, 201016 notes

The First Baby Shower Unites Women on the Margins

by Onleilove Alston, guest contributor

A statuette of the Virgin Mary in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. (photo: Michael O’Donnell/Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons)

This Advent I am reminded of the meeting Mary had with Elizabeth to announce she was with child. Though this could have been a time of anxiety for Mary, with Elizabeth it became a time of celebration. I playfully call the following account of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth the first baby shower:

“Mary didn’t waste a minute. She got up and traveled to a town in Judah in the hill country, straight to Zachariah’s house, and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby in her womb leaped. She was filled with the Holy Spirit, and sang out exuberantly, You’re so blessed among women, and the babe in your womb, also blessed, And why am I so blessed that the mother of my Lord visits me? The moment the sound of your greeting entered my ears, The babe in my womb skipped like a lamb for sheer joy. Blessed woman, who believed what God said, believed every word would come true!

And Mary said, I’m bursting with God-news; I’m dancing the song of my Savior God. God took one good look at me, and look what happened — I’m the most fortunate woman on earth! What God has done for me will never be forgotten, the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others. His mercy flows in wave after wave on those who are in awe before him. He bared his arm and showed his strength, scattered the bluffing braggarts. He knocked tyrants off their high horses, pulled victims out of the mud. The starving poor sat down to a banquet; the callous rich were left out in the cold. He embraced his chosen child, Israel; he remembered and piled on the mercies, piled them high. It’s exactly what he promised, beginning with Abraham and right up to now.

Mary stayed with Elizabeth for three months and then went back to her own home.”

In America, baby showers are times for women to come together and celebrate new life; presents are exchanged, advice given, and games played. Mary and Elizabeth celebrated the new life within them by exchanging presents of joy, encouragement, song, and prophecy. Both women were carrying children of promise: one would pave the way and the other would be the way.

John the Baptist, a prophet even from the womb, jumped for joy because he knew the baby Mary carried was the Messiah. Mary and Elizabeth were both silenced and marginalized in their society, yet in the company of each other they declared prophetic words of what God was doing in their midst. Neither woman had a convenient pregnancy — Mary being a teenager and Elizabeth being an elderly woman, but each allowed herself to be inconvenienced for God’s purposes. Mary and Elizabeth’s celebration shows the importance of women coming together for prayer, praise, and prophecy.

When Mary sings, “He knocked tyrants off their high horses, pulled victims out of the mud. The starving poor sat down to a banquet; the callous rich were left out in the cold,” we see that in the presence of Elizabeth she could freely declare words that may have been dangerous if spoken in public. Mary’s song was more than words of celebration, it was a declaration of the inevitable breakthrough of justice.

In my tradition as a Protestant Christian, Advent is a season of waiting, but this Advent season I am not waiting for Christ. There is no need to wait because his grace breaks into my reality each day. As a young African-American woman, I am waiting for the justice Mary sang about to break through into my community, into the U.S. prison system, into the shacks of South Africa, into the relations we have with each other.

This passage is an encouragement to me as I wait because it reminds me that when women gather in Christ’s name He is in our midst. I believe that if we want justice to break through into our society we cannot passively wait, but like Mary and Elizabeth we have to actively wait singing prophetic songs and taking actions of justice. Let us not grow anxious by the circumstances we see: the holiday parties, gifts to buy and return, or seasonal loneliness. But, during this season of Advent, let us remember that the Gospels included everyday people who God used in extraordinary ways.

Women can continue to come together to rejoice, celebrate, and prophesy about liberation through collective action and prayer. This Advent I will actively wait by organizing for justice in my community, because when we come together the course of history will be interrupted, life birthed, and justice given.

Onleilove Alston is a native New Yorker and a student at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. She lives in a Christian intentional community in Harlem and is a contributing writer for Sojourners.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

Dec 25, 201019 notes

#Advent #Virgin Mary #poverty #Magnificat #Elizabeth #submission

Play

Dec 25, 20102 notes

#Christmas

On Being Blog

January 2011

76 posts

December 2010

82 posts