Preparing for Advent a Week before Black Friday

This Sunday is Christ the King Sunday, which means we're at the end of the liturgical year. It also means that we're about to plunge into the Christmas season. This week-end is a good time to plan for how we're going to have a meaningful Advent, how we're going to resist the consumerist, capitalist madness of a whirlwind that tends to sweep us all along.

Last year was one of the first years in a long time that I experienced such a December. I had read about these kind of months, where people (often women) spend time rushing from pillar to post, whipsawed by all the obligations. I always felt proud that I was able to resist such madness. And then, last year came, when there were so many wonderful opportunities, and I wanted to do them all. ALL!!! And so, I found myself overbooked, doublebooked, with little time between activities. By Christmas day, I was exhausted and irritable.

So, let's strategize. How can we avoid a hectic season? How can we invite more contemplation and quiet into December?

--Make a budget now. A week from today, the Christmas shopping season begins for those of us brave enough to go into stores. Before you go, make sure you know how much you can spend. It's easy to get caught up in the shrill cycle of good deals and fierce desires. Don't buy so much that you'll still be paying off those credit cards in July. Nothing is worth that.

--Instead of buying stuff, buy experiences. Most of us have too much stuff. Why not give someone a meal out or a movie? Give the gift of your time.

--Instead of buying stuff, donate to charities. I'm lucky enough to be able to buy just about everything I need (and my needs are fairly simple). I am haunted by all the charities that are underfunded. I am haunted by the gaping needs in the world. I would prefer that people give money to the needy than to buy more stuff for me. Chances are good that lots of people on your gift list feel the same way.

--Plan your social calendar now. And keep it simple. Choose only one or two events per week-end. Declare that you won't go out on school nights. You can't do everything, and you'll only feel irritable if you try. What's most important to you and the ones you love?

--Purge the traditions that have ceased to have meaning. This one is tough. For example, I often find myself bored and irritable as I sit through The Nutcracker. I always think I'll love that ballet, probably because I loved it as a child. I don't love it as an adult. Why spend the money and time? Of course, if everyone else in the family adored it and wanted to go, it might be worth it. But now is a good time to have a frank discussion, before we're caught up in the sentimental sweep of December.

--Streamline some of the traditions. Do you really need to bake every kind of cookie that you remember from past holidays? Maybe you and your friends could have a cookie swap. Or get together to bake cookies together. Have a wonderful afternoon of cookie dough and wine and leave with enough cookies to get you through the holiday. For years, I did a cookie bake/swap with friends, which grew into a dinner swap, which we'd still be doing today, if I hadn't moved 700 miles away. That tradition meant something. These days, though, I don't bake cookies all alone. Consider ways to make the holiday meals simpler. Consider ways to simplify the holiday card tradition. Ask yourself which church events mean something to you and which you're attending because you always have.

--Take time to help the needy, and bring your children along. Some of my favorite holiday memories involve helping others. My Girl Scout troop used to go carolling at nursing homes. The church of my adolescence assembled gift baskets for homeless women. The words of Isaiah are knitted into every fiber of my being: "learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow" (Isaiah 1: 17). My parents, along with social institutions like church and school, modeled the good behavior of working for social justice. It's stuck with me. Advent is a great time to train the next generation in the habits of social justice and charitable work.

--Schedule time in your day to slow down. Now is the time to remember to pray. Now is the time to rest. Light the candles on your Advent wreath and contemplate the mysteries that so many religious traditions celebrate as the year winds to a close.

Autumnal Colors, South Florida Style!

I've been inspired by the blog pictures of many people who have been cataloguing Autumn up in the upper 48 states: Dave Bonta has a great photoessay that takes us on a hike and Sherry O'Keefe shows us a weathered face of autumn. I routinely lament the lack of Autumn colors down here in southernmost Florida, but this week it occurs to me that we have gorgeous Fall colors, just not traditional ones.

So, I decided that it was time to take out the camera, to meditate on God's grandeur in a non-Brit-Lit part of the world.



This time of year, our yards are covered with a beautiful carpet of lavender flowers. From a distance, if you squint, it looks like snow. Natives call this groundcover clover, but it's nothing like the clover we'd use to make clover chains in a different part of the world.

Who says we don't have traditional Fall colors? Here's our orange--sure it's more lurid than your maple trees, but beautiful still.

I remember when I first realized what a florist in a different part of the country would charge to add birds of paradise to a floral arrangement. I thought, wow, those grow in my yard, and they spread like weeds!

Bougainvillea--the quintessential tropical tree. We used to have one that bloomed year-round, in a much more vivid pink than the one pictured. We lost that tree in the horrible hurricane season of 2005. I mourned it more than most trees, and it was one of the first that we replaced.

And now we look ahead to the next season. If you look at the above picture, you'll see it's a poinsettia bush! My spouse took one of the ubiquitous Christmas Eve poinsettias home and planted it in the yard. It's done beautifully as a green bush, but we wondered if it would turn colors. In other states, there's an elaborate procedure that involves putting a bag over the plant and putting it in a closet--something about that process tells the plant to change color. A few weeks ago, our outdoor plant began the change without all the fuss. Fascinating!

Meditation on This Week's Gospel

The Readings for Sunday, November 21, 2010:

First Reading: Jeremiah 23:1-6

First Reading (Semi-cont.): Jeremiah 23:1-6

Psalm: Psalm 46

Psalm (Semi-cont.): Luke 1:68-79

Second Reading: Colossians 1:11-20

Gospel: Luke 23:33-43

Today we celebrate Christ the King Sunday, which is the last day of our liturgical calendar. The readings are familiar: we're back in the land of Good Friday, with our king crucified on a cross. Perhaps not the image we'd expect for Christ the King Sunday, but those of us who have been reading through this cycle (either for the first time or for the umpteenth time) will be familiar with these strange twists of imagery, with the upheaval of all our expectations.

I have always loved the cyclical nature of the lectionary, with its readings that loop around and remind us that all of life is cyclical. When I'm having a bad day (or week or month), it's important to remember that everything can change. When I'm having a good day (or week or month), it's important to express profound gratitude and to try not to dread the next downturn too much. With every downturn comes an upturn. The life of Christ shows us this.

Christ's life shows us that being king requires something different for a believer. It's not the worldly experience of kings, who are venerated and obeyed. Being a Christian king requires humbling ourselves and thinking of others before we think of ourselves. But our rewards are great. If we could emulate Christ's behavior, we'd have a wonderful community here on earth, and whatever we might experience in the afterlife would just be icing on the cake. We'd have already had a taste of heaven right here on earth.

Maybe we feel grumpy as the holiday season approaches. Maybe we've had a season of sorrow, and we can't quite manage to feel festive. Maybe we're tired of humbling ourselves and we'd like someone to humble themselves for us.

Well, here's some good news. Someone already has. Maybe in this season of thankfulness, we can concentrate on our good fortune, even if we don't feel it. We're alive to see the sunrise and the sunset, some of the best shows on earth, and they're free! Even if we don't have as much money as we'd like, there's always someone who is in worse shape (and if we give some of our money away, we won't feel as constricted about money. Trust me. If you're feeling tight and pinched, now is the time to return to tithing). If we are having trouble keeping everything in perspective, maybe it's time to volunteer at a food bank or an animal shelter--or if we're not into organizational activities, we could do our part to pick up litter. We could smile at the janitorial staff. We could thank them for cleaning the communal bathrooms.

If we start working on our spirit of gratitude, the gift of generosity often follows. If we pray for those who need our prayers, our hearts start to open. If we work on forgiveness, our spirit soars. And soon we realize what it means to celebrate Christ the King Sunday.

A Poem to Celebrate Food, Friendship, and Community

At my creativity blog, I've continued my contemplation of food: this post ponders how we eat, why we eat, and how our society distracts us with weight control schemes that keep us from doing the important work (creative work, social change, you name it), and here I continue the thinking by considering the extra duties that children and pets confer.

Not surprisingly, many of my poems feature food. Here's a poem that appeared in Ruminate, a poem which thinks about women and food, women and religion, about the whole idea of communion (both the verb and the sacrament):


Eucharist


I knead the bread leavened with beer,
stew a lamb shank in a pot of lentils,
prepare a salad of apples, walnuts, and raisins,
sweetened with wine and honey.
No one ever had herbs as bitter as this late season lettuce.

My friends gather at dusk, a motley band
of ragtags, fleeing from the Philistines of academia:
a Marxist, a Hindu, a Wiccan, a Charismatic Catholic,
and me, a lapsed Lutheran longing for liturgy.

Later, having drunk several bottles of wine
with prices that could have paid our grad
school rents, we eat desserts from disparate
cultures and tell our daughters tales from our deviant days.
We agree to meet again.

Gnarled vegetables coaxed from their dark hiding places
transform into a hearty broth.
Fire transubstantiates flour and water into life giving loaves.
Outcasts scavenged from the margins of education
share a meal and memories and begin to mold
a new family, a different covenant.

We have participated in the Paschal mysteries,
not yet comprehending the scope of what we have created.

What the Monks Can Teach Us About Eating

The one thing that strikes me most about monastic eating is the scheduled aspect of it. We live in cultures where we're surrounded by food, most of us. Granted, a lot of that food isn't very tasty or very nutritious. I'm thinking of the past two weeks where everyone at my office has brought in the Halloween candy that wasn't claimed by trick-or-treaters. Most of us can't drive more than one block without being seeing (being tempted by?) a variety of eating establishments--again, most of them offering food that's not very tasty or nutritious. But boy, is it convenient--we don't even have to heave our bodies out of the car.

The monks eat at specific times of the day, two of the meals after a worship service. Monastic guests might have a different experience than the monks. Maybe monks are allowed to forage in the kitchen whenever they're hungry, but I doubt it.

What can this way of life teach us about eating? Plenty:

--Sticking to an eating schedule means that our blood sugar will never fall too far. It also means that we won't overeat because we snack through the day. It's easy not to snack, if there are no snacks to eat.

--There's always a bowl of fruit, if you just can't wait until mealtime.

--A sandwich and a bowl of soup make for a lovely supper. We ate this meal as our first meal at Mepkin Abbey, and I kept hoping for soup throughout the week-end.

--You only need dessert once a day. Really. Only once. Or maybe you want to make an exception for Sundays and have dessert twice.

--At Mepkin Abbey, the lodging for guests is at least a half mile away from the main part of the Abbey. One of us once had a pedometer during our visit, and we calculated that we walked 10-20 miles on an average day. Even if we didn't take a stroll down to the river or through the gardens, we'd still go back and forth to the chapel and the refectory 6-8 times a day. I often lose a pound or two during the week-end, even though I'm eating hearty meals.

--For the most part, for a variety of reasons, monks eat a tasty, vegetarian diet.

--Silence at meals means that the focus is on the food--or perhaps on God. You're not courting indigestion by talking about politics or home repairs or finances.

--At the midday meal, the monks listen to a book (I think it was a recording, but I can't be sure). I read through a lot of books and don't remember most of them. But I remember the snippets of the books that were being read when I visited the Abbey.

--We talked about how these monks put items together that we never would have done at home. For example, at the evening meal the last night, we had a spinach-tomato frittata paired with a cottage cheese and pineapple side dish. If we had been at home, we'd have probably offered a veggie side dish or a salad. We get into ruts, in food prep as with other areas. The monks point a different way. I suspect they use what's on hand, what needs to be used up.

--We also talked about how delicious everything was, even food we might have snootily turned our noses up to at home. For example, at the midday meal we had ice cream for dessert. It wasn't bottom brand ice cream, but neither was it premium. Still, it seemed like the best ice cream ever. I had an ice cream with Heath Bar bits in it, and I was surprised by how much I loved it.

--Portions are limited by eating time. You can take as much as you want, but you only have a certain amount of time to eat.

--Monks may move beyond this, but I found that because I was eating communally, I limited myself a bit. For example, I'd have loved to have more than one bowl of ice cream, but I knew that we were expected to take only one. Usually the food seems limitless, but once I was there and the one pan of enchiladas seemed to be dwindling quickly. Conscious of the line of hungry people behind me, I took a smaller portion than I might have.

--You might think that monks worry about world hunger or that they eat the way they do to free up resources for the rest of the world. If so, they don't talk about it. I suspect they eat the way that they do because they've been eating this way for many centuries and because it's a frugal way to be true to the rule of hospitality.

--Perhaps hospitality can point us back to the best way to eat. Much of what I've written above blossoms out of the monastic commitment to hospitality and welcoming the stranger. When I gobble a fast food meal by myself in my moving car, I am not practicing the hospitality of a welcoming table. God calls us to live in community. Solitary eating of non-nutritious food does not move us closer to that Kingdom ideal of sharing a table with the community.

Return to Regular Church

In between travelling and a visit from my sister and nephew, it's been a month since I worshipped at my home church. Today I plunge right back in. It's my week to do an improv Sunday School. We will be focused on cool women of the Old Testament, excluding Ruth and Esther. I will probably focus on Miriam the most. I just don't have much to say about Deborah, and the other women of the Old Testament are problematic. I don't really want to explain Bathsheba or Jezebel or the woman who cut Samson's hair to preschoolers and elementary school children.

I have learned an important lesson. It's important to have coloring pages. Some of our children would rather color than do anything else.

I've been fighting off a cold all week, so I'm not at my high energy best. A bad day to be having a low energy day--not only do I lead Sunday School, but I'm Assistant Minister. I shall muddle through somehow.

I've been to several mountain tops, both literal (Lutheridge!) and metaphorical (Mepkin Abbey!). It's always a bit hard to return to suburban church life, regular work life, the daily chores of upkeep.

So, my prayer for today:

Please God, grant me the wisdom to lead children towards your sacred text. Let me illumine them, whether through improv or coloring pages or song. Grant me the energy needed to be Assistant Minister. Let me not infect others with my germs, but only with my love.

What the Monks Can Teach Us About Ways to Lead Our Lives

Monks have so much to teach us. You could argue that most people have much to teach us, but monks, with their obviously different lifestyles, have a clearly different angle.

Here are some of the things I've learned from reading about monasticism and from being a guest in monastic communities:

--Monks understand the value of balance better than anyone else I've ever met. Their lives are highly structured, which many Western minds might balk at--yet it leads to the balance that so many of us crave. Monks worship periodically throughout the day and evening. In between they have times for study and times for work. They break for nutritious meals at specific times that never change (a lesson my grandparents knew well, but I've strayed from--my grandparents even snacked at specific times). They get 7-8 hours of sleep a night.

--They're willing to have some periodic disruptions of the highly structured schedule for special events. For example, Mepkin Abbey has an annual festival where they present creches from around the world. It's a fundraiser for the Abbey, but before the hordes of people come, the monks have a special night for themselves when they get to see the displays before everyone else.

--Meals are simple, except for when they're not. At Mepkin Abbey, the monks eat their big meal in the middle of the day, which makes sense to me. In the evening, supper is a simple sandwich, sometimes served with soup or salad or some kind of fruit. In the morning, we had hardboiled eggs with toast, and cereal was also available. Sunday evenings had a more elaborate evening meal--dessert twice in one day. Sundays are special, which make sense.

--Times of talk are balanced with times of silence. Trappists are more committed to silence than other religious orders. At Mepkin Abbey, silence isn't enforced around the clock. But for twelve and a half hours, monks don't speak. At meals, monks don't speak. At first I thought I'd hate all that silence. But now, as life becomes more filled with noise, I crave that quiet.

--Again and again, I am struck by how the monks are committed to ancient practices. They don't waste time looking for new and better and more efficient ways to accomplish things and live their lives. They're part of a community which figured out the best way of living long ago. It may not work for everyone--they don't waste energy trying to be all things to all people. They're not trying to convince the rest of the world. But the rest of the world can sense something--that's why for most communities, you need to make reservations to come visit months and months before you plan to come.

I understand that many people have problems with the Roman Catholic church, or even Christianity. I understand that many people look at monasticism and point out all the problems. Many non-monastic people are defensive for reasons that I don't often understand--it's not like monks are out there recruiting.

Or maybe that's the source of the anxiety when it comes to monasticism. Because, of course, the monks are recruiting in a sense, in the best sense. They recruit by showing us a better way to live our lives. Like so many ways the Holy Spirit works, the monks point us to a closer union with God--not by talking about it or making legislation--but by living it.