The radically counter-cultural nature of the Advent narrative demands poetry of equal heft and teeth. Few are better positioned to contribute such as Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (15 August 1917 – 24 March 1980). Catholic prelate and later Bishop of El Salvador became a martyr in his outcries against the social injustice and violence amid the escalating conflict in his homeland. He perished by gunshot while serving Mass. His spirit is the very spirit of Advent itself: love invading hate, light invading darkness, righteousness invading chaos.
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 –1894), born in London, was an English writer of romantic, devotional, and children’s poetry. She is also famous for having written the texts of two well-known Christmas carols: “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Love Came Down at Christmas.”
This poem combines Advent and Lenten themes; the sacrificial Christ pursuing the hospitality and kindness represented by the inn where there was no room for the holy family. The question ever asked of us, “is there room for the Christ within?”
Don’t forget to pop over and visit Real Poets Daily. They’re a wealth of inspiring poetry!
No, the above is not meant as some cheap attempt at a New Joizy accent with the word adventure. Let’s just call it the purposeful amalgamation of Advent and Fragmentia. Let it be a place where the illumination of God’s in-breaking into our world found in the Advent narratives unites with the fragments of literature and faith and life seeking to bring us to deeper understanding of it all.
Advent is upon us once more. With it comes a barrage of books and practices all aimed at helping us get the most from the experience. Last year I chose to post a daily poetic reflection on my poetry website. This year I’d like to do something similar here on innerwoven. It gives me opportunity to dive deep into some of the best words about the best time of the year; the beginning of the church’s calendar at Advent. These poems are both old and new and are found in various places.
For Advent, day 1 we begin with a gorgeous piece by Sally Thomas, which I saw first on a favourite Instagram channel, #realpoetsdaily
Here is “First Sunday” by Sally Thomas ( @sallytnnc )
I’ve been quite open about my struggle with alcoholism and subsequent recovery. Perhaps it is because, through my association with the program and community of A.A. I’ve rediscovered the loving, trustworthy God I once knew. That God somehow got lost along the way, despite my practices of faith, my role as a “professional Christian,” and a radical conversion experience at eighteen.
These days, my faith is simpler. It is not so cliché-ridden, expectation-laden, preconceived notions-driven. It is one of basics: learning humility, self-love, and the practices necessary to maintain and nourish the same. Along the way, I read everything I can get my hands on to assist in that journey. This is a short excerpt from my Seeds of Grace: A Nun’s Reflections on the Spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous by Sister Molly Monahan (pseudonym).
Our Europe Team for Serve Globally, the mission organization we serve through our denomination (Evangelical Covenant Church), recently met for our annual retreat (two and a half year COVID delay notwithstanding) at Le Lazaret in Sète, France. For my wife and I, it was only our second such experience. Our first was in October, 2019 and acted as a kind of “reconnaissance mission” as we explored God’s call.
This beloved team is a collective of singular passion, unwavering commitment to justice and reconciliation, enviable humour, rich fellowship, boundless creativity, and endless capacity for joy. We would take a bullet for any one of them.
Our speaker and guide for the retreat was none other than Al Tizon, former Executive Minister for Serve Globally, missiologist, teacher, writer, prophet, and friend. His upcoming book, Christ Among the Classes, shaped our discussions.
By way of understatement, these were not easy conversations! We engaged in matters best left alone unless one wants to face the convicting issues of wealth, the Gospel to and among the poor, our complicity, knowing or unknowing, in perpetuating systems of greed and disenfranchisement and how all of that intersects with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Dr. Al Tizon
It can be equally stirring and unnerving to discuss one’s place in a world given to championing the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor, while not demonizing the rich. What does that even look like? Is such socio-economic righteousness even an attainable goal? When does it cross the line from kingdom equality to political radicalism? Is there a difference? If so, what?
The questions arising from such discussions are as dizzyingly complex as are the issues from which they derive. But, it is our calling as followers of Jesus, himself a friend of the poor, and sinners, and children. We, by association, are to befriend the outcast, emancipate the leper du jours; even love our enemies. This includes those we are most quick to either dismiss or demonize.
Al (he’s not one for the fineries of title!) painted a picture of the transformation of heart toward equanimity by way of downward mobility, an increasing identification with the poor. This starts first with an awakening to our own relative privilege and wealth. To be “born again” is to see anew, or perhaps for the very first time, our place in the broader world; our individual and collective sin and how it has affected us and those around us.
We journeyed through a series of steps along the way toward the ultimate goal of befriending and advocating for the poor. The rich are not of the devil. Nor are they to be eschewed, pooh-pooh’d, or railroaded out of access to grace. But, Jesus makes clear that they will have a much more difficult time when it comes to the attitude of mind and heart necessary to befriend those who, by definition, require something from them, whether that is as benign as their time or as challenging as their resources.
I like to keep things simple. I take my cue from Wendell Berry who recognized the need for every song we compose to be fully accessible to all. If not, we still have work to do…
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” once proclaimed advertising executive, Fred R. Barnard.
Like so many of you, I love picture. Metaphor. Symbol. Illustrations as it were of the lives we lead that, themselves, mirror the confluence of flesh and fire, body and spirit, life and eternity. Occasionally, I post something that is a tip of the hat to such metaphors.
Door is a favourite such metaphor. They are something we must open ourselves but which, at times, are opened for us. Often, I open doors just for me, but most doors are communal, allowing others to go through with me, before me, instead of me, or even in spite of me. Once open, we’re faced with a decision: stand and gaze, or walk through and take an existential risk of faith mixed with trust. Once through, we gain the elation of having taken that risk and our view opens to be exponentially more expansive than it was before.
Speaking about prayer, Jesus made a remarkable promise to his disciples, “Knock, and the door will be opened for you.” He also said, “I am the door. If anyone enters through me, he will be saved, and will come in and go out, and find pasture.”
Such a profound, but mysterious, invitation!
Whatever the circumstance, in Christ, all such doors lead inward to friendship with God and outward to the riches of a universe being restored, renewed in God’s image. All of it an act of grace.
On January 31st, 2011, I posted my very first piece on this blog. After much consideration I chose the name innerwoven because it seemed to capture what I believe to be true about all of us – we are beloved creatures kneaded into the dough of earth and eternity by God. An often-nasty business requiring much punching and bending and mucking about that constantly shapes our raw material into something warm and nourishing to be served up to a world starving for its goodness. And, although true spirituality is a two-way street – impulses and experiences, ideas and trouble, ecstasy and environments – moving in and out of us, the work of God is largely an inner one. God, at the very center of us, pushing His/Her way out like radiating circles of magma to the mouth of our volcano, ready to burst out upon the world.
This blog then was originally designed to be a catch-all spiritual notepad upon which I could scribble a few ideas about the nature of the soul, the shape of my emerging life, and in so doing, build a little community. Writing about all that required poetry which is what happens when words make love. They impregnate the page with something remarkably sweet and real. Robslitbits became the creative writing arm of the blog which I later portioned into a separate entity. At first, however, it was all right here.
To celebrate eleven years, I repost one of my earliest blog entries. This one was originally early February, 2011, but it still says the kind of thing I’d typically say. Thanks to all of you for taking this journey of spirituality and literature with me. You make life fun, interesting, and just…better!
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Gerard Manley Hopkins. John Donne. Wm. Shakespeare. Christina Rosetti. Emily Dickinson. Paul Simon. Bono. Since I was a very young lad growing up in Calgary, Canada, I’ve had a love affair with language; specifically the art of words. Words spoken. Words written. Words read and re-read, like ingesting food for the eyes that gets digested in the heart.
In the holistic sense of the term, words are sensual. They are meant for more than simply corralling ideas or channelling information. They can and should be beautiful for their own sake. Carefully chosen and meted out in gradual succession like adding the correct ingredients in proper order to the perfect meal, words are part of the whole and greater than the sum of their parts. They massage meaning into our spiritual skin, perking up our inner ears to hear what our unseen lover whispers in our unguarded moments.
The Christian life is more poetry than prose; more a wild garden than suburban lawn. To that end I share this brief poem:
Looking out from the Christmas Festival on Prince’s Street
The air feels sharp. Like a paper cut on dry skin. The same air that is moderated by the sea is also saturated with it so that the wind denies however many layers one can throw at its defence.
It’s a good thing this city is so photogenic. She blushes with feigned humility at every turn, dipping her shirt to reveal her grey-stone breasts just enough to draw you to her. But, as you draw near, her manner reminds you that you’re a mere stone’s throw from the North Sea.
In early Winter.
As seen from our window, snow comes wistfully to Comely Bank.
Anyone who follows us on social media, or has been within camera or earshot of us in the past few weeks, is already aware that my wife and I live now in Edinburgh, Scotland. We haven’t stopped talking about it. You ever hang around new parents and they never quit talking about their newborn? Yeah, it’s kinda like that.
Everything is new. We have new UK phone numbers almost impossible to memorize (memorise). We are learning to write dates day/month/year. We’ve traded a five-number zip code for a postal code with two caps, a number, another number, and two more caps. We’re learning what it’s like to shop for days of food at a time rather than weeks. We’re learning the complexities of laundry in the UK, a process not unlike rebuilding a laptop.
Thanks to the relative compactness of Edinburgh streets, we’ve taken like pros to something we would never have done in North America, ride a bus. We walk everywhere else. Living in the relatively central district of Stockbridge I call this the “one-mile zone.” We can walk almost anywhere we need to be, including downtown (uptown as the locals call it).
The glaring lack of any formal Thanksgiving tradition here is regrettable in one way, given the many memorable observances we’ve enjoyed over the years with family, friends, and one unlucky turkey. But, it is also a wonderful thing not having to engage in the inevitable, often heated, debates about Christmas decorating starting “too early.” Despite its lack of liturgical credibility, “too early” for me would be mid-October, not American Thanksgiving which just happens to fall less than a month from Christmas.
Edinburgh loves her Christmas decorating. She does it well, with a voracious thoroughness that causes Mrs. Claus to blanche at the sight. Is it thoroughly secular? Yeah, pretty much. Is it beautiful and welcoming? Absolutely. Which, as you will recall from my earlier post on the Enneagram 4, is my love language.
Beauty is next to godliness.
Blue Christmas
The Walter Scott Memorial
Merry-go-Round
Big wheel keep on turnin’
Edinburgh has lighting down to an art.
More Edinburgh lights
The door’s the thing.
I’ve often questioned artists who claim their particular geography to have the “best light” when they live where there’s nothing but an abundance of it, washing out all colour and nuance. When light is involved, “most” does not equal “best.” My soul prefers its light at a premium; where it changes much, leaves me alone for long periods of time, and is therefore, precious.
Granton Harbour in morning light, shrewdly shrouded
For me, Edinburgh in winter is that place.
Pathways beckon
St. Bernard’s Well, Leith Parkway
A runner for many years, I confess that the best pathways for moving contemplation are these damp corridors of green-framed stone and shadow. It is something about subtleties where colours can pop because they’re not constantly blanched by direct sunlight. There’s an existential complexity to it utterly lacking in sun-drenched regions.
I have the opposite of seasonal affective disorder (S.A.D.) I’m depressed in constant sun. Nothing changes. It’s like trying to drink from a fire hydrant…all the time. It’s too much, too often, for no reason.
The breadth of human experience requires more than the cheap seats at a bad movie. It needs emotional distance, space to laugh and hurt and question and doubt and start all over again. The heart needs lament; needs thoughtfulness, discernment, the tepid wondering for which it is engineered. I agree with Pàdraig Ó Tuama’s review of Dunez Smith’s amazing poem, “I’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense.” where he states, “not everyone needs to live in perpetual summer.”
Yes. That.
Gravestones at St. Cuthbert’s Kirk
St. Cuthbert’s
2021. This will be our first Christmas away from our boys. Either one or the other, or both, were always with us for the holidays. However, given the weight of God’s call upon us to love and serve Edinburgh, it seems not so high a price to pay, given the great returns we’ve already enjoyed from this incredible place. Besides, our laddies are squarely in God’s hands every bit as much as we, or anyone else.
innerwoven 