We’re in peak autumn season now. My city’s streets are covered with thick layers of red and yellow maple and dogwood leaves. They are so vibrant they are almost glowing. It really is pretty magical. I almost ran a stop sign, I was so distracted by the beauty. The other night, I roasted beets and I laughed at myself remembering how much I used to hate them. They were so … dirty. All I see now is this rich and vibrant pinkish plum root that stains my hands, it is so strong. My husband reminds me that you can eat the leaves too, but I can’t get over the thing that is the most nourishing, the actual meal is the root — unseen and growing in complete darkness. It’s as if all that harsh light of summer has been bottled up and gone underground for the hope of autumn.
Sometimes it feels like I don’t know what time or season I’m in. So far, there’s been an election season, Daylight Savings, Halloween, and my kid’s birthday. Going full steam ahead into Thanksgiving, my other kid’s birthday, and then Christmas. Sprinkle in recent conversations about God’s judgment or mercy based on who was or was not elected president, and I’m left bewildered. Aren’t God’s mercies always available, no matter who is president? It’d be a shame to think otherwise. I know our diagnostic tendencies run deep. We want to diagnose so we know what to do, how to be. I’m trying to leave shame at the door and enter the room less afraid about whether or not God is judging me, let alone the people I’m in the room with.
As Fleming Rutledge writes in her essay, “The Advent Life for Nonheroic People,”
In our own Advent life, we who are saints and sinners at the same time must find a way to believe and proclaim two seemingly paradoxical things at once:
“We shall all stand before the judgement seat of God” (Rom 14:10).
“Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:39).
So, in an effort to care and not care, I’ve decided to be less picky, or shall we say controlling about it all. I’m going to start Advent early and eat beets.
Helping me find grace in all seasons has been Robert Farrar Capon’s delightful book, The Youngest Day: Shelter Island’s Seasons in the Light of Grace. Capon sets the tone in the beginning with a sermon preached by the poet John Donne on the evening of Christmas Day at St. Paul’s in 1624.
God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their season: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is always Autumn, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quotidianam, our daily bread, and God never says you should have come yesterday, he never says you must again tomorrow, but today if you will hear his voice, today he will hear you. If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgment together: He brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; he can bring they Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the ways of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, windtred and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.
But in order to not be so picky about it all, we must first ask a very important question.
What Do You Want?
My New Testament college professor used to go on these hilarious rants about “Christian art.” You know, when Evangelicalism was in its heyday in the eighties and nineties and wanted to have a Christian version of everything — cheap replicas of the real thing. His favorite artist to pick on was none other than the quintessential Thomas Kinkade. I honestly don’t know if Kinkade professes any love for the Son of God, but my professor really did not like his paintings.
“Soooo over the top!” They were, “shallow and kitschy.” They were nothing compared to Monet, Renoir, Hopper, or O’Keefe.
We laughed because he was right. They were kitschy. Dust off all that fairy dust, and you’ll find some strong doses of sentimentality and wishful thinking.
But you know what? Twenty years later, I think I know the kind of people who would hang such sentimental art above their fireplace — the ones who want something more. And there’s no shame in that. I think we can all relate. Whether it’s fantasies or nihilism, I think we can all agree hope has been buried deep underground.
“In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is always Autumn, his mercies are ever in their maturity.”
Peering Into the Tomb
My neighbor’s mother-in-law wants to die on her own terms. She suffered a stroke a couple years back and since then has felt her body and mind in decline. In her world, it is not okay to be weak. It is not okay to let others care and provide for her. It is not okay to be, well, not okay. She has jumped straight to spring, she is her own judge. She’s bloomed and she is declaring now is her time to go.
I listen as my neighbor tells me about her husband sitting at his mother’s bedside — a signed doctor’s note with the A-OK; she’s decided to not eat or drink, and that’s the way she’ll go. He can either be with her or let her go through it alone. He decides to be with her. He decides “to sit still, even among these rocks,” as the great poet and witness T. S. Eliot reminds me.
Time is blurring together and opening up, and a Thomas Kinkade painting ne’er in sight.
My feet shift on our dirt road covered in the damp glow of fallen red and yellow leaves, and my eyes get teary as my neighbor struggles to find the words to say how she feels about it all. We acknowledge there are multiple layers of grief here. I acknowledge the tender hurt and resolve her husband must have in the face of his mother denying his care as she ages.
In spiritual direction, we learn how to sit with people for a very long time. They are always looking for God, but most of the time they don’t have the language for it. So as directors, we learn to listen for what is underneath those stories. Of course, I am an amateur at this. I am only two years into receiving spiritual direction for myself, but I can tell you without a doubt, it has changed the way I see. As Margaret Guenther so aptly puts it in Holy Listening, The Art of Spiritual Direction:
Only by letting ourselves be known to each other and to our deepest selves can we have the assurance that we are known by God. If this inner work is done in spiritual direction, it will have an effect on the relation of the individual to the rest of creation. When he allows himself to be known to himself, to another, and to God, the directee will be aware of the web of relationships that connects him to all creation.
My neighbor is looking for something in the stories she tells. She is looking for herself in how she relates to her husband and the world she lives in. She is looking in the empty tomb, but Jesus is nowhere to be found.
I’ve been seeing myself in my neighbor lately. I realize my need to just give her my own version of a Thomas Kinkade painting and be done with it. “Here! Put your hope in God! Look how beautiful it is,” I want to say.
She can tell it’s a replica. People can tell when it is not real.
I realize my own restlessness to sit with my own questions in the presence of God and a patient listener. Spiritual gluttony rears its ugly head as it presents for me a feast of “little books” on prayer as Margaret’s English friend Janet likes to put it:
Filling one’s shelves with books about prayer is a poor substitute for prayer itself, and immersing oneself in other people’s recipes for the spiritual life is an effective delaying tactic.
Then the prescription of faithfulness and simplicity is in order.
I must receive the prescription of faithfulness and simplicity before I can be faithful with others. I must let the slow, repetitive work of God do its work as I sit in the questions with myself and with others. I’ve been looking into an empty tomb of little books for years, searching for myself. And I have found parts of her, but the question buried beneath it all remains,
“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
In his book, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit, Henri Nouwen writes of having the chance to meet with Mother Teresa, and after about ten minutes of him going on about his questions and how complicated it all was, she looked at him quietly and replied, “Well, when you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never do anything which you know is wrong … you will be fine!” I find myself grateful that my spiritual director isn’t that direct with me! But when one has only ten minutes with Mother Teresa, there is no beating around the bush.
Even when we are looking again and again in the empty tomb, we are asking him to teach us. He is our great Rabboni, inwardly teaching us as we outwardly seek him. We learn to live our questions as Rainer Maria Rilke put it in Letters to a Young Poet. And as a director, I am learning to love the one I sit across from and their questions too.
The late sixth-century bishop Gregory the Great, in his Be Friends with God, so poignantly observed,
Why did she (Mary Magdalene) stoop down again, why did she want to look again? It is never enough for a lover to have looked once, because love’s intensity does not allow a lover to give up the search. Mary sought a first time and found nothing; she persevered in seeking, and so it happened that she found Jesus.
I am learning to let the Spirit inwardly teach me as I sit with others as they peer into the tomb.
All Time Is God’s Time
And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for the glory of God did lighten it and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them that are saved shall walk in the light of it; and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honor into it. And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there. (Rev 21:23–25)
As the evenings turn cooler along with the shades of color on our maple trees, the light gathers itself back into tiny little seeds to be buried, waiting the long winter’s night to burst forth again.
At nine days without food or water, my neighbor’s mother-in-law was still alive. She was said to be “happy and loopy.” It’s been fourteen days now and the seed of her life has now died and gone back into the ground. Her son has flown back home from Massachusetts, busying his hands with his creations.
Sometimes when there is no fruit, there is still a seed germinating in the dark. Even when it seems that the gates of hell are swung wide and prevailing, there is still a root gathering pigments of color so vibrant it could be quite something to behold when it is ready. It needs to be watered in faith with questions and care and a companion who will honor this person’s presence.
And maybe one day, a day that seems young and old, you’ll peer into that tomb again and hear the sound of your name.
Why are you crying? Who are you looking for?
And you’ll finally know who you are looking for because he said your name.
No need to look into the tomb anymore, the light has gone inside. As Capon writes of his heavenly Autumn in The Youngest Day, “Whether it’s Jesus or the sun, when it shines it not only flatters but transforms.”
The light has come inside. Go do your thing, Beloved.
