Isaiah 61.10 - 62.3, Luke 2.15-21
The First Sunday of Christmas, 31 December 2023, Keasden
‘But Mary treasured all the words of the shepherds, and pondered them in her heart.’
New Year is a good time for pondering. For going over what has been, and considering what is to come. It’s a good time for re-setting ourselves if we think that life has bent us out of shape. It’s a good time for putting life in context, and remembering the larger reality which may otherwise be crowded out.
And church is a good place to ponder that larger reality. For in church we hear words we rarely find outside; our shared time of worship frees us to express ourselves in ways we seldom otherwise can. The words we speak and sing help us find our place again in the world, and re-set our heart.
Consider Psalm 148, a wonderful song of creation. (Take a look at it again).
It begins above the skies: ‘Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the heights’; it continues with the same divine company who visited the shepherds on that Judean hilltop: ‘Praise him, all you his angels; praise him, all his host.’ And then, in echoes of the creation story in Genesis 1, the Psalm comes to earth, where sun and moon, the waters, the mountains and weather systems, all that grows, the creatures of land, sea and air, the lowliest and the most powerful people, women, men, old and young, are all entreated to do what, together, we are created to do: to Praise the Lord.
We may find it surprising to be reminded that the most fundamental purpose of our lives is to praise the Lord. We are created to praise God. And to do this, never alone, but hand in hand with everyone and everything else in all creation, from the deepest depths to the highest heights.
And if we do find it surprising, that’s probably because this larger reality has been obscured from our view by the substitute story which crowds in on our everyday lives, which tells us that there are irreconcilable differences between women, men, old and young; which tells us that the gaps between the lowliest and the most powerful people are inevitable and must only grow; which tells us that every created thing is ours for exploitation for the increased wealth and comfort of the few; which tells us that even when the mountains burn and the weather systems combust, when creatures and communities die off, we must continue in this way of destruction, for there is no alternative way; which, finally, puts a price on each of us, determining how useful we are in solely financial terms. This story persists despite our knowing just how much it diminishes us and separates us from the world, from others, and ourselves.
‘But Mary treasured all the words of the shepherds, and pondered them in her heart.’
And there are many like Mary, whose ponderings have led them to conclude how flawed is this substitute story which crowds in on our everyday lives, how destructive it is of all that is most valued in the larger reality of God’s care.
These many who ponder are the spiritual ones; among them are artists and the poets; the writers creatively exploring the possibilities of other ways of living, and the community leaders trying them out in practice; among the many who ponder are the ones whose lives are rooted in the land, connected with the life of other creatures and the turning of the seasons, and who thus understand themselves to be part of a conversation as deep as time and as rich as the good soil itself.
The late writer Ursula Le Guin in 2014 said that in the hard times which are coming, we’ll be wanting those ‘who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality.’ [1]
The world-system which dominates our lives will keep insisting that this way of domination and destruction is ‘the real world’. Those who prosper from it will persist in trying to persuade us that it is ‘just how things are’, and that any visions of an alternative way of life are untenable.
But this is not so; and how crucial it is to see that a better world is not only possible in the future, but that it is alive, and active, already in practice: it is the larger reality within which we live.
How crucial it is that we who have an inkling of this reality, keep praying our Psalms and singing our Magnificats, and growing our veg, and tending our animals, and loving our neighbours, and protesting the military-industrial ways of the world which repeatedly and always fail us. How important that we do so for the sake of the ‘more than 70% of young people who now feel hopeless about the climate crisis, and the more than half who believe that humanity is doomed’ [2]
Where there is an invisible barrier to new kinds of thought and action then young people are left to imagine only extinction. [3] Thank God then, for the Psalmist and Mary and all those other poets and visionaries of freedom, who occupy a world they affirm as being the true and real world, a world which is here and now, and vibrant, and is revitalised each time we absorb their words and follow their examples. This is the larger reality within which we live, inside which all other world-systems, including our own, will come and go.
The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart encourages us to ‘Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things… God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.’ [4]
God is at home on this earth. Those whose lives are steeped in rural patterns of life, and in the gentle rhythms of the Church year, understand this. We already deeply sense that ‘As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease’. [5] We comprehend that we are created in love, with the purpose of living in harmony with the rhythms of the seasons, with the land, the creatures and all the peoples of this world; at the deepest level we appreciate that we are created not in competition with, but in celebration of this joyous gift of existence. [6]
May our ponderings draw us ever closer to the One who holds all of this together; the very One who gentle Mary held in her arms.
Notes
[1] Ursula K. LeGuin, Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, 19 November 2014.
[2] Matt Gallagher, ‘Children of Men’ – 17 Years On: A Grave Warning to a Nation Adrift. BylineTimes, 29 September 2023.
[3] Matt Gallagher, ‘Children of Men’ – 17 Years On: A Grave Warning to a Nation Adrift. BylineTimes, 29 September 2023.
[4] Elizabeth Roberts, Elisa Amidon, eds, Earth Prayers: 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations from Around the World. Thanks to Robert Gallagher for sharing the complete text:
Apprehend God in all things
for God is in all things.
Every single thing is full of God
and is a book about God
Every living thing is a word of God.
If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature–
even a caterpillar–
I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God
is every creature.
Earth cannot escape heaven,
Flee it by going up,
or flee it by going down,
heaven still invades the earth,
energises it,
makes it sacred.
All hiding places reveal God.
If you want to reveal God.
S/he runs into your lap.
For,
God is at home.
It is we who have gone out for a walk.
[5] Genesis 8.22.
[6] John Davies, Seeking well-being with Zimbabwe’s dry and dusty soil. 15 May 2022.
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