The Rev. Michelle Meech, First Sunday of Advent
Jan Richardson is an artist and poet. A teacher and minister. In her book of poetry called Circle of Grace, she offers beautiful poems of seasonal blessings. This is one of hers for the season of Advent:
Blessing for Waking
This blessing could pound on your door in the middle of the night.
This blessing could bang on your window, could tap dance in your hall, could set a dog loose in your room.
It could hire a brass band to play outside your house.
But what this blessing really wants is not merely your waking but your company.
This blessing wants to sit alongside you and keep vigil with you. This blessing wishes to wait with you.
And so, though it is capable of causing a cacophony that could raise the dead,
this blessing will simply lean toward you and sing quietly in your ear a song to lull you not into sleep but into waking.
It will tell you stories that hold you breathless till the end.
It will ask you questions you never considered and have you tell it what you saw in your dreaming.
This blessing will do all within its power to entice you into awareness
because it wants to be there, to bear witness, to see the look in your eyes on the day when your vigil is complete and all your waiting has come to its joyous end.
I love this clear depiction of awakening as a blessing, even though it may not be a comfortable moment – pounding on your door, banging on your window, brass band playing outside your house.
I remember when I was young, I was notoriously hard to wake up. I have always been someone who wants to drain the last ounce of sleep from my nightly slumber. And because my mother worked the early shift in a factory, my Gramma Helen would usually be there to wake us up and get us ready for school and out the door.
I remember the bright overhead light would slap on in the hallway, and when she was getting frustrated… in my room. The agony of bright light in that moment. And then, I would hear the clapping of her hands and the yelling of my name, all of which was, in effect, a dependable and annoying snooze alarm that she would repeat as often as necessary, each time counting down the minutes I had to get ready.
Perhaps that’s the reason we don’t appreciate awakenings. They are annoying. And uncomfortable. They are jarring. And disturbing of our peace. Disrupting the way we have organized our world and organized ourselves in the world.
And although that’s how it feels to us, this irritating interruption of our peaceful routine, Richardson tells us that’s not what this awakening wants. We get stuck there though, in the uncomfortable. That’s how we receive it. And we stop there.
But that’s not what this blessing cares about, nor really what it actually is.
This blessing wants to be with us. And that in itself is a curious thing. I mean, I don’t know about you, but if someone were tap dancing in my hallway, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t want to keep them around. But this blessing wants to stay with us, to accompany us in our cranky, confused state brought on by the inconvenience of having our lives interrupted.
Luke’s Gospel gives us this scene from Jesus’ foretelling of the destruction of Jerusalem. He says that people must flee the city because from there people will be taken away as captives and the holy city will be taken over by Gentiles, by those who are not Jewish. And then, in today’s passage, he talks about how confused and fearful people will be, which makes sense.
But that is exactly when redemption is near. That is when the reign of God is at hand. Luke is clear that the things that are happening are not the promised redemption. But they signal something more profound. Something that is yet to be defined.
It might be surprising to some of us to learn that the term “woke” arose in the 1930’s. According to Wikipedia, it was originally coined as a synonym for the word “awake”, a reference to becoming aware of the socio-economic and political issues that affected African Americans. It really was an awakening as people saw through the veil of what was presented as normal, polite society to gaze upon the layer upon layer of systemic sin that kept Whiteness in control.
It was an awakening to God’s Love – a deeper belief that arose to help Black people claim their belovedness in a society that didn’t want them to know that belovedness. A society that felt threatened by that belovedness. Because it was a society – is a society – based on power and privilege.
Some 70 years later, after the turn of this century, “wokeness” began to be used in a broader sense, to refer to social inequities such as sexism and homophobia in addition to racism.
Unfortunately, the word wokeness has become a political weapon. Used by people on both sides as an excuse to draw lines in the sand. This takes us away from its blessing. Away from its purpose.
Awakening calls us past the name-calling and the line-drawing. It moves us past the clanging, mic-drop, social media moments that create a splash to get attention. And it draws us deeper into God’s heart where we can find our own truth. It is the blessing of a still voice that leans in and sings to us a song that unwinds us from our fears of not belonging, of not being safe… and invites our heart to open of its own accord. To open to the end of our vigil, the truth of our belovedness, the truth of God’s Love. This is how change actually happens.
This awakening may only take a moment, but it usually takes a season to prepare for it. And its why Jesus tells us to watch. To be alert. To pray. This is what we practice in Advent. We soften the ground so that the walls we’ve built will fall. We turn down the noise. We allow for more space.
Because there is a distance between the moment of disturbance and the slow integration of this disturbance into our thoughts and beliefs. Our choices and behaviors. Maturing into our faith. Just as there is a difference between being awake long enough to hit the snooze button vs. truly being awake and aware, finally arising on a new morning. It’s the distance from learning about the concepts of power and privilege to the opening of our own hearts to learn what real justice (and therefore what real love) truly looks like.
It’s the difference between what Richardson calls letting the dog loose in the room and letting it stay, making whatever mess it needs to make to our tidy, well-groomed, acceptable lives, until it gets to know us and we get to know this blessing.
I think we often believe, as Christians, that spiritual practice is anathema to social change. It can be, if we believe that Jesus is only ever our personal savior.
But Jesus came to redeem the world. As such, our spiritual practices become preparation for real change. Without spiritual practice we risk trying to change the world to fit our own image.
We could go along, never really readying ourselves. Feeling these disturbances as annoyances. Hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep. Never really allowing our lives to be interrupted.
Or we could learn how to prepare ourselves for God’s reign. To deepen our prayer. To soften the ground and let the walls fall. To offer space from the noise of all the attention seeking pundits and characters, not to indulge ourselves, but to listen for the voice of this blessing.
This blessing that wants us to understand the cracks in reality as opportunities for light to shine in. That wants us to have the strength to look beyond the veil and see what social justice could actually look like.
This blessing lies waiting for us. Always waiting for us, ready with its quiet song. So that we can reimagine ourselves in a way that lets more light into the ancient dreams of who we were before we got so mired in the world’s definitions of who we need to be.
The blessing is belovedness – to know ourselves and to know God.
To love ourselves and to love God enough to be able to change the world.
