The Ancient Things we Do: Mothering Sunday

In churchland we maintain some remarkably odd practices. Take Mothering Sunday, for instance. An odd name for Mother’s Day, I presumed? Nope. Last week my priest buddy, less green and more intense than myself, sent me a text announcing that I needed to find the small bottles of oil in the college chapel used for anointing the sick, the dying, and the newly baptized, and bring them to the cathedral to be refilled.

No problem, I thought to myself. Just grab those bottles and take them to the church. Wrong.

It turns out that Mothering Sunday is one of those ancient practices we continue to observe which look like it’s been pulled from historical fiction. As I followed my friend’s instructions, down to the finest detail, I felt like I was LARPing rather than doing my job. The process was fascinating.

The oils left from several years ago had gone completely rancid, sticking to the bottom of the bottle like old honey. Nothing new could be added until the old had been removed. I called my mentor. “You’re sure I can’t just pour this down the sink?” I asked, a little whiny. Nope. The oil had to be burned.

How does one burn rancid oil out of the bottom of a tiny glass jar, you’re wondering to yourself?? After several failed ideas and consultations, I came up with a solid plan. Squatting in front of my fire place, I carefully wiped out each jar with a rag and lit the rags on fire, consuming all the oil. As I watched the flame soar up from the earth, I felt like I was sitting on holy ground. Here was sacred oil, sent out into the world to be a blessing to the vulnerable, being returned to God in fire and ashes.

At the cathedral service, the new oil was blessed, that it would be comfort and hope to those to be anointed, spread out across our diocese in all the diversity of their homes and lives. I thought of how elemental it is to take something as common as oil and make it into something sacred which nourishes community and draws us into the life of the Holy One. And just as oil brings flavour to food and fills our bodily cravings, so now this oil is sent out to flavour our life in spirit.

This Christian tradition of ours, with its ancient rituals and mysterious rites, has an intriguing way of mixing the sacred with the profane, using the stuff of normal days to usher us into relationship with the Divine. Quite unlike the powerful top-down institution it has often become, the call of Christianity has always been to affirm the goodness of everyday life and to find God in all the small and normal places. There’s a reason our God took on humanity and pitched his tent among us.

In a culture where everything is disposable and even our most valuable possessions are made to break (as I write on a cracked computer screen!) there’s something life-giving about investing sacred qualities in physical things. Sure, I could have just dumped out my oil and no one would have known or cared. I could simply anoint a dying woman with oil from my kitchen. But when I am careful to return to the earth by fire that which has been consecrated for holy use, I am declaring my belief that God inhabits our time and space. God comes and dwells among us and uses the stuff of our lives to create life and mystery and hope.

In a world where even human beings are treated like commodities, the blessing of oil says that the simplest things are chosen and used by God. The oil is a tangible reminder that we are never alone in our journey or sickness or even in death- that the Holy One comes and dwells with us just as Jesus walked among us on this same dusty earth.

I’m struck by how the burning of the old and the blessing of the new mirrors my own messy life. That old oil can stick to me like crystalized honey sometimes, but it has to be burned away before it can be filled with bright new oil. The old might not be bad exactly, but it is not the best. It has grown stagnant and it is difficult to bless others with that old oil. But just as the Holy Spirit dwells with the sacred oil, so the Holy Spirit dwells with me, filling me up to be a gift which overflows Christ onto the world. It is not, of course, the oil that is sacred. The oil comes from Superstore! But it’s what God chooses to do with that oil that marks the story of our faith. And it's an ancient story.

The Darkness and The Light: Mental Illness and the Coming of Spring

I get excited this time of year when I realize that the days have started getting longer. Especially in Manitoba. There’s nothing like the feeling of getting up in the dark and going home in the dark and feeling like it’s never going to end as we drag by December 21^st, the longest day of the year. I make crafts.  I watch TV. I wait.
But today is January 22^nd and it’s still light out as I hurry for the bus after work. Even though many weeks of cold still lie ahead, I know the end is coming. The dark winter will be over, I will wear less than 6 layers in the morning, and I will wake with the feeling that it isn’t still night. Yes, summer is on the way.

Yet, thinking of the hope that comes with the longer days- even 5 and 10 minutes longer- reminds me of my friends, family, colleagues, and students whose days are not becoming any brighter just yet. The ones over whom mental illness has settled like December 21^st itself, that long and dark day which seems to never end. Apparently, we’re in sight of “mental health awareness week,” and I keep hearing a cheerful voice on the radio from Bell Network saying, “Fortunately, you can make a difference! Just text this number…” Every time I hear the voice, I find myself yelling back at it, “No! You can’t make a difference!”, annoyed by the simplicity of the idea that sending a text could somehow put an end to the darkness faced by so many dear ones.

The truth is, mental illness is on the rise at an alarming rate in this country- particularly among our students. Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, PTSD, suicide… sometimes I feel like a walking DSM5 just because of the people I interact with and love on a daily basis. There seems to be an epidemic of hopelessness which refuses to be quarantined. Just as I cannot make spring come any faster, so do we seem utterly helpless in the face of the darkness of mental illness. Perhaps it is all the more confusing, since we Canadians have become accustomed to having a degree of relative autonomy and control, that something so debilitating can escape us. You’ve seen it. You’ve felt it too.

It is often at these darkest times that people find themselves stumbling into the strange world of faith, with its metaphors of dark and light, valley and mountaintop, wilderness and homecoming. Because mental illness is something quite outside our ability to categorize and understand, it is frequently with metaphors and bodily memory that people are able to trudge their way through it. Ideally, the world of faith forces people outside of themselves, so that they can see themselves as part of a bigger story in which light and darkness come and go and in which the light of resurrection always has the final say.

When we are overcome by our own darkness, Christ promises to be light for us. When we wander through the wilderness, lost and alone, Christ will be our homecoming. And when it seems like the darkness itself is caving in on us, God has promised to fight on our behalf.

It is a miracle of life that those who find themselves weakened by mental illness are often the ones who do community better than those of us who are self-sufficient enough to forge ahead on our own. They are often the ones with hearts big enough to love the stranger and forgive the unlovable. Because wisdom and endurance are developed in the wilderness. Sometimes, during cold Manitoba winters, we talk about how hearty and strong our ancestors must have been and I can see some of that hearty endurance in the courage of those who suffer the dark days of mental illness.
But while I’d like to say there’s some great purpose to the darkness, some greater good which will be worth it all in the end, that would be naïve. Sometimes, there is no endurance developed in the wilderness, but only chronic pain. It shouldn’t be. And when God’s kingdom comes in its fullness, such suffering will be no more. But until then, the Holy One really will be spring for us. And spring won’t be long now.

The Liturgical Calendar: A Year of Colour

Perhaps I should back up even further and explain why we observe Advent at all. Spiritual teachers of many traditions have long taught that time is cyclical, rather than linear, and the Christian year is the way we observe the passage of time. The book of Ecclesiastes, one of the older books in the Hebrew Bible, says that “nothing is new under the sun,” and our Jewish ancestors teach that there is a sense in which we experience the same things again and again in life, coming full circle as we experience events and lessons in a different way each time we encounter them.

There is a rich tradition of story-telling in Judaism, where the story of the people- particularly their bondage and exodus from Egypt, their pilgrimage in the wilderness and entry into the Promised Land- are told again and again. This sets them apart as a people, reminding them of who they are and where they’ve come from. When the story is told again, they are proclaiming, in essence, “We are the ones who came up out of Egypt; this story is an inseparable part of us,” and there is a sense in which the whole drama happens again as the story is told.

The Christian year, beginning in Advent, serves more or less the same purpose. It reminds us of who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. It enables us to enter into the great story of our faith and become actors in the unfolding drama of God’s work in the world. We begin in Advent because the world was longing to be made new before the birth of Christ and we are reminded that we are still waiting for that newness. It forces us out of our regular routines which act like everything’s okay in the world and reminds us that our attempts to be self-made are continually falling flat on their face, just as they were last year and the year before, and the year before that.

 

My colleague and mentor Tim O’Connor explains that as we near the festival of Christmas, we “turn around and look back” to that time long ago when God came among us as a tiny baby; but as the festival comes to an end and we near Epiphany, (January 6^th), we “turn right back around” and look toward the future, when God will at last make the world whole. We carry the spirit of Christmas with us into the rest of the liturgical year, remembering that God continues to walk along with us.

The lessons that we learn in Advent- that the world is broken, that we encounter a kind of hope (week one), peace (week two), joy (week three), and love (week four) in the Christ child that changes lives and makes the broken whole- we carry into the rest of the year. Just as Passover reminds our Jewish brothers and sisters who they are and where they’ve come from, so Advent and then Christmas remind us that things are not always as they seem. In a world of Christmas shopping, we remember our need for a Saviour. In a world where despair and greed seem to run rampant, we declare that a baby who joined us some 2000 years ago changes everything.

It is fitting that Advent is the way we begin the year anew because for all the declarations that things are not okay and we need someone to come intervene, it is ultimately a declaration of hope: outrageous, unreasonable, radical, hope. In our culture in particular, I have found that hope is in desperately short supply. We may sing jingles that “wish every day could be like Christmas,” but this is among the most common times of year for suicide attempts. Ours is a season which does not deny the pain of the world but which simultaneously declares that things are not as they seem. Hope- whole, deep, abiding hope- is on the way.

Things are Not Okay: Advent 1

I fear that in my excitement to begin waiting and watching, I have forgotten what this first bit of Advent is really about. Beginning on Sunday we have been lighting the “hope” candle, which tends to be associated for me with happy ideas like joy, love, and peace. We cannot really have hope, however, until we first acknowledge that things are not okay. Think about it: “hope” is not necessary for people when things are going well. Hope is the treasure of the broken, the hurting, and the lonely.

In our readings for Morning Prayer from the lectionary this week, we have been hearing, not a story of excitement over the coming Christ, but a story of brokenness and failure. In the readings from the prophets (Isaiah 1-2 and Amos 3-4), Israel is condemned for oppression and hypocrisy and the poor cry out for justice. In the Psalms, the people are surrounded by enemies and injustice on all sides, crying out to God for mercy. In the Gospels, we find John the Baptist crying out against the hypocrisy of religion many hundreds of years later, because things have not changed.

Part of why the oppression found in Israel is such a travesty is that these are the people whom God called apart to be a safe place for the hurting of the world: the strangers, the orphans, the widows, and the outcasts. Yet our readings for this first week of Advent cry out, “Things are not okay in the world!” It is a cry, not only of the Christian Church, but of the whole world. We long for something new, for justice and mercy and hope that things will not always be this way.

The Church too has been called to be a people set apart, a blessing to the strangers and outcasts in our lands; but we, like Israel, have become unjust and hypocritical instead. So in the first week of Advent, we are called to repent- to acknowledge that something is deeply wrong with the world and, not only can we not fix it, but we are a big part of it.

Yet the prophets do not leave their people in condemnation and the rhythm of Advent doesn’t leave us there either, as we come to the end of this first week. Even as we are reminded of the ways in which we’ve failed the world, failed God, and failed ourselves, we are given a promise: God is going to do something new among you. God has seen that you cannot be the blessing to the world on your own, so God will break into our time and space to dwell among us and be the justice we long for. The bad news is we can’t do it. The good news is that God can: and soon will.

Now, as I sit with my first Advent candle at the end of a long day, I think about the brokenness of the world and repent of my role in it, both personally any communally. Then I beg God to come and transform the mess we’ve made. I sit in stillness for a moment, and I blow out the candle with a sense of hope, knowing that by acknowledging my own inadequacy I have made space for God to come and dwell among us. Because God never barges in unwanted and uninvited. That, my friends, is the hope we profess this season: not a greeting card sentiment, but a deep, almost painful assurance that God has not forgotten us.

When We're Faced with Suicide

World Suicide Prevention Day

Tomorrow is World Suicide Prevention Day and I find myself thinking of all the theological misconceptions around suicide. The questions people have when a loved one takes his or her own life are particularly difficult, in part because suicide is such a bizarre event that it makes us question much of what we thought to be true. I say it’s bizarre because creation is made to live and to desire life; the very fact that a person no longer desires what he or she has been created for is an unusual twist in the created order.

Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that virtually all of us has been affected by suicide in some way; I can’t even count the number of people I know of who have suicided, known either to me or to people I love. I use the verb “suicided” rather than “committed suicide” because it’s time we stopped putting suicide in the same category as a crime (such as, “he committed a felony”). Usually when someone “commits” something it is utterly shameful, a taboo subject in the community.

In years past, the Church has made the grave mistake of treating suicide as one such taboo subject. These deaths were explained away and condemned, the families of the deceased shamed and outcast. A person who died this was buried outside the churchyard as a symbol that he or she would not rise with the Christians on the day of resurrection and would be condemned to eternal punishment.

Fortunately, the Church now has the opportunity to acknowledge our error and take an active role in suicide prevention and care, as we have with other ancestral baggage. A suicidal person is in utterly unbearable pain, such as most of us could never imagine. Jesus calls such hurting people, saying “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:18). As the Creator-God, it is always God’s desire that God’s children choose life, promising to carry us through the darkest and most painful moments of our lives. Yet when a child dies, God is also there to catch him, to gather him into God’s arms and keep him safe there forever.

As those who are left behind to wonder and to grieve, I believe the most important thing we can do is to talk openly about suicide, as scary and painful as it can be. When a friend or family member is struggling, don’t be afraid to ask about it. Encourage her to seek help in whatever way you can, reminding her that she will come out the other side of the darkness she’s experiencing. Tell her she never needs to walk alone- and then tell her again.

Tomorrow I will wear a yellow ribbon to honour the too-short lives of those I have known and those I have not. But I also wear the ribbon as a symbol of light in dark places, a reminder that it’s ok to talk about suicide and to ask for help. Finally, I wear the ribbon as a reminder to myself that sometimes the people around me are walking in dark and lonely places. Perhaps if we can walk together, the road will be a little smoother and the burden a little lighter. Perhaps together we can come out the other side of that darkness.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, click here to contact the Manitoba Suicide Hotline