Greetings,
Once more I had the opportunity to hear music in the tradition of the black church: excellent classic pieces mixed with exciting, vibrant and uplifting renditions of traditional Christmas favorites and African-American spirituals. Such joy and hope! Yet, it comes out of the greatest of human despair and sorrow, the depths of brokenness: broken bodies, broken relationships, broken families, broken promises, broken lives. It was all wonderful, but as always, I was especially touched by the rendition of “Come Unto Him,” from “He Shall Feed His Flock” from Handel’s Messiah. Given my years at Johns Hopkins, my mind immediately goes to the statue of Jesus, with its inscription, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden.” All the years I watched people kneeling on that marble floor, looking up into the face of Jesus with their heart rending petitions and Thanksgivings. Watching brokenness being healed. Watching the faithful, and coincidentally very often black church choirs, coming to sing praises and carols at the feet of Jesus before moving out though the hospital wings to bring good cheer and hope.
This is the vital message of Advent. Eduardo Galeano tells the story:
“Oil, passing along the banks of Lake Maracaibo, has taken away the colors. In this Venezuelan garbage dump of sordid streets, dirty air and oily waters, Rafael Vargas lives and paints.
“Grass does not grow in Cabimas, dead city, emptied land, nor do fish remain in its waters, nor birds in its air, nor roosters in its dawns; but in Vargas’s painting the world is in fiesta, the earth breathes at the top of its lungs, the greenest of trees burst with fruit and flowers, and prodigious fish, birds, and roosters jostle one another like people.
“Vargas hardly knows how to read or write. He does know how to earn a living as a carpenter, and how as a painter to earn the clean light of his days: His is the revenge, the prophecy of one who paints not the reality he knows but the reality he needs.”
(From Memory of Fire: Volume III: Century of the Wind, translated by Cedric Belfrage.)
More hope in the midst of brokenness. From Israel in Egypt to slaves in our history to the downtrodden and oppressed of today, brokenness and hurt and sorrow and despair: yet for those willing to look beyond their current condition, there is hope and joy.
Jean Vanier writes, in The Broken Body:
Our brokenness is the wound through which
the full power of God
can penetrate our being
and transfigure us in God.
Loneliness is not something from which we must flee
but the place from which we can cry out to God,
where God will find us and we can find God.
Yes, through our wounds
the power of God can penetrate us
and become like rivers of living water
to irrigate the arid earth within us.
Thus we may irrigate the arid earth of others,
so that hope and love are reborn.
From the Epistle of James:
See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth,
being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.
You too must be patient. Make your hearts firm,
because the coming of the Lord is at hand.
James 5:7-8
We thank you, Lord, for our brokenness and wounds. Move in and through us that we might live and serve in your power, bringing your love and justice and peace to all of your children, that all might know and be washed in the river of life, rolling justice down like the waters and righteousness like the ever flowing stream. Amen.
Yours & His,
DED
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