by Christie Purifoy | Dec 8, 2011 | Advent, book of quotations, Books, Jesus
The following words can be found in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. I’ve had this small volume on my Amazon wish list for several years, but this is my first season to read it. I should have clicked purchase long ago.
J. B. Phillips on Advent:
“What we are in fact celebrating is the awe-inspiring humility of God, and no amount of familiarity with the trappings of Christmas should ever blind us to its quiet but explosive significance. For Christians believe that so great is God’s love and concern for humanity that he himself became a man. Amid the sparkle and the color and music of the day’s celebration we do well to remember that God’s insertion of himself into human history was achieved with an almost frightening quietness and humility. There was no advertisement, no publicity, no special privilege; in fact the entry of God into his own world was almost heartbreakingly humble. In sober fact there is little romance or beauty in the thought of a young woman looking desperately for a place where she could give birth to her first baby. …
That is why, behind all our fun and games at Christmastime, we should not try to escape a sense of awe, almost a sense of fright, at what God has done. We must never allow anything to blind us to the true significance of what happened at Bethlehem so long ago. Nothing can alter the fact that we live on a visited planet.”
We live on a visited planet.
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 1, 2011 | Advent, Community, Home
Perhaps the most difficult thing about darkness is that it tells us we are alone.
Darkness, it lies.
Long ago, the church began celebrating its new year during winter’s darkest days. This seems right and good, to me. It’s in times of darkness that we most need to be reminded that we do not wait alone.
Whether or not we’re able to attend church regularly, whether or not we’ve found a place to call our church “home,” and whether or not we truly feel at home there, we do not wait alone.
I believe that this is true, even on the days when it doesn’t feel true. Even on the days when I find community in the pages of a book written decades ago rather than in flesh-and-blood conversation.
In fact, waiting with others is the point of Christian community. One of my favorite writers, Henri Nouwen puts it well:
“The whole meaning of the Christian community lies in offering a space in which we wait for that which we have already seen. Christian community is the place where we keep the flame alive among us and take it seriously, so that it can grow and become stronger in us. In this way we can live with courage, trusting that there is a spiritual power in us that allows us to live in this world without being seduced constantly by despair, lostness, and darkness. That is how we dare to say that God is a God of love even when we see hatred all around us. … We say it together. We affirm it in one another. Waiting together, nurturing what has already begun, expecting its fulfillment – that is the meaning of marriage, friendship, community, and the Christian life.” (from “A Spirituality of Waiting,” as written in my Book of Quotations)
Sometimes I feel lost in the darkness, whether it is a global darkness (famine, crimes against children, poverty) or the darkness that descends when I forget that life is not meant to be as complicated as I sometimes make it (with my buying, my rushing, my worrying).
Advent reminds me to slow down, to light my candle, to find comfort in the many candles lit around me, and to know, again, that if the only thing I do most days is wait patiently, with thanksgiving, then I have lived well.
“The Photographer,” otherwise known as Kelli Campbell, invites each of you to contribute your own Advent images to the Advent Flickr group. If you are not a photographer, we hope you will still join both of us there to watch as the season quietly unfolds in pictures.
by Christie Purifoy | Sep 30, 2011 | book of quotations, Poetry
I keep a book of quotations. It looks exactly like any other journal, but it’s for a different kind of journaling. Journaling with the words of other writers, if you will. Here I scribble down quotations from all kinds of books: poetry, theology, memoir, literary theory, fiction, you name it. I write down anything I want to remember.
Sometimes I use these quotations later, in my own writing or maybe just in conversation. But, it isn’t really about utility. It’s about beauty. Language can be so beautiful it stuns. However, I am generally reading so much, so quickly that I need a way to hold on to those beautiful bits that I just can’t bear to let wash down the stream of words, words, words.
In The Poetics of Space the French philosopher* Gaston Bachelard tells us that “the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
That is pure poetry and reminds me, once again, that I will always find more truth in poetry (and myth, and story, and art) than in the dictionary.
Like many introverts, I imagine, I am happiest when in my own home. I also love the purely abstract idea of houses. As a middle-schooler, I wanted to be an interior designer. As an almost-college student, I considered architecture. Ultimately, my desire for fame and fortune led me to study literature. (For those perhaps unfamiliar with the current job market in the humanities, I should explain: that was a joke.)
After ten years of English lit. and babies, I finally did finish with school, and we left Chicago. I have missed my Chicago home for one year and six months. When I picture what it is that I miss, I see what Bachelard prompts me to call my “dreaming spot.” A soft green chair is huddled up against a corner window. A tall built-in bookshelf is just on the other side of the window, and through the glass there are rooftops with one-hundred year old chimneys and treetops that shift from bare, to bright green, to rich green, to shades of fire, and back again.
When I leave this Florida house, I am sure that I will miss the big bay window that shelters my writing desk. I still have the soft, green chair, but I no longer spend much time there. I prefer the hard-backed desk chair, here by the window, where I can see vegetable beds, ripening citrus, water, and (when I’m lucky) river otters. Right now, this is my spot for dreaming.
For me, one of the saddest and most troubling verses in the Bible is Matthew 8:20 where Jesus tells us, “‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’” To follow Jesus, is to say, “Lord, I will make my home in you.”
But we have also been given a promise. In John 14:2 Jesus says, “’In my Father’s house are many rooms . . . I am going there to prepare a place for you.’”
I love houses, mine (wherever it happens to be) most of all. I simply cannot imagine having no place (let alone a cozy, book-filled place) to lay my head. And so I stumble upon yet one more difficult, beautiful paradox: my desire for Home is God-given and good, but this fact gives me no right to hold my house in a possessive, white-knuckled grip.
“Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.’”
(Matthew 16: 24-25)
*Lest anyone formulate an unduly high regard for my intellectual habits, I must admit that I do not actually spend my days reading French philosophy. I encountered this quotation in the travel section of my Sunday New York Times. Poetry can find us in the most surprising places.
by Christie Purifoy | Aug 30, 2011 | book of quotations, God's Love
I keep a book of quotations. It looks exactly like any other journal, but it’s for a different kind of journaling. Journaling with the words of other writers, if you will. Here I scribble down quotations from all kinds of books: poetry, theology, memoir, literary theory, fiction, you name it. I write down anything I want to remember.
Sometimes I use these quotations later, in my own writing or maybe just in conversation. But, it isn’t really about utility. It’s about beauty. Language can be so beautiful it stuns. However, I am generally reading so much, so quickly that I need a way to hold on to those beautiful bits that I just can’t bear to let wash down the stream of words, words, words.
During our recent vacation, I read Ian Morgan Cron’s Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir of Sorts.
It fully lives up to its title. Which means that the story it tells is crazy and beautiful, wise and, frequently, very, very funny.
Toward the end of his story, Cron describes the life-changing moment when he hears (or thinks he hears) the voice of Jesus asking him, Cron, for forgiveness. These words heal an ugly wound in Cron’s heart, but they puzzle him too.
He knows in his head that Jesus is perfect. Knows that there can never be any reason why He would need to ask for forgiveness.
When asked, theologians, pastors, and priests consistently fail to unravel this apparent contradiction. Finally, a woman named Miss Annie, a woman with no seminary training, does exactly that. She tells Cron, “Why wouldn’t Jesus humble himself and tell a boy he was sorry for letting him down if he knew it would heal his heart?” Cron interrupts with what he knows: “But if Jesus is perfect?”
“Miss Annie ambled the five or six feet that separated us and took my hand. ‘Son,’ she said, rubbing my knuckles with her thumb, ‘love always stoops.’”
Since finishing the book, I’ve been considering the truth of Miss Annie’s words. I can remember years where the things I knew about God seemed to stand like a wall between me and His love. Learn just a little bit about God’s power, his glory, his holiness . . . do that, and it can be hard to fit your own miserable, tiny little self into the picture.
Maybe there are those who can hear a Sunday School lesson on God’s love and then feel it in their bones. All I really know is that it didn’t work that way for me. Perhaps my head and my heart are farther apart than they should be.
I will always be grateful that Love stooped down and came looking for me. Like Miss Annie said, Love humbles itself, Love stoops, and what this means to me is that Love pursues. Love chases. Love makes itself small enough for even our short-sighted, human eyeballs.
Love searches desperately for one lost sheep, and love keeps on searching until that sheep is safe, until that sheep knows and feels that she is loved.
