by Christie Purifoy | Nov 27, 2011 | Advent, Jesus, prayer
A Prayer for the First Sunday of Advent
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
– from The Book of Common Prayer
“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 | Nov 25, 2011 | Advent, Seasons
There’s a tension in our hearts and in our culture regarding Christmas.
On the one hand, we walk into a big-box store on October 31 and say, “Oh no. Already?” “Rudoph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is playing over the loudspeakers, and even the Christmas-lovers amongst us feel resistant.
On the other hand, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Eve rush us by in a flurry of to-do lists, shopping lists, and worries over family finances. By the time we find ourselves staring at the dirty dishes of our Christmas dinner, we remember, with surprise and regret, the “reason for the season.” (Sidenote: I solemnly swear that this is the last time I will repeat that annoying rhyme. No more, I promise.)
There is a beautiful middle ground: Advent. But, how to practice it outside of our churches? How to bridge the gap between lighting a candle on Sunday and the pressure to deliver two dozen holiday cupcakes to our child’s classroom on Monday?
To be honest, I’m not exactly sure. What I do know is that I don’t want to frame this season with Black Friday shopping and day-after-Christmas gift returns.
Beginning this Sunday and for the twenty-seven days that follow, I will be posting images (the photographer has been hard at work), reflections, stories and poetry in the hope of walking a middle way.
A way that moves between the too-much-too-soon and the over-and-done-in-a-blur. A way that steps between Sunday’s church service and Monday’s overwhelming to-do list. A way between the sugary sweetness of a televised Christmas movie and the disappointment of a trashbag filled with crumpled wrapping paper.
My intention is to create (and share) a quiet escape from consumerism and the Jingle Bells that only succeed in giving us a headache. Whether you adore Christmas and all of its trappings or you find the forced merriment of this season just too much to bear, you will, I hope, find a respite here.
It won’t be entirely comfortable, however.
I don’t want to consider Mary’s joy without remembering Mary’s pain. Christmas is a birth-day, after all, and I’ve long been convinced that birth and death are strange twins, one always shadowing the other. Our hope, as Christians, is that death does not triumph. One day, death itself will die, and the newness and joy of birth, no longer shadowed by sorrow, will be ours for eternity.
To keep up with each post this Advent season, visit the facebook page for There is a River and click “Like.” You can also receive each post delivered straight to your inbox by clicking here to subscribe by email.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 17, 2011 | Family, God's Love, Grace, Jesus, motherhood, Scripture, Stories, Uncategorized
A brief story about a Purity Ball in my Sunday newspaper catches my attention. There is an image (a church altar decked in lace like a bridal veil) and there are words spoken by a twelve-year-old girl (“I’m saving my purity for my husband”), and I feel troubled, as if there is a small pebble in my shoe.
I don’t know why I am troubled. These are my people, after all. We speak the same church-y language, we love the same Lord. And goodness knows we need more fathers like this one, fathers who dance with their daughters and whisper prayers over their heads.
It would be easy to keep turning the pages, forget the nagging pebble, but I do have an eight-year-old daughter, after all. I hold the paper still and say to the sky, “Lord, do you have wisdom for a firstborn girl raising a firstborn girl? I’m troubled, and I don’t know why.”
And I can’t say if it’s an answer to my prayer but what comes to me is a story: the woman at the well. The woman with five husbands and one who wasn’t even that. Considering her, I decide that she wasn’t created for a husband (or five). She was created for Jesus.
In fact, she was so highly esteemed by him that Jesus chose her to be the first to hear his earth-shattering news: the Messiah you have longed for is here. I am He.
I want to take this lovely twelve-year-old girl by the hand, look her in the eyes, and try to explain (but how to explain?) that purity isn’t some thing wrapped up in a box. It isn’t a commodity exchanged for a price. It’s a fire, it’s a light, it’s a fountain, and, yes, it turns the values of this world upside down because it’s holy and it’s a sacrifice.
What I would try to say is something like this: purity is a renewable gift, not a thing to grow dingy and worn (though I’m not quite sure who is the giver and who it is that receives, is it me? Is it Jesus?).
But the best news of all? Husband or no, you are invited to live the kind of love story in which even a prostitute can be the belle of the ball.
So, dear little girl, may your light shine, may my light shine, may the light given my daughter and my sons shine and shine. For He is ours, and we are His.
Good news.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 10, 2011 | allergies, Community, Faith, Family, Food, God's Love, grief, healing, Jesus, motherhood
On Friday, our weekly pizza-and-a-movie night had to be postponed (and, yes, for those of you wondering, I make two: one deliciously normal for four of us, one dairy-free, wheat-free and “pizza” in name only for the middle child).
This middle child, our accident-prone five-year-old, had to be taken to the emergency room after a fall onto the cement floor of our garage. He came home late that same night happy to show off his new plastic dinosaur and the half-dozen staples on the back of his head.
I still remember, years ago, the preschool teacher who told me that if any child was going to fall into a puddle or trip on the curb it would be my son. Always. This has never stopped being true.
Twenty-four hours later, three of us kneel to receive communion. We prepare to remember death and taste resurrected life while the boy so recently knitted back together stands behind us. The boy who knows what death tastes like better than any of us. He does not yet receive the elements, but he is always given a short blessing, a gentle hand on his head.
Our servers are an elderly couple unfamiliar to me. They must be Sunday-morning regulars moonlighting at our Saturday-evening service. The husband places his hand on my son’s head and leans in close. He prays and prays until it seems that the attention of a whole room has condensed and fixed itself on this prayer for one small boy. I don’t remember a communion blessing that ever continued so long.
It is long enough for this memory: I am seven-months pregnant with my miracle baby, my-sewn-in-tears-and-reaped-in-joy son. I am filled up with a baby and with fear. Having waited so long for him, I am sure that this gift cannot be given with no strings attached. There must be some price, in pain, that I must pay. Until someone touches my own head and prays for me, and I see … well, I hardly know what I see, but it is as if my unborn son and his maker are alone together. Then I understand that I have only a peripheral role in the relationship between them, and I see that my love is small and weak compared with the love God has for the child he’s made.
Kneeling at the communion rail, I can see that the young couple next to me are also watching my son and the gray-haired man. I can see tears in her eyes and feel them in my own, and I know that this, this, is what it means to live in a beloved community. We have been so well-loved by God that our hearts break for how he loves everyone around us. We are loved, and we are loving, and our hands touching broken heads and fearful hearts are the hands of Jesus, always.
And the heavy burden of love that I carry for my son is shared. It is not, has never been, mine alone. Of course, my husband shares it, the firstborn (who runs to her room weeping as the car leaves for the emergency room) shares it, but Jesus also shares it and his beautiful church shares it.
We are a beloved community.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 4, 2011 | Jesus, Scripture, Uncategorized
How’s that for a title? Did it draw you in? Turn you off?
To be honest, I’m trying not to care whether or not His name is an effective lure for a blog post. I’m trying not to care because I’ve realized something important: it’s all about Him, but I make it about so many other things.
I’ve tended to think that this is a problem for “those other” Christians (and, I promise you, there will always be “others” in this gorgeously diverse body of Christ).
I point my finger at an earlier generation of believers and say, “Thanks to you, too many people in this country think Christianity is about right-wing politics, pseudo-science, celebrity preachers, and churches that look like clones of corporate America.” I may be the quiet, introverted type, but I’m quite good at pointing fingers, even if only in my own mind.
However, I’ve been convicted (a heavy, old-fashioned word, right? Yet, I think it’s the only one to use). I, too, have made this believing life to be about so many other things: social justice, creation care, orphan care, free-trade coffee … well, you get the idea.
Surely those are good things? Justice for the poor, caring for widows and orphans: aren’t these necessary components of a religion that pleases our maker?
Yes, I’m quite sure that they are. I’m not about to buy chocolate harvested by trafficked African children, and the grief I personally feel over abortion and capital punishment can’t be untangled from my Christian spirituality.
And yet … I’m beginning to see how a commitment to good things (to causes, to ideals) is not exactly the same thing as a commitment to Him. To Jesus. One certainly flows from the other, but they are not interchangeable.
If someone asks, “What is Christianity all about? What does it have to offer?” the right answer is “Jesus,” not “feeding the hungry” (though that doesn’t, for one minute, let me off the hook for feeding the hungry).
I pray that my life speaks on behalf of justice for the least of these. I must do (and keep on doing) some serious self-reflection about the size of my house, and the overflowing state of my children’s toyboxes (not to mention my own closet). In my view, following Jesus demands these responses. Yet, I can no longer live as if this is the heart of the Good News that Jesus came to preach.
The treasure we’ve been given, the treasure we should be proclaiming, the treasure we should always be giving away … is Jesus himself. Emmanuel. God with us.
I have hardly begun to see how this Jesus-centered faith will reveal itself in my life. Is it only semantics? What, really, needs to change?
I can point to small things. Reading the Bible with my kids, I try not to reduce the story of Noah and the ark to a moral lesson about obedience or trust. Jesus told us that Scripture was all about Him, and I want to take that seriously. I want my kids to see Noah and his ark, not in isolation, but as a part of one beautiful, world-changing Jesus story (thank you, The Jesus Storybook Bible!). I’m also grateful to attend a church where the Eucharist (Communion, Lord’s Supper) is not an afterthought but the highlight of our weekly gathering. The sharing of this Jesus-meal is the purest, most compelling sermon we can preach. It communicates perfectly to seeker and believer, child and adult.
I sense that there’s more … much more. What a relief to know that this is not merely one more theological knot to untangle. This is not one more item to check off of some spiritual to-do list.
This is far more personal because it’s all about a person; it was, is, and always will be about the One who sits enthroned. Jesus.
