Advent-uring

17/11/2023

FOR MY BOY

My pace, slow and measured,
Cannot keep up with yours.
You dart past, wheels attached,
On a zigzagging course.
Without the wheels, your little body
Cannot feel the joy of the school run
Or the grocery trip - and then you ask - again -
For my arms to hold your feelings.

Anger and sadness gaze through your surface,
Because they mirror your intensity of love,
and the degrees of joy
You plunge downwards through
every time we say no.

Four years of a limbic system
In stops and starts,
Slowed often by my own
stumbling path.

Four years of fists, and feelings,
flights of fancy and loving you.

We go and play, mostly I sip
Coffee for my nerves, and overhear
Conversations from the fringe. My little fringe.
You are in the fray, centred, busy.
I hear about the older lonely school runs,
Lonely dinners, a mess-free home.

Disembodying my brain, I smile at its
Exhaustion. Push it down.
And I
Hold your hand a little bit closer,
Play a little bit harder,
on our short, slow way home.

31/08/2023

24/04/2023

"Mum, do butterflies remember their lives as caterpillars and cocoons?"

I thought this was a rather insightful, existential question into the philosophy of biology just before bedtime. So we researched it briefly and now here I am this morning, reading through journals like Developmental Biology, which is rather different from my normal fare of human geographies and migration. I must also admit, I am not a fan of little flying things and so the images here have been pushing my buttons but I learn!

Braby (here: https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-do-butterflies-remember-being-caterpillars-99508 #:~:text=The%20study%20showed%20that%20memory,it%20learned%20as%20a%20caterpillar ) seems to think that they perhaps don't but that they do remember biological, experiential learning. They may not remember everything but they remember their fears, their hurt and their In 1972, beetles were taught in their pupal stages to find a specific way through a maze and they remembered that as fully grown beetles. In 2008, scientists decided to assess the retention of memory by seeing if Manduca Sexta caterpillars remembered an aversion to a specific smell... They did this using pain stimuli and ethyl acetate. It is not an unpleasant smell, in itself. It's what goes into nail polish or some glues. It's definitely a strong smell. But the pain stimuli with the experience of the smell was important and the caterpillars remembered it. When they were butterflies.

The most recent research (2022 and published this year) appears to show that the fruit fly's brains actually evolve within the pupa casing from what they became temporarily as larvae back into the ancestral experiences of the butterfly... Parts of their brain remain the same and other parts are co-opted into learning how to fly, to use their wings, to find their food and communicate with other insects.https://elifesciences.org/articles/80594.pdf

The carrot not the stick... If you're like me and that's what you're thinking, then these guys in 2005 thought the same toohttps://sokolowski.eeb.utoronto.ca/files/2012/07/Hendel_2005.pdf and I put it here for the benefit of you and me and people like my 7-year-old. The pharyngeal receptors for the tastes they like appear to stay the same in this reorganisation that goes on during the pupal evolution we just talked about.

So, butterflies - and fruit flies and to***co hornworms - remember! They remember what it was like to be slowly pacing forward at 1cmps (oh yeah, centimetre per second!) at their very fastest and to gradually change into a bejewelled, winged creature that flies from flower to flower.

Not only do they remember but when they have dragged themselves, weary with so much growing and changing and body-disfiguring, into a coil of caterpillar fully satiated with this life and ready to rest, they weave themselves a membranous covering like a duvet on a difficult morning. Inside the duvet, it is a tiny mystery.

For weeks, in our house, we have watched our pupae. We have not known what to expect. Inside the pupal casing, the vital organs remain and build using what has returned to primordial goo. The goo can be seen were you to split open the cocoon at exactly the right time. It looks like a chemical mess of nothingness. But it isn't. Science tells us that the insects retain imaginal discs of what their new stronger organs need to be - like little temporal blueprints. This batch of caterpillars have had a rather rough start. Not all of them made it. When we first tried this a few years ago, all 5 babies made it. But this year, only 2 have survived. Perhaps one more and we are trying to do what we can... If anyone does know what to do about a butterfly that has half its legs stuck into a cocoon that has not fully opened, speak now! :-)

But you can see the transformation that has failed in those 2 others that have not made it. It becomes a small blob of organic mush and then mould grows over it, other organic material taking over. It's fascinating. It's painful. The butterfly that is half its way out right now - it looks like it is wriggling out of death. The change is painful. It looks like it cost them everything. It looks like death.

Here is the wonderful thing. The butterfly or moth that is out already looks so much larger than death, larger than her life as she knew it.

In answer to my daughter's question, I think yes. And I think it is a more beautiful thing than we know.

"But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I’ll probably never fully understand. We’re not all going to die—but we are all going to be changed... In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelves and replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal...

Death swallowed by triumphant Life!"

I don't know. But I imagine. We're told we will sing the song of the Lamb and of Moses, the great cloud of witnesses we come from, our ancestral, eternal memory of who we are...

We are told the former troubles will not come to mind but that we will sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob... and I shall sit down, I think, with those I have lost. I think we will remember those we have loved and held, and lost, or await. I think we will remember our pain to remember its redemption and smile.

I think we will remember the joy of loving, living and learning and we will fly.

07/04/2023

Every year, the waiting gets me. We wait on Thursday. We wait on Friday. On Saturday. Some people are still waiting.

In my job, I actually look at the *work* of waiting in migration trajectories. How waiting becomes life. How people *become* in waiting. Waiting is fluid, vulnerable, unpredictable. Protracted displacement happens when you are on the run, without your papers, living in the shadows for 5 years at a minimum. When you have a brokenness whose healing you are waiting, it doesn't go anywhere. You learn to live with it. Waiting is not passive. It's hard work.

Story after story, people had learned to live with their brokenness until Jesus came. The woman with the haemorrhage for 12 years made her freedom happen. So did Jairus, the bereaved father. So did Peter's mother-in-law or the paralytic at the pool. Because they could see their freedom.

But people only wait because they know that freedom is coming. Otherwise waiting is simply acceptance and hopelessness. The image of the cross has become the Christian faith's identity in the world's eyes. An empire's device for subjection. And yet the cross is one moment which held an eternity of love, for a faith which rests so largely on the empty tomb. We know the empty tomb is coming. I don't know if the disciples and Jesus' friends knew it with as much certainty. He had told them but were they waiting uncertainly, did they know when or how? Without this, what was their hope?

Hope that is not real hurts. Studying the psychology of hope, Snyder, and then subsequent others, suggest a theory of hope hinged on goals, plans to reach those goals (pathways) and the ability to motivate oneself to do those things. The Bible says FAITH is the certainty, the fabric of our hopes. It is the substance. In faith, we have proof of those things we cannot see. Logically, I prefer to circumvent the circular argument that seems possible and dig deeper. Faith allows us to know that a thing is coming and to act on it. To build our pathways. Not that it is but that it will be.

Faith is Sunday. Faith is active waiting. We wait, we do community, we live, we love because we know that freedom is ours.

Without the knowledge that the empty tomb is coming, did the disciples plan to spread the gospel? Change the world and heal the sick? Did they chart their missionary maps on Friday and Saturday? I don't know. It doesn't sound like it. But Jesus told us he is coming back, just like he told them. We should be talking to Jesus and building our pathways, walking the road to Emmaus and sharing our stories. Because we wait in hope.

My three-year-old loves his fantasy. Superheroes are his favourite things. They fix the bad stuff. They fly in and save the day. They magically appear. He knows they're fiction and he finds it glorious fiction. But the other day, he met someone and said to them that Jesus is alive. Like that's the best thing about him. Hulk might have his underpants on and nobody laughs at him. Spidey can web. Captain America can do whatever Captain America does for a little Welsh kid.

But... Jesus is alive. In his head, He is here and the others are not. The hope my little boy gets from watching endless reruns of superhero shows are exciting but not real to him. I don't know how... We haven't discussed fact vs fiction quite just yet. The hope of Jesus, with no exciting streaming, but just a hazy understanding of his presence, I imagine, is real simply because Jesus is alive to him in the here and now.

That is the hope that allows me to wait. To act and to love and to be the change He wants us to be. Because he is alive and he has called us to life.

14/02/2023

A Somber Valentine's Day Post

A couple of Sundays ago, we talked about how God sees everything. And insightfully, the person speaking said it wasn't a reassuring picture at all. Surveillance is not comforting in any way.

In the original version of the Panopticon, suggested by Bentham and then popularised into larger theoretical frameworks by Foucault, the place is a prison. Pan - opti - con is the all seeing machine. It is an isolating supervision over all of the acts and words of the inmates within the cell. You are under observation. The picture of the panopticon helps highlight the starkness of this all-seeing judgement.

This is a very uncomfortable thing that God seems to be offering the people. No?

This peaceful, loving God in the Bible that everyone talks about - he is telling them he sees every deed and, in the context of some passages like Ezekiel when people are convinced that God is an illusion who sees nothing, this is a license to destroy, to run away, to deceive. It is also a constraint on freedom. What distinguishes this oppressive regime from the image of God that I have grown to love? Is my image of God misinformed?

Foucault writes about the person inside the panopticon:
"He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication."

And yet, Hagar, in her darkest hour of abandonment by her family, worships the God who sees. She is grateful that he has seen her and saved her - El Roi, the God who sees.

Hagar was also running away. She had been shunned by her husband of sorts. She was being persecuted by a mistress who first sacrificed her on the family's altar and then threw her out when the sacrifice became unnecessary. But Hagar says this:

"I have now seen the One who sees me." It is that moment that changes her life. Knowing and being known.

Love - real love - is being seen and being known in your worst moments and still being loved. I have my funny moments, my awful moments, my angry moments and my useless moments. I am sure I have some stellar moments thrown in but they are few and far between. And yet, I am confident that my family love me. To know the ugliest parts of your spouse or parent or sibling or children, the most frustrating and the most hurt areas of their souls and to love them still - that is love and that is when we can truly be ourselves.

If I had the graphics skills, I would take the central tower of observation in the panopticon down and put the man with a torchlight in with the inmates, walking among them, being with them.

This is a God who allows himself to be seen. This is a God who allows himself to be vulnerable, visible and put to shame on a cross on top of a hill in judgement. He is not watching us from a tower of power. He is with us... He sees us because he walks where we walk. He loves with full knowledge and still delights in his love.

"To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us." - Tim Keller

23/12/2022

When I first came to the UK, I found it odd that people were always asking me if I was okay. It took me weeks to work out that this was normal. Years to discover that other people had trod where I had. Was it my hair? My clothes? Was it my face? Did I have my thinking frowny face on? (We all know what it's called but I'm not going there for both language and sexism...🤓) Many years later, I am still working on the habit. I am used to it, of course, but it's still not in my bones. So I gratefully reassure people that I am indeed well but usually forget to volley back a casual 'You alright?' and walk on because they look quite perfect to me. A few paces later, I tend to remember and worry that they think me a rather self-centred neighbour...

About a decade later, my husband travelled to India for the first time and was met with 'Have you eaten?' which made him wonder 'Eaten what?' I had warned him of this phenomenon pre-departure. Still he often replied that he had not eaten (until schooled otherwise) which prompted an awkward offering of a meal much less hearty than they perhaps would have liked to have served a guest! In addition, he also often got served food he refused but that is another story of uncomprehension for another day...😅

Fifteen years in, we came full circle. My parents arrived in the UK and had the same misgivings I began with. We also went to a very South American church in the UK at the time which led them to assume reluctantly that one simply kisses both cheeks when greeting someone - producing more awkward results in any mostly English church visits.

What kind of greeting is that?! It's a question Mary grappled with at the start of the incarnation. Luke 1: 38. For all our romanticising of Gabriel's visit, that was an awkward encounter among the finest. The whole encounter was alien to her from the sounds of it. Gabriel was rather more attuned to her reactions. "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God." Anyway, suffice it to say, it was all a bit of shock to the system.

The thing is Mary had hoped, with everyone else, for the coming of the Messiah. She had waited. And she knew she was of the lineage of David. She remembered the prophets more often than the obligatory once a year. And yet, it threw her.

_Oh, God will come. He will work. I have never doubted it. Through other people, yes. Through me? Um sure, yes, he always does every day. But, Mary, this isn't every day. This is one of those big, breakthrough moments and you've got a job._

I don't know about Mary but I wouldn't know how to respond to that. I do not know how to finish that conversation I just imagined. I would have questions. I would probably ask to be told what I had to do and when and how and where. Then I would begin to ask why.

But Mary is given nothing.

When the angel tells her that she will conceive and bear a child, it just doesn't feel like she gets to DO much. But it is a LOT. It is a LOT to have a child and become a parent. Definitely a lot to be engaged and suddenly told that you are to conceive and have a baby, but it will not be of the man you love and are going to marry. Definitely a lot to be told that the baby will be called the Saviour and that his will be an eternal Kingdom. A lot when you can't afford the traditional lamb (Luke 2:32).

It is a lot; yet none of it - not the conceiving, bearing, birthing, trait bequeathing or the naming - is in her hands.

Do you often want to do more things than to be more present? Often I refuse to understand what the phrase means. It is far easier to DO and to demonstrate love with tokens than to be present because the latter makes you vulnerable. Being present for long enough and stripped away *enough* of Christmas activity or everyday life is not exactly comfortable... For many, it is raw, real, exhausting work.

Being present in ministry, in parenting, in community... it is not something we do very well in the church. We are often so flush with the joy (and it is a legitimate joy) of serving, of preaching, singing, preparing, hosting, gift-giving and delivering that it covers our need. Both mine and the ones with me. Do you ever sit down with a family or a person who was in need and just are present in their need? I find that hard to do. Or hold your overwhelmed child and let him cry or rail in your presence? I find this really hard to do! Or simply go to the meeting or the thing in the community or the friends' event with no other reason than to be there? Again, you have me pegged right.

Yet, that is all Mary was allowed to do in this moment. She begins her role in history here and all she can do is simply listen and take it. And it was the biggest gift God asked of her.

"If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you'll never be and you need not waste time in trying." This is a little gem from L.M. Montgomery that has stuck with me since primary school but it wasn't from the famous Anne at all. The doer, the talker, the visionary, the heroine. Instead this protagonist is a much quieter, much less heroic one.

I don't know how much silence there was between Gabriel and Mary in that conversation. Mary does ask a question. She goes for it and tackles the thorough, obvious, absolute impracticality of the angel's announcement. ‘How will this be since I am a virgin?’ (Luke 1:34) and the angel explains that it will be, with very little of Mary's doing (v 35-37).

There is nothing between verses 37 and 38. To me, that is one of the most loaded silences I can imagine.

Mary is told that she is about to become pregnant (she is a virgin) and that she is about to have a baby (she isn't married) and that the baby will be the promised Messiah that generations of waiting and yearning faithful have desired. Mary pushes back - very mildly. Um but how? Mary is told it will happen because... God. And he keeps his promises (Luke 1:37).

And then Mary says 'Be it unto me according to your word'. I feel like that deserves a BOOM, mic drop 😅 because whatever transpired between verses 37 and 38 was huge. It was earth-shatteringly, life-changingly, course-alteringly, mind-messingly big for Mary and it was all inside of her. Gabriel may have known and he was present. He says nothing but he must have been there.

I wonder if she cried, sobbing for dreams she had had that she let go of for bigger ones that would become hers. I wonder if she was also angry for a while. I wonder if she was terrified about what Joseph might do. I wonder if she tried to think of solutions discarding each of them on their way in because... God.

And then did she grow slowly excited as she began to understand?

Did she begin to riffle through memorised prophecies trying to make her canvas fit the frame she was being given?

Did she smile about Elizabeth and her husband Zacharias?

Did she work her way through Gabriel's bombshells slowly grasping the joy?

Did she nod at Gabriel because everything will be okay and did he nod back?

Did her heart suddenly lighten because Jesus was coming? Did she cradle her belly with expectant anticipation? Did peace begin to come while Gabriel stood in that moment with her?

Well, we know it did because we have verse 38. But in real life, it takes an interminably long time for me to go from my plans, when they are set in stone which engagements often are, to a life that comes one day at a time. And I have to do it again and again. Sometimes my plans work and sometimes they don't. But I often forget that I do not hold my future or my children's. I want to protect their every choice. My three-year-old clearly tells me otherwise. My six-year-old doesn't bother talking me through her rather different plans.

Little about the next few years of Mary's life seems predictable. Her life is overhauled, first with this baby as babies often do; and then with Joseph's hurt and reversal; and then with everyone in the fields visiting her baby newly post-partum; and then with strangers from the East; with murderous decrees; and then with more visions, first to leave the country and then to return. Raising this Messiah as an average lad in an average, poor family in a farming community must have been crazy! She knew not long after he was born that raising him and loving him was going to hurt like a sword in her heart. But she raised him and she loved him and she said, in that very awkward encounter with Gabriel, after she faced her feelings in her silence between verse 37 and 38:

Be it unto me according to your word.

02/12/2022

In our house, we began Advent on Advent Sunday. So naturally, I embraced the consumerist tradition of chocolate calendars with complete gusto and raced the kids down the stairs to open the very first one. And then we went to messy church where the vicar pointed out that we were going to run out of chocolates. 'Doh. I had not reckoned with mass production. You will know from this evidence of my slightly insane pace of life and the excitement of Christmas that my posts here are not the finest writing, but humbly reflective. Thank you for journeying with me.

We have some Egyptian friends who were describing their Nativity Fast... it is a rather different take on Advent. It is self-effacing, reflective and solemn. I find it hard to contain my excitement though with this season. It leads to joy.

It leads me to wonder about Mary and Joseph. Central figures in the very final part of the story of advent, they must have borne much expectation. The expectation of people over the centuries and then an unanticipated gestation. I wonder about Mary's nesting. Did she collect heirlooms from Elizabeth? Knitted warm things, family secrets? There was only a donkey's worth she could have carried and most of that was her and her baby. And the donkey's never been a given, so poor Joseph would probably have been the load-bearer.

I did not nest much in the traditional way of nesting when I was pregnant. Each time, I did instead all the work I could possibly imagine that needed to be done at my workplace and everything else I couldn't imagine doing once I had a clingy baby earth-side. Once I was further away from home than I'd ever been but the preciousness of being together with loved ones was still special. I saved every moment of maternity leave for baby cuddles and very little for myself.

Pregnancy is not always fun... I had always walked a couple of miles to work. Walking to work or - in another town - walking to the hospital up a hill with precious cargo inside who consistently makes you sick is a lot of work. Mary didn't have a donkey in the Bible. She may have but she walked most places and she must have been an exhausted young lady!

But it was still full of joy because I could smile every time I thought about the life inside me. I imagine this was Mary too. She must have been shocked at first but knowing who she was carrying must have carried *her* through a lot.

The expectation of the ages, the expectation of the people, Mary's baby... What an immense thing. In this birth was the hope of nations, the hope of freedom and salvation.

Knowing who is to come, knowing him makes Advent exciting. Not easy - and our Eastern Orthodox brethren remember that well - but so so exciting.

Christmas is coming!

28/11/2022

Centuries of silence, with no word. I get antsy when I have waited more than 10 minutes for a text. When people talk about centuries, it is often a flex, a poetically (un)justified exaggeration. This isn't one. There were at least 4 of them in excruciating tumbleweed style. The last things that were said had been rather strongly put.

“See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction."

It is hard to reconcile the love, joy and peace we put on our Christmas cards with these words. Instead, the people get a stark warning and then silence. I find it hard to imagine what relating to God may have been like in those 400 years and more. I, in this post-Christian era, with my faith what it is... I know what the waiting is for given so much has passed since then. Just like Easter, we know what is coming. Did they?

The word 'advent' uses the Latin prefix which carries a host of meanings but primarily 'toward' in direction or timing... So towards the coming. We know that today but I am taking a guess that few in those 400 years called it advent. They probably called it exhausting.

Silence from God is not new, in the Bible. He sometimes simply cannot be heard. I am not here to tell you you are doing something wrong or indeed to tell you what to do right, if you are currently in His silence. Silence is overwhelming, though, isn't it? If the world has changed, crises battering at your door every other day, the news nothing you can listen to with your children in the room, and you are not sure where you fit in, but you still hear no answers... it's overwhelming. I think this word of the year, permacrisis, is a rather succinct little image.

But this season... it's not called AbMalachi (rather glad it isn't, to be fair) even if that is what it felt like to those with the lived experience. It is not a post-resounding-lay-it-on-the-table-talk season. These 400 years that we try to commemorate in our 4 weeks of harried tradition and shopping - we call those weeks 'advent' because they were journeying towards the coming. The journey is prevalent over the whole story. Living in occupied territory, living in political takeovers and wars, the magi halfway across the world, the very pregnant woman on a donkey across the country, a scattered diaspora, protracted refugee situations, internally displaced, refugees again on the road fleeing the country to save their child from a power-hungry, murdering leader. The journey is prevalent but it is not always pretty. It is real. It is today.

Incidentally, adventure does come from the same root if you are like me and you’re wondering. It’s the kind of word-loving wondering I do. It kind of means ‘towards the thing that is about to happen’… The thing that is coming is big; it is life-changing. Malachi did mention reconciliation in the verse above, overshadowed as our reading is by human hurt. C.S. Lewis, in the final Narnia chronicle, says: “We must go on and take the adventure that comes to us.”

Because if that is what Advent is – the journey - then our lives are Advent too. This is the palpable excitement of this adventure. Because it's not just Christmas that is coming. HE is coming. If we believe what we believe, then we know that He has promised this. So then this is Advent we are living, and I like remembering the first in these weeks for that reason because it gives us hope.

Towards the coming of a Saviour.

Because it is hard. It’s not just me, right? The road is rough and dirty and downright awful, sometimes.

Because it can be extremely lonely. Maybe no one gets it, even if you thought they once did.

Because one other thing about silence is not rushing to fix it. I keep learning this as a parent. It is holding space for you, grief shared, being held together, weeping with you, overwhelmed with you.

But we must go on and take the life-changing adventure that comes to us… His name is Jesus.