Category: Fourth Sunday in Advent

Friends,

A few weeks ago I referred you to The Red Hand Files. The Red Hand Files are Nick Caves’ public reply to questions / letters sent to him. Here is his latest that I think tandems today’s Gospel reading rather well. For were it not for angelic intervention a socially “disgraced” Mary would have been dismissed by a so-called religiously “righteous” Joseph and no Gospel would have followed. Throughout the ages men have often been deaf to the truth of angelic liberators. With righteousness weaponised, the rejection of women have followed. These rejections are the real disgrace!

Grace,
Alan

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“Yesterday, I was listening to your BBC interview, and the interviewer asked you to discuss the distinction you make between spirituality and religion – I’m interested in this distinction too, and it’s something I wrestle with.

What do you do when you’re a woman who would like the kind of spirituality with rigour that religion affords, but your faith, and much of its rigour is stacked against your sex? What to do, when the faith you were raised in continues to make decisions that isolate women, and prevents women from being fully themselves in the church and the world?

I haven’t been to church, or even prayed for a long time. I’ve been angry at my church because women continue to be discriminated against, and because not all of us were safe there.

Christ is still compelling for me – and while congregations are still mostly made up of women – how do the rest of us practice within a church that we know hates us.”

CLAIRE, SOUTH GOLDEN BEACH, NSW

“Dear Claire,
In many ways, the figure of Jesus is the radical and mystical embodiment of female energy. It is there in the blood thread of suffering that runs from his birth to his death, his emergence bereft of male seed, the mercy and forgiveness he displays and teaches, his nurturing, shepherding love – all of this feels female in its essence. I think perhaps the biggest mistake the church made was to distrust, dismiss and undermine this implicit female energy that pours through the gospels and the idea of spiritual belief itself.

I can see why you would reject a theology that seems to have taken that free-flowing spirituality and imprisoned it within an intolerant and hostile masculine construct.

Even though I go to church when I can, I am by no means an advocate of organised religion. Like you, I struggle with it. However, I feel the church I attend allows me a lasting structure that can contain my unbelief and belief both – that is to say, my love for the motion, direction and energy of faith, albeit nested in a certain skepticism of its ultimate destination.

Certainly church has its challenges, and it may be the last place you might find Christ, if that’s what you’re looking for. But, for me, a church service affords me a place where I can, for an hour or so, put aside my uncertainty and sit within a gathering space – a place of communal and timeless yearning, imperfect though it may be. There are times when my rational mind clamours in and I wonder what I am doing there, yet there are other times when I am genuinely lifted up by its mothering energy – the words and music and liturgy – and I find those ever-present whispers and intimations of spiritual activity, that both haunt my life and give it meaning, to be quite beautifully affirmed. There within that institution I feel the sacred and feminine essence to be revealed.

Claire, as I said, I am not an advocate for the church one way or the other, and I wish I had a better answer for you. Sometimes it feels as though part of the work of a spiritual life is to discover a way to transcend the imperfections of the religion itself and attune oneself to its essential nature. This is what I try to do. In any event, I wish you all the best and thank you for your letter. I am sure many will relate to it.

Love, Nick”

Friends,

Anne Dufourmantelle in her book Power of Gentleness, writes in the final chapter that is entitled: A Gentle Revolution:

“It is sometimes inadvertently that a revolution takes place. An effect of extreme gentleness, barely different from other moments, and then life suddenly catches fire, is ablaze. But burning with inexplicable gentleness. As if suddenly you were taken by the hand along a precipice and needed not only to walk along the edge but to dance, and yes, you dance without fear or vertigo as if the very space took refuge in you, and then as if, upon arriving on the other side, everything had changed, but without violence. Is the intimate revolution of this kind?”

She then goes on to tell a short story of a young Italian soldier. It is a story of surprising ordinariness, “barely different from other moments”, yet I find myself reading and re-reading it with a growing sense of wonder. With each reading it “suddenly catches fire” and the “surprise holds” me.

A young Italian was drafted into the army during the First World War. For months he hid in the mountains with his comrades. They had almost no provisions left. The order was to defend the mountain pass at any cost. Feeling a sense of absurdity that he tried to hide from the others, he kept a journal. One night he noticed the movement of troops in the pass on the other side of the cliffs separating the narrow valley, and he thought that all was lost. The offensive would occur the very next day, that much was certain, and he knew he and his comrades would not have enough ammunition. That night, without his comrades knowing, he decided to venture as close as possible to the enemy camp. Halfway there he almost turned back; he heard a song rising from a gramophone. The surprise held him. He was so moved by it that he decided to come forward until he was seen in the open, a sign of surrender in his hand. He was captured immediately and brought to the officer of the German army. The record was still playing. They both knew the tune. The voice that rose from the recording had an unusual gentleness. The German officer talked with this man all night. Risking everything, the Italian explained the position of his troops, their certain death, and put their fate completely in his hands. The German officer let him leave in the morning. And he never launched the attack. He went in the direction of another valley, leaving them time to withdraw and make their escape. This is a story of gentleness.

This story involves no less wonder than sipping wine from a water-filled-cup and no less surprise than the Creator of the cosmos “contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man” (Charles Wesley).

The epicentre of the story’s surprising wonder lies deep beneath the surface of expectation. “Their certain death” escapes certainty. The story’s surprise rests in what does not happen rather than what does happen just like a tree spared from the woodcutters axe. The tree stands today as it did yesterday. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. The tree, though rooted in the same soil is now rooted in a new story. The story of what could have been, but wasn’t. The tree, though not dead, inherits the wonder of new life.

So it is with the soldiers. Though not dead, they too inherit new life. This new life is birthed out of a gentle revolution. A gentle revolution that involves radical risk taking, courageous vulnerability and musical invitation that travels over enemy lines and creeps beneath ideological uniforms to build a bridge between enemy hearts.

I share this story of gentle revolution with you at this time in the hope that it can help us to see the Christmas story as one of gentle revolution that catches fire precisely because of its surprising ordinariness: A peasant girl giving birth to a baby in poverty, yet held by the musical invitation of God’s loving favour.

In growing wonder,
Alan