The Slow Way Newsletter: Look Up, Raise Your Heads. It's Advent
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unhurried thoughts
Look Up, Raise Your Heads: It's Advent
This week I had a lot going on. (I'm making a big announcement in your inbox later this weekend about some new plans for The Slow Way. Stay tuned!) So as I was working to get all the tasks done I checked with my Wise Writer Guides, also known as my mastermind group, for some advice and general inspiration. My friend Erin Lane responded to my long list of to-dos with, “My mantra is ‘Let it be easy. Let it be kind.’”
I scratched those words on torn copy paper and taped it with painters tape (as one does) next to my desk. Let it be easy. Let it be kind. There’s enough hardness in my life already. Why make things harder than they have to be?
This past week my new pastor, Michael Rudzena, preached from an apocalyptic Jesus passage in Luke 21. In it, Jesus describes coming terror and perplexity and anguish. And then he says that when these things come, “look up and raise your heads for your redemption is drawing near.”
If you want to know how Michael talked about the apocalyptic parts, you can watch his sermon here. It really is something special. But his main focus was that line at the end. Look up, raise your heads. Hope is coming.
This first week of Advent is the Week of Hope. It’s the week we’re invited to pause in the midst of the commercial hustle that very quickly invades these early days of December. The curse of Holiday Card creation, then addressing! The way money seems to pour forth out of our pockets and into the cash register at Home Goods (or is that just me?). And the Hallmark movies. Oh, so many Hallmark movies.
Of course, this year of our Week of Hope has coincided with the appearance of Omicron, and all the fear that comes with the unknown of what lies ahead. Look up and raise your heads.
Michael quoted from Simone Wiel’s book Waiting for God:
“There are those people who try to elevate their souls like someone who continually jumps from a standing position in the hope that forcing oneself to jump all day— and higher every day— they would no longer fall back down, but rise to heaven. Thus occupied, they no longer look to heaven. We cannot even take one step toward heaven. The vertical direction is forbidden to us. But if we look to heaven long-term, God descends and lifts us up. God lifts us up easily. As Aeschylus says, ‘That which is divine is without effort.’ There is an ease in salvation more difficult for us than all efforts. ”
Did you catch that? “There is an ease in salvation more difficult for us than all efforts.” Sometimes the easy thing is the hardest thing, because it requires we stop working so hard to grasp it.
Michael described how the ease in redemption is a bit like a fiance’s “yes” to a proposal. It is “an act of attention, an act of consent.” It’s not a muscular effort, it’s turning our head in the direction of the invitation. “Advent tells us to stop, to pause, to put ourselves in a position of consent,” Michael said.
And this week, as I’ve worked a little harder. As I’ve mourned the reality of my dad’s illness which continues to develop and bring grief and hardship to my family. As I’ve made my Christmas purchases, and tried to finish that holiday card that just can’t to finish and order already, I have thought of this position of consent.
Yes, Jesus said. The world will explode. It will be horrific. Wars will come, viruses will mutate, perplexity will rule, parents will get sick. But when this happens, “look up and raise your heads, for your redemption is drawing near.”
Maybe the waiting we’re asked to do in Advent is not a passive sitting while the world around us hustles toward the 25th. Maybe it’s an act of consent, a paying attention, a way of learning to see hope. Coming, coming right to us. Our redemption drawing near.
a slow practice
It’s not hard to consider the calamities around us. They’re everywhere, aren’t they? But I’m imagining there’s one thing, personal or communal, that weighs on you right now. Today were going to summon all our artistic powers and draw a picture of the thing weighing you down. Be sure to draw it in the center of your paper so you have some space around it.
Now, draw around that thing all you have been doing to fix this reality. Maybe it's prayer. Maybe it’s a second medical opinion. Maybe it’s the conversation you keep trying to have with your family member who seems to live in a different political reality than you. Maybe you have protested political decisions but nothing seems to be changing. No matter how hard you scream at the powers in the world, our fossil fuel exhaust just keeps rising to the sky. Sometimes we can jump over and over and find that we’re still in the same place, exhausted.
What does it mean for you to look up? In the midst of this sorrow in your life, this anxiety, this troubling reality, how can you practice active consent to the the work of God? This doesn’t mean you stop trying. Not at all. But there’s a difference between the whole and healthy work of surrender and the clinched fisted anger of effort.
Now turn your paper over. Draw a picture of you releasing this thing you have held with clenched fists. What does it look like for you to unclench your fists and open your palms to the sky? Take a moment to look at your picture, say out loud: “I release this.”
Hear the voice of God saying to you, “Your redemption is coming.”