[ hold :: this space ]

i mentioned in an earlier post that we’re curating a basement space for christmas this year. just to clarify, the space is open to everyone, but I’m not putting details up here because we want to keep track of who’s coming - and we want to send you an invitation in the mail! please email if you’d like one - and if you’ve already emailed, the invitation’s on its way…

And of course, if you’re wanting to be part of creating these spaces, let me know. A group of us meet once a month to have a drink together, and plan the spaces, and there’s always space for another around the table. We’re taking the spaces into another direction next year which is going to be brilliant…

[for a space in Benalla in a couple of weeks... we're going to explore waiting through the characters in the advent story... this will need work if we're going to use it - i like the idea more than the execution]

what was it like for you, god,
when you were waiting for your child to be born?

did you like awake at night
overawed by the miracle of life,
overwhelmed by what was to come?

did you wonder if you were up to the task -
if you’d know what to do
when he ran away
when he was cheeky or outright rude
when he defied authority

or did you think no child of yours would ever dare behave that way?

did you practice conversations, plan the wisdom you would share?
did you wonder if you’d let him think differently to you?
did you pray for the strength to let him teach you too?

did you despair at the pain your child would be born into
and grieve the limits of your protection?

did the world become infinitely more precious
and overwhelmingly fearsome
all at once?

did you worry you might not love him?
did you wonder how you would be able to ever let him go?

did it change you, god, this waiting?
how are you different because of this birth?

i’m planning some sacred spaces for christmas at the moment, for a variety of contexts and ‘audiences’. today was my big day to make it happen - almost meeting free, working from home, a whole day to get inspired, and pull it together. It’s 3.30 and all i have is a dozen less ideas than i did at this time yesterday. luckily, i know it’s like this every christmas, so i’m not panicked. though maybe i need the panic. either that or gin.

and instead of being a place where we talk about these things, describe them so you don’t miss them when they happen, it would be nice if it was a place to encounter these things, so we go away different… so i started thinking about the wishlist, what i really wanted for christmas… in a space, and really, just in general…

light
a moment of knowing that this night is not all there is
and not all there will be

hope
an encounter with the kind of hope that captivates our imagination
so we can’t help but become more than who we thought we were,
and find ourselves living for something that is all at once
preposterous and impossible

peace
- world peace -
predictable, i guess, and unlikely
so perhaps a smaller moment would do
- just a sign that we want war to stop enough
to relinquish the satisfaction of the moral high ground
to give up our easy stereotypes and caricatures
of nations and people

[to know that any label
Israeli
or Palestinian
Iraqi
Muslim
Jew
Christian
witch
gay
straight
paedophile
murderer
evangelical
liberal
progressive
is never enough
to do justice to anyone

but i digress]

joy
to experience a moment it’s real,
when the theory becomes sacrament,
where we wonder what just happened then…

[That’s all i want for christmas

though i acknowledge
that i’d be happy to settle for less
like those earrings with the origami birds, a le creuset casserole, or the new augie march cd

and perhaps therein lies the problem…]

this is another of those posts i will regret writing, where people will start worrying and offering pastoral care… nonetheless, i will take a deep breath and hit ‘publish’ anyway…

I quite like christmas, but for all the wrong reasons. i like presents. i like shopping. i like my friends, and that we find lots of reasons in december to spend time together. i like that christmas is a good reason to buy champagne from one of the ‘up high’ shelves at Dan’s. i like tinsel, sparkles and fairylights. i like practising Christmas recipes, and going to the market with Clare on christmas eve to buy lobster and raspberries. I like that there are reasons to buy new outfits with frippery shoes [summer’s coming!].

Yes, i really am that shallow.

In fact, if it weren’t for the traffic on the roads and the Christian bits, Christmas would be my absolute favourite time of year.

Christmas is the part of the Christian story i find most difficult – not for the details of the story, they don’t bother me at all, but because i find it really hard to make sense of the difference that it makes. It seems i get pissed off about this time each year that the world isn’t magically better as a result of the incarnation [if he’s the prince of peace, why isn’t there peace?]… And the alternative, all too often, is to dilute the story down to the palatable bits [this is what God is like when God is in human flesh], and not demand something more of it [where is that world peace, dammit?]. This year the ‘what difference did it make’ question is biting harder – not in a bad way at all [please don’t offer pastoral care!], just in an ‘i can’t bear to talk about a promise i don’t believe… so i’d better go in search of some promise i can talk about’ kind of way.

I’m working on a deadline for an advent piece at the moment, and i’ve just realised that it’s the connection between advent and Christmas that makes me tongue-tied. i get the waiting in advent [in fact i love it], i just hate that Christmas is so often offered as the end of the waiting - the moment the world was holding it’s breath for… and yet actually, we’re still breathless. We’re still dreaming the same dreams as Isaiah, i’m just less confident than him that this kingdom might actually happen. i can theologise that tension away with the best of them, but i’m still pissed about it.

Luckily there’s nothing like the process of writing for a deadline to sift through the crap and to let there be a moment where some clarity falls into the light. i just need to trust the process to work -after all, i do still have 65 minutes before the deadline… and perhaps once the piece is done i can go across the road and try on that frock i saw earlier…

there’s no happy ending to this blog post, no nice little twist that will make anyone glad they read through to the end. but sometimes, in the absence of clarity, it’s good to at least call out loud from in middle of the fog…

This is the liturgy for tomorrow’s service in at the prison. The gathering is taken from last year’s service at the women’s prison.

Gathering

You could easily think, here,
that Christmas is just a romantic notion,
a fairytale
a plan of God’s
that didn’t quite work.

You could easily think, today
that this is a season for everyone else to celebrate
a story for everyone else to believe.

But the story of Jesus’ birth has more in common
with the inside of a prison
than it does with the glossy pictures in a Kmart catalogue
and the sparkle of Carols by Candlelight.

So this Christmas
we hear it again:
this story told first by ridiculed prophets, dirty shepherds and a single mother
of a love that is as old as the universe
and as new as this moment

and we wait for God’s love to be born again.

Bible Reading: Luke 2:1-14

Wondering / Reflection

I wonder what it was like for Mary and Joseph when they couldn’t find a home -
when, at their most desperate moment, no-one wanted them.

I wonder what Mary was thinking when she went into labour. Did she scream? How much did it hurt? Was she scared?
I wonder when her fear turned to hope.

I wonder what it was like for Joseph to watch her, and to wait.
I wonder what it felt like for him to hold God in his hands.

I wonder what the shepherds thought, when the angels turned up
and why the angels chose shepherds -
or whether the angels sang to everyone, but the shepherds were the only ones who heard.
I wonder if we would hear.

I wonder what made them believe.
I wonder if we would believe.

Prayer

This is the season for miracles, God,
for angels to sing
for stars to light the dark
for hope to be born
for love that comes in a human shape.

It’s the season for miracles, and we pray for them today.

In the places in our lives that are empty
we pray for the miracle that changes despair to hope.

in the places in this prison that are too lonely
we pray for the miracle that brings light into fear

in the moments in our days that seem endless
we pray for the miracle that changes hopelessness into joy

in the horrors in our world that seem unfixable
we pray for the miracle that brings peace into hatred.

You are the God of the impossible
so come, God, make Christmas real again today,

through Jesus Christ, love born in our midst

amen.

Lord’s Prayer

Communion intro

The bread and wine we’re about to share
joins us to the people throughout history and across the world
who have come to this meal in search of life.

Just as Jesus’ birth was for the whole world
this bread and wine is for everyone

for the hungry
for the lost
for those who search
and those who are found
for those who question
and those who know peace

this is bread and wine for everyone.

Let us pray… [move into communion liturgy and distribution]

Prayer for the world

You choose the most unlikely, the darkest parts of life
in which to be born.

So we pray that your love will be born again this Christmas
in all parts of the world where love and hope are hard to find.

Invite people to light candles and pray prayers

In spite of all evidence to the contrary
In spite of us having every reason not to believe
Come Lord, come.
Let your love be born again this Christmas.

Amen.

Sending out

Go from here
search for the love that God brings to life
in every moment
and in every place.

in the name of Christ
Amen

more later, when there’s space to breathe, but to begin with, these are some photos mike took from the first of the spaces from Coming Soon. the space was based on Isaiah 2:3-5, the swords into ploughshares passage.

can you see the little glowing object that’s up the top of the photo, on the left of the concrete pillar? that’s an origami peace crane, spotlit from underneath.

The planes and crane were made from pages of the bible… the reflection around it worked on the theme that swords and ploughshares are made from the same metal, we choose which we will make…

the vinyl lettering is still adhered to the wall. it seems to add a nice touch to the carpark.

more of mike’s photos can be found here. the space looked absolutely fantastic - felt like we were ‘in’ the space more this time, rather than ‘on’ it. i’ll explain that later.

today i’m off to the Afred Acute Psych Unit for a Christmas eve service.

peace does not always come in the shape of a baby

in a season that abounds with fertile miracles
pray peace for those for whom every breathless, wondrous mention
of babies born
will bring only unspeakable pain.

pray peace for the Elizabeths who will not get pregnant,
for whom no miracle will occur, at any age
who know themselves only as cursed.

pray peace for the Marys who are pregnant and who do not want to be
for whom every movement inside is a reminder of fear and despair.

pray peace for the Marys whose partners say ‘no’.

pray peace for the Rachels whose babies have died
and whose cries will go unheard
in the clamour of christmas bells and carols.

and pray peace for the unnamed women
whose stories are not spoken out loud in the bible
the women who ended pregnancies
the women who miscarried
the women who will never have the chance to have children

pray peace for the women for whom this Christmas story is only a reminder
of the inadequacy
and failure,
the grief
and the guilt,
they feel every month.

peace does not always come in the shape of a baby.

God’s act of faith at Christmas is to rely on humankind for the plan to work. Our act of faith is to say ‘yes’.

we confess, God,
that, unlike joseph, we probably wouldn’t have said ‘yes’
that we probably would have scoffed at the question.

we confess that if the plan had relied on us,
it probably would have failed.

we confess that we do not believe the impossible can happen
that we mostly think that this whole idea
of christmas
has no grounding in reality.

in our defence, though, we have good reason to doubt.

this Christmas, God,
bring the angels that speak to us
rumours of hope
and life

we are willing to be convinced

Amen.

a reminder of the basement space, which is coming up on December 23rd. i’m so looking forward to it

No time to write about this, but i was in the prison again yesterday… it had a much better flow and centre this week, and the men were up for talking [last week they'd been in lockdown for most of the day, which does everyone's head in, throws everyone off balance]. I think next week we’ll write prayers on hope, love, joy and peace to use on christmas day.

As i was walking through the carpark on my way in, a young woman and her baby were walking out. She had gone to bother, and dressed up beautifully for the visit - and the baby too - but had obviously been turned back at the door. ‘I came all this fucking way for nothing,’ she sobbed, to no-one. ‘Again’. When i used the bathroom in the visitors centre before going in, the back of the door was covered with graffitied declarations of love from the women for the men they were leaving behind: ‘Alisha loves Tony for life’. Strange wording, anwhere else but here.

the liturgy:

Still Waiting
Advent Candle lighting:

Person 1
We are people living in darkness
It’s hard to see the world around us,
and the faces of those who are near us.

Person 2
[light the candle]
We light this candle in the darkness
to remind us of the light that hope brings into our world
and we pray for more to come.

All
Come, Lord Jesus, come.

Bible reading:
Set the scene
What do we know about Mary?

Read Luke 1:46-55

Mary said:
With all my heart
I praise the Lord,
and I am glad
because of God my Savior.
He cares for me,
his humble servant.
From now on,
all people will say
God has blessed me.
God All-Powerful has done
great things for me,
and his name is holy.
He always shows mercy
to everyone
who worships him.
The Lord has used
his powerful arm
to scatter those
who are proud.
He drags strong rulers
from their thrones
and puts humble people
in places of power.
God gives the hungry
good things to eat,
and sends the rich away
with nothing.
He helps his servant Israel
and is always merciful
to his people.
The Lord made this promise
to our ancestors,
to Abraham and his family
forever!

Reflection:
When it must have seemed that her life couldn’t get more difficult, I wonder how Mary found it in her to celebrate?

I wonder what made Mary believe that God was blessing her?

I wonder if Mary was as scared as she was glad?

I wonder when the fear turned to courage?

I wonder whether she was as impatient as us for the time to come
when everyone has enough to eat, when humble people will be in places of power.

I wonder what the waiting was like for Mary

I wonder what the waiting is like for you.

Let us pray
We know you will understand, God,
if we don’t have the faith that Mary had
- not quite yet, anyway.

give us the faith, today,
to prepare the space in our lives and in the world for you to be born
even if it doesn’t seem likely.

because while we are a little sceptical at times about Christmas
we’d really love to be convinced.

Amen.

Lighting candles:
Story about the children in south Africa lighting candles and placing them in the windows… where the soldiers would come and knock them over. The children would laugh at the soldiers who were afraid of the light.

Today we’re going to light candles for those situations in the world
and in our lives
where is hope is needed

Where are the places in the world
and in your lives
that are waiting for hope?
Come and light a candle, and say your prayer out loud, or in the quiet.

Sending out

Desmond Tutu said this:
Goodness is stronger than Evil;
Love is stronger than hate;
Light is stronger than darkness;
Life is stronger than death.

We wait for the time to come when all the world will know this.

Go into the waiting of this week,
knowing that you do not wait alone.

Go in peace, and may the god of peace go with you

Amen.