Seeking Wisdom: A New Year's Resolution

I grew up surrounded by adults who were often very smart, but not often very wise.

I saw the difference starkly when my volatile grandfather abruptly sold the home we lived in, the fall I turned 14. With little notice, my grandmother, 3 siblings and I found ourselves unhoused. My older brother and sister finished out the school year living with a nearby family from our church. My grandmother, younger brother and I landed with a couple we had never met before in a town 30 miles away.

Hazel and Jim Wilson had never gone to college. One of my uncles had met them through the board of a Christian camp and knew they had a reputation for hosting missionary families home on furlough and difficult teens whose families no longer wanted them. I'm not sure what he told them, but they welcomed us for as long as we needed. We lived with them from mid-October until late January of my freshman year of high school. 

They lived in a small frame house on a large country lot, surrounded by woods and hills. Jim worked on the highway, mowing berms in the summer, plowing snow in the winter. Hazel was an aide at a small daycare center. 

It took a while for the sense of peace in their home to seep into my shattered heart. I was adjusting to a new school, abruptly cut off from friends, older siblings. Most of our belongings had been given away or put into storage. Yet there was a quiet, and welcome, and calm, in the Wilson's house that somehow counterbalanced the loss that landed us there. 

It occurred to me, eating dinner every evening at their kitchen table, that I'd never lived in a household with adults who weren't somehow at war. And I'd never spent time with more than one adult without somehow being hammered with competing opinions.  

At the Wilsons, conversation moved slowly, cheerfully. Questions were met with generous good humor. Decisions were made with plenty of space for any options or objections to be weighed. 

Some things in their house were givens: everyone did chores. Everyone helped. Everyone spoke with respect and listened with care. But beyond that, there was plenty of room to think, and consider. 

Jim and Hazel had never had children. At first I was puzzled by the diverse assortment of young adults, young families, unexpected visitors who would show up at odd times, often unannounced, some staying for dinner, some spending the night on the living room couch, or some just standing in the yard to talk awhile before heading off on their way. I soon learned: these were some of the teens Jim and Hazel had fostered over their decades of marriage. Some had returned to their own families. Some they had adopted. For all, the Wilson's home was an island of calm, peace, healing, wisdom.

Sometime in my teens, I stumbled on James 3:17 and 18. My first thought when I read it was "this is Hazel and Jim. This is who they are. This is why I love them": 

But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace. 
(King James Version) 

By the time I read that passage the remains of our fragmented family had moved into the top floor of a two family house, just up the street from the small church the Wilsons attended. I saw them every Sunday morning and evening, and often on Wednesday evening for prayer meeting. They were a magnet for me and others. Their presence, the peace that surrounded them, filtered into every meeting they attended. I memorized that passage from James and carried it with me. When smart people I knew dismissed the Christian faith as nonsense, the Wilsons' wisdom was a weighty counter balance. 

I've been seeking that kind of wisdom ever since, and watching for people who live it fully. Surrounded as we are by anger, division, judgmental opinions, competitive agendas, we need people like Jim and Hazel.

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but sometimes I find it helpful to carry a passage with me and use it as a screen for the swirl around me. So here are a few thoughts for the year ahead:

1. Listen more, argue less.

I've been struck lately at how much conversation feels like an attempt to lure me into argument. I don't have an opinion on everything. I don't want to duel over politics, theology, food, health. We can’t all be experts on every issue that confronts us, but we can take time to listen and learn before we voice opinions. If we haven’t taken time to look a little deeper, hear both sides of the story, understand the pros and cons, maybe we should ask questions and listen rather than repeat accusations that stir our anger but not our understanding.

2. Love more, judge less. 

I've been reading a book by Brian McLaren called Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World. He explores the constant sorting of us vs them, in vs out, right vs wrong. What would happen if we started instead from a place of strong benevolence? What would happen if our first goal, always, was to see and love the other person as God sees and loves both them and us?

3. Seek righteousness, not "rightness."

"Rightness" is a list of dos and don'ts and a competitive duel to have the best answer. Righteousness is very different: a rich blending of justice, truth, compassion, kindness, wise governance, equitable economy. That one work deserves several posts of its own. I attempted one 2012 (Reconciling Righteousness) and again in 2013 (Hungering Far Past "Rightness")

4. Pray for wisdom, for ourselves, our leaders, churches, communities, familles.

The passage from James is worth memorizing and praying, for ourselves, our families, and for those in leadership in our churches, communities and nation. Pray that our homes and churches would be places of healing for people harmed by division and judgment. Pray that our national and church leaders would be  peacemakers, full of mercy and good fruit. Pray that we ourselves would be magnets of grace for those weary of argument, anger and division. 

But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. (New King James Version)

Light in the Darkness

Leandro Bassano, Annunciation to the Shepherds, Italy 1600

There are seasons when I step away from news, social media, current events. Seasons when the darkness and division seem too overwhelming, the daily assault too hard to absorb. 

This is one of those seasons. I pray for Israel, and Gaza, for hostages and hospitals and families with no safe place to hide. I pray for the people of Sudan in the horrors of disease and war. I pray for Ukraine, and Russia. I pray for our national leaders in the divisive politics of the day. And I turn off the news and avoid the social media posts. There is too much grief and division, too much confusion and accusation. My heart can't hold it all. 

I stumbled this week on the work of Jürgen Moltmann. I've been reading Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. Moltman's essay, The Disarming Child, is the last entry in the collection. It begins with this passage from Isaiah:

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.… The people will rejoice.… For the yoke of their burden and the staff on their shoulder and the rod of their oppressor thou hast broken as on the day of Midian. For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty Hero, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from this time forth and for evermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.
—Isaiah 9:2-6

Moltman experienced darkness as a child in Germany in the 1940s He was drafted into military service in 1943 at the age of 16 and served in an anti-aircraft unit during Operation Gomorrah, a joint British-American bombing campaign in which over 10,000 bombs were dropped, and over 40,000 Germans killed, in one week of round-the-clock bombing on Hamburg, Germany's second largest city.

After the war Moltman spent time in a succession of prisoner-of-war camps where he encountered the Bible, the Christian faith and the hope of forgiveness and reconciliation. 

He describes that time in his essay:

A people in darkness . . . This phrase touched me direclty when in 1945 we were driven in endless and desolate columns into prisoner-of-war camps, the sticks of the guards at our sides, with hungry stomachs and empty hearts and curses on our lips. But many of us the, and I was one, glimpsed the light that radiates from the divine child.. This light did not allow me to perish. This hope kept us alive. 

The book of Isaiah predicts and describes the Babylonian captivity. a period of Jewish history when Judah was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar II. Jerusalem was destroyed and many Judeans were exiled to Assyria.  

But for the prophet, Assyria is more than just Assyria. She is the representative of the power that is hostile to God, and this makes her at the very same time the very quintessence of all inhuman oppression. The prophet looks at the specific pllght of his people, but talks about a misery experienced by people everywhere. That is why his words and images are so wide open that prisoner in every age have been able to find in them their own fate and their own hope.

In our Christmas services we celebrate that hope, but we sometimes miss how radical and political that hope is: 

the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty Hero, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end.... The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

Moltman talks about the zeal of nationalism, of power, of revenge. He saw that zeal in the German nationalism that led to World War II. We see it now in US politics, in the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan. Anger, bitterness, division, hate: they beget more of the same, until violence breaks out and the cycle continues. 

Isaiah foretold a a different future, a new kind of leader. Moltman continues:

He will establish “peace on earth,” we are told, and he will “uphold peace with justice and with righteousness.” But how can peace go together with justice? What we are familiar with is generally peace based on injustice, and justice based on conflict. The life of justice is struggle. Among us, peace and justice are divided by the struggle for power. The so-called “law of the strongest” destroys justice and right. The weakness of the peacemakers makes peace fragile. It is only in the zeal of love that what power has separated can be put together again: in a just peace and in the right to peace.

I find myself caught by that phrase: the zeal of love. That love brought God to a take on human form, to live as a refugee, a stranger, a wanderer condemned to die a disgraceful death. That zeal invited followers who gave their lives to share it, and still shines across centuries and continents, in places of sadness and anger and loss.

That zeal invites us to live as people of light and love, as agents of both peace and justice, as new people, following the child we celebrate. Moltman's own life was changed by that zeal of love, and the call to follow: 

We can follow him, even today making visible something of the peace, liberty, and righteousness of the kingdom that he will complete. It is no longer impossible. It has become possible for us in fellowship with him. Let us share in his new creation of the world and – born again to a living hope – live as new men and women.

The zeal of the Lord be with us all.

Joyful Genealogy

I'm fairly sure no mythic god would be announced with a genealogy of the kind that appears in Matthew, Chapter 1, listing the paternal ancestry of Jesus across two thousand years. As a writer, I'm always intrigued by the narrative arc of the ancient Biblical texts. Why start an important, dramatic story with a lengthy list of begots? 

The list itself has spurred reams of historical speculation. Why is it arranged as it is? Why does Matthew's differ from Luke's? What's the evidence for either? Why are there obvious omissions in both?

I talked yesterday with a niece who has sometimes dabbled in family genealogy. I have a younger sister I've never met, and my niece was at one time in touch with that part of my disrupted family. She reminded me I also have three half-brothers I never met. We don't even know their names. They've never made it onto any family tree I've ever seen. 

But no family tree ever has every name. Every family tree has holes.

Would I put a genealogy in a story of my own? Probably not. If I did, which family lines would I include? In my father's mother's line we have links that go back to early Welch settlers along the Hudson valley sometime before the American Revolution. In other parts of the family tree, we know just a few names, back to maybe the early1900s. Names before that were lost in a sea of northern Italian Carl Capras, (my paternal granfather) or Irish Patricia Ryans (my mother). 

My husband Whitney and I have been watching The Chosen by Angel Films, a series on the life of Christ. We watch an episode each Sunday evening, with our regular Sunday evening fare of popcorn and cut-up apples and cheese. We watched through the first three seasons, then circled back to watch again. It's a fictionalized version of the Gospels, of course, but parts of it ring true, and parts raise intriguing questions. 

Matthew is one of my favorite characters. The quirky, hated tax-collector. Obsessed with detail, disliked by his fellow disciples, a meticulous note-taker. The writers of The Chosen did a great job imagining Matthew as the writer of the Gospel of Matthew.

But there's something taking place in Matthew's genealogy that leaps past any imagined 1st century reporter, no matter how fond of making lists.

As would be expected for a writer of that time and place, most of the names Matthew provided are male Many were powerful, important, known figures from Jewish history. 

There are also names that might have been known by the people of Jesus' day, but aren't recorded in any Old Testament writings: Akim, Elihud, Eleazar, Matthan. Other names seem changed or conflated or slightly out of order. Let's assume Matthew didn't have access to digital census documents, or Ancestry.com. Should anyone assume an exactly accurate listing, or is there something more important at stake?

Here are the most unexpected entries, totally wrong if Matthew's goal was to win support for an unexpected Messiah (Warning: at least 2 of these stories would be banned in any well-conceived book-banning scheme):

• Tamar: a Canaanite widow (ie: NOT endorsed wife) who posed as a prostitute to entrap her father-in-law Judah (Genesis 38, check the backstory here)
• Rahab: a Canaanite prostitute who lied to her own people to protect Jewish spies (Joshua 2, context here)
• Ruth: a Moabite (another outsider), who married Boaz after a not-exactly model courtship (Ruth 3, summary here) 
• Bathsheba: she's not named by Matthew, just "Uriah's wife", a reminder that King David was not always a paragon of virtue and was guilty of Uriah's death after the illicit conquest, or worse, of Uriah's wife Bathsheba. The conception of Solomon, Bathsheba and David's son, is not one most writers would take care to spotlight in the opener of an authorized holy narrative (2 Samuel 11; story here)

In an essay called "Genealogy and Grace," Gail Godwin ponders the list of Jesus' ancestors:

For reasons unknown to us, God may select the Judahs who sell their brothers into slavery, the Jacobs who cheat their way to first place, the Davids who steal wives and murder rivals -but also compose profound and beautiful psalms of praise....

And what about the women Matthew chooses to include? ... Every one ... had scandal or aspersion attached to her. 

What does your own family tree look like? What's your own part in that tree?

Christmas can be a hard time of introspection. We think of loved ones no longer with us. We think of family rifts, stories not told, histories we carry we don't fully understand. 

I find myself encouraged by the genealogy of Jesus. By the recognition of the women - seen and remembered - despite so many reasons to omit mention of their lives. 

I find myself rejoicing that God's story, as it unfolds across generations, has never been the exclusive domain of the powerful, the purposeful, the socially accepted, the righteous and the upright. 

There's room in it for me. For my family: past, present, future. Known and unknown. 

As Godwin concludes:

Matthew's genealogy is showing us how the story of Jesus Christ contained - and would continue to contain - the flawed and inflicted and insulted, the cunning and the weak-willed and the misunderstood." (from Evensong, Gail Godwin, 1999). 

As we think about who will gather, and not gather, around our Christmas dinner tables, let's rejoice that there's one table where all are invited, all are welcome, all are named.  

From 17th century Tree of Jesse
P. Kritikos Collection (Patmos) Wikimedia Commons

Prepare the Way

The Old Testament text in church this morning was Isaiah 40:1-11.

I've been grieving the tragedy unfolding in Israel and Gaza. The lives lost, the captives still missing, the terror and grief and hunger and disease.

I've been grieving the accusation and anger in the streets and campuses here in the US. Even good people struggling to say the right thing, to do the right thing, find themselves caught in the middle of an escalating divide. 

My friend Jess Campbell was the reader in church this morning. I've known her since she was in 10th grade, in the first small group I led in youth ministry. She's now the youth director at our church after years leading youth ministry and Young Life clubs on Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, then working with several churches in the mid-west. 

"Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem."

Maybe I was teary because hearing Jess read reminded me of so many times of reading scripture with her and her friends in that first small group, with her and the other youth volunteers and interns when she worked with me as a college intern. I'm moved to see her still reading God's word with such conviction and joy. God's word grows in us. Shapes us. Sings across our years and decades. 

But maybe I was teary because comfort is so badly needed in Jerusalem. In Gaza. In this whole weary world. And because God's people, all of us, are so in need of a tender voice when so much of what we hear is so strident and hateful. 

The reading went on:

"A voice of one calling:
"In the wilderness prepare
    the way for the Lord,
make straight in the desert
    a highway for our God.

"Every valley shall be raised up,
    every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,     the rugged places made plain.'" 

Prepare the way. 

That's a major Advent theme. 

Often the focus of preparation is prayer, silence, reflection, waiting.

I've blogged in the past about each of those. 

But this year I'm struck by Luke's record of John the Baptist's message. When John told the crowds following him to prepare the way and produce fruit in keeping with righteousness, they asked him "What should we DO?" 

His answer doesn't fit well with the normal Advent message:

“Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”

Sit with that a while.

What questions come to mind?

Today is my 68th birthday. I'm sitting by my family room fireplace, considering my new tea cups, my soft new socks. New earrings, new book. A box of Bridge Street chocolates. Some left-over Wegman's cannoli. 

In a world where so many are hungry and homeless, what does it mean to hear the words of John?

In a world of anger, war, division, what does comfort look like? 

There is a practical piece to repentance and preparation. My guess is that it will be different for every person. John went on to address tax collectors and soldiers. What would he say to the rest of us? Be content. Share what you have. Don't lust after more. Is that enough?

But maybe the seemingly spiritual is in fact most practical. In a time like this, pray for Jerusalem. For Israel. For Gaza. Pray for wisdom. For justice. For peace. For God's grace and mercy to be felt and known and expressed in practical ways. Then produce fruit in keeping with righteousness. Whatever comes to mind. 

Maybe.

But also, in a time like this, it's good to return to words of scripture. 

That's where the comfort and preparation and next steps of obedience come. 

Isaiah 40 is worth reading completely. Here's how the chapter ends:

"Do you not know?
    Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
    and his understanding no one can fathom.
29 He gives strength to the weary
    and increases the power of the weak.
30 Even youths grow tired and weary,
    and young men stumble and fall;
31 but those who hope in the Lord
    will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
    they will run and not grow weary,
    they will walk and not be faint."

Metanoia

I began this blog on November 1, 2010, just a month after I ended eleven years in youth ministry at the Church of the Good Samaritan. 

I think at the time I was concerned that without the weekly schedule of lessons and talks to prepare, I'd lose the discipline of study and reflection. I posted almost every Sunday for the next six years, then more sporadically the next four, and ended a bit abruptly in June of 2021. 

I called that last post Owlets, UFOs, Microbes, Miracles. Toward the end I wrote:

"We miss so much by our own inattention, our determined refusal to listen, our predetermined categories, our amazing arrogance. We know so little, yet we think we understand enough to say what's real, what's not, what's worth our time, what isn't."

Maybe I stopped blogging after that because in a world where so many were arguing so fiercely over science, health, politics, faith, I didn't want to argue. Even a weekly blog post seemed too much of a challenge. I was deep into work with Fair Districts PA, an organization I helped form in 2016, advocating for better voting maps in Pennsylvania. And I was exhausted by a year of pandemic, by extended family health complications, by the rising tide of political ill-will. Silence seemed easier, and sometimes easy may be what we need. 

But recently I've had nudges to start posting again. I've started a few posts, then set them aside. But today is the start of Advent, one of my favorite times of the year, and I'm feeling the need to settle back into a more consistent discipline. I'm going to revisit and revise some earlier Advent posts, then see where that takes me in the new year ahead. 

This post is a revision from December 4, 2011. 

********************

Advent is a time of preparation: four weeks of waiting before the day we celebrate Christ's birth. In the liturgical church, John the Baptist is one of the voices of that challenge to get ready. The gospel texts describe him calling “Prepare the way." "Make straight the path." "Repent and be baptized.”

“Repent” is one of those words badly flattened in translation. The original word is “metanoia” – “meta” and “noia.” “Noia” is easy: “mind.”

“Meta” is harder. It’s a prefix we see in “meta-narrative” or “metaphysics.” It can be translated “beyond,” or “after.” But the meaning seems larger, more like “encompassing,” or “like this, only bigger.”   

So “metanarrative” is the bigger story that contains, and explains, other narratives. “Metaphysics” is the bigger vision that contains, and explains, the physical world. 

And “metanoia”? Literal attempts at translation read it as “a change of mind.” But it’s more like moving from a small mind, our own, to the “meta mind,” the larger mind that encompasses ours: God’s own.  

So when John the Baptist calls "repent, " he's calling us to let our small minds go, and find our place in God’s. To let our own agendas go, and find ourselves in God’s. To set aside our own narrow view, and ask God to help us see his larger vision.

C. S. Lewis, struggling to explain this larger view of repentance, put it this way: 

“[F]allen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.  Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor—that is the only way out of a "hole."  This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance. . . .  It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years.  It means undergoing a kind of death." (Mere Christianity) 

If we think of repentance at all, we're likely to think it's something we can check off, a quick confession, a grudging acknowledgement of guilt, a half-hearted "I'm sorry," then on to other things. But metanoia is much bigger, more lasting. As Lewis says, it’s a kind of death, letting go of our own great ideas, our own fiercely held prejudices, our own self-importance. It’s a willingness to take on a less selfish way of living, a less self-absorbed way of seeing.

The difficulty, of course, is that we can’t really do this on our own. We see what we see. We are who we are. We hold tightly to our smallness. Conditioned by our experience, our upbringing, our temperament, the voices of our culture, our families, our favorite tv shows, we are locked into our own way of knowing, and trapped in our own ways of living.

From prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a former student: 

“One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. . .  I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In doing so we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia . . .” (Letters and Papers from Prison)

I'm struck now, rereading this, at the great heartache Bonhoeffer must have felt, seeing so many of the Christians he'd known fall in line with the Nazi regime. I'm struck by the fear he must have felt, knowing the brutality of the regime he had opposed, no doubt knowing his own execution was not far off. 

What was it like, for him, to live “unreservedly” in the perplexities and struggle of a concentration camp? What did it mean "to watch with Christ in Gethsemane"? 

Hesychius, a fifth century Greek theologian and church historian, wrote, "We will travel the road of metanoia correctly if, as we begin to give attention to the spirit, we combine humility with watchfulness . . ."

There’s that word again: watchful.

In some ways, much has changed since I my 2011 post. We've had some tumultuous presidential elections. A pandemic. Divisions in churches, friendships, families. We're surrounded by epidemic anger, grief, anxiety. 

Yet the need for metanoia remains unchanged. John the Baptist's call is as insistent as it was two thousand years ago.

Each week I say the prayer of confession with others in my church: "we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent." 

What does it mean to love my neighbor now, in this time, in this place, in this context? How have I fallen short? Am I truly sorry? What would it take to love my neighbor better?

I have friends who see repentance in any form as a negative thing, who think that acknowledging wrong is bad for the psyche, that confession of any kind is unnecessary and potentially harmful.

I find it deeply comforting. 

I’m not perfect. My attitude, my thoughts, my words, my actions. None are perfect. Not even close. I say the wrong thing and hurt people around me. I get too busy and let people down. I hold fiercely to my own ideas and react with frustration when asked to explain them. I procrastinate when prompted to reach out in ways that might cost me time, or risk my emotional safety.

And God still loves me. Still surrounds me with his kindness. Still calls me to deeper wisdom, clearer vision, more consistent faithfulness. Forgives my failings, calls me to change, and gives me grace to take the next step forward.

So I ask for grace to move on toward wholeness and holiness, to be able to watch with Christ in Gethsemane, whatever that might mean. I pray for wisdom to inhabit the callings we are all called to: agents of reconciliation. Light in a dark world. People who love in the way we’ve been loved.

And I wait for metanoia, for myself, and for all who claim to follow Jesus: a change of heart, of mind, of life, so we can see and act with a love and wisdom greater than our own.