Holy Days & People for December

Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before the Nativity. It is a time of preparation and anticipation. The gospel readings for the first couple of week are centered on the theme of the End of the World. "Advent" means "coming." Hence, Advent is a time when we look ahead with eagerness to the End of the World.

Advent also carries with it an implicit assumption that there is something defective about "the- world-as-we-know-it," and that we have nothing to lose in its destruction. Therefore, Advent has always been most offensive to the powerful and the affluent in society.

This explains why in the most wealthy and powerful country in the world, Advent is rarely celebrated as a season with its own integrity. We have replaced Advent with "The Christmas Shopping Season," which expresses values exactly the opposite of what Advent is about.

And yet, that being said, perhaps, on further reflection, we are simply expressing our belief in the coming End of the World in a different way. If you knew you only had four weeks to live, what would you do? For many of us, the immediate answer is that we would run up our credit cards in a frenzy of consumption, trying to have as much experience and pleasure as possible. Many would follow this philosophy of "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." Indeed, this seems to be the thinking underlying much of what we do in December.

The problem with this is that it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the End of the World." We express the End as "tomorrow we die." But the good news of Jesus Christ is quite different from this. That message is "tomorrow we live!"

The "End of the World" is not death, but life. We are never looking ahead to darkness, annihilation, violence, and disorder. Rather, in Advent we look to Bethlehem where a birth is to take place. God’s love and life enters our world, full of grace and truth. That is what the End of the World is about, not wreckage and sorrow.

This changes everything. Instead of thinking, "tomorrow we die," Advent is about remembering that "tomorrow we live," and forming our lives accordingly. The question is not, "How would you live if you knew you had to die soon?" but, "How will you live now that you know that your life is only about to begin?"

This is what Advent is about: beginnings.

Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan were American women working with the poor in El Salvador during the bloody civil war raging there in the 1970's and 1980's. All but Donovan were Roman Catholic nuns. They ministered to refugees, delivered supplies to the poor, and found shelter for people made homeless by the war. For this they were targeted by the Salvadoran government as subversives, and a death squad was sent to kill them. They were kidnapped and brutally murdered on December 2, 1980.

John was born in 675 near Jerusalem. He was a great theologian and hymn-writer, active in the iconoclastic controversies of the time. (He favored the use of icons, which became the accepted doctrine of Eastern Orthodoxy.) John’s great work, The Orthodox Faith, remains a classic summary of the theology of the early church. He also wrote at least two hymns which regularly appear in modern hymnals: "Come Ye Faithful, Raise the Strain," and "The Day of Resurrection."

December 5 + Clement of Alexandria.

Clement is credited with being the founder of Christian philosophy. Alexandria, in Egypt, was a great cosmopolitan center with a famous library. Clement has a strong background in the Greek philosophers, which he used to interpret Christianity in terms of the thought-forms of the time. His expression of Christian theology according to Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophical categories had a lasting impact on Christian thought and mission.

We know little about the original St. Nicholas other than that he was a bishop of the city of Myra in what is now western Turkey and that he may have attended the seminal Council of Nicaea in 325 (where, legend has it, he got into a fight with the heretic Arius). After his death the stories about him proliferated until he became one of the most universally popular of all Christian saints. Wherever Christianity went, St. Nicholas was embraced.

Among the stories about Nicholas is the one in which he saves three girls from prostitution by throwing three bags of gold into their window at night, thus providing them with a dowry. He is also supposed to have brought to life three murdered children, saved from death three unjustly condemned men, and rescued three sailors in distress. From this connection with gifts and children, St. Nicholas’ memory degenerated, via Holland and New York, into Santa Claus.

Ambrose was a 4^th century Roman lawyer and governor who was appointed Bishop of Milan by popular acclamation. He hadn’t even been baptized yet. The new Bishop had his hands full: Milan was a major political and economic center, and many of the Christians were Arian heretics. He had enough moral force to exact penance from the Emperor.

Ambrose wrote hymns and popularized the singing of hymns in worship. His substantial contribution to Christian doctrine was mainly through his sermons. In 386 he baptized a young philosopher by the name of Augustine Augustine became the most important theological figure of the Western Church.

These two great spiritual influences of our century died on the same day in 1968. Barth was the greatest Reformed theologian since Calvin and was even referred to by the Pope as a "Father of the Church." He wrote a massive, 13 volume, work called the Church Dogmatics, in which he expounds a truly biblical theology for the end of the modern age. Barth may be the end and culmination of a tradition that began in the 5th century with St. Augustine. Since Barth’s death, it may be argued that theology has been foundering aimlessly, seeking a new orientation.

Merton began his career as a fairly strict Trappist monk as a conscious rejection of the materialistic values of modernity. His talent as a writer soon made him a celebrity with several best-sellers to his name. Clearly he had struck a chord with many of his generation. His spiritual journey led him to explore ahead of their time such things as feminism, liberation theology, and interfaith-ecumenism. He died in an accident while at a conference with Buddhists in Bangkok.

If Barth’s work was a kind of culmination and grounding, the work of Thomas Merton, can be construed as a new beginning. Merton was a dedicated student of the Christian tradition, especially its mystical core. It is the recovery of Christianity’s deepest spirituality, and even locating the common ground with other religious traditions, which is becoming a major focus for theology in the 21st century.

Finnian lived in the 5th and 6th centuries and was a very influential figure in the emergence of Celtic Christianity. He is credited with initiating the monastic movement, having learned many of its guidelines and practices from Cadoc and Gildas, working with Illtyd and Dyfrig. All these men were contemporaries in south Wales and together they formed the core of Celtic Christianity after the time of Patrick. A group of disciples gathered around Finnian, which included such figures as Columba and Brendan.

The Russian Empire owned what is now the State of Alaska until 1867. During the century or so of Russian rule, the area was evangelized by Orthodox missionaries. The two greatest of these were John Veniaminov, who later became Patriarch of Moscow, taking the name Innocent, and a simple figure called Father Herman.

Herman arrived in Alaska in 1794, along with nine other monks. The group immediately became embroiled in a conflict with Russian business interests over a wide variety of moral issues, usually centering on abuses of the native people. This tension between the ecclesiastical and economic interests would characterize the Russian experience in Alaska until their time their ended.

While the Russian businessmen earned the hostility of the natives, the monks received a warm welcome. It seems that some local shamans had prophesied their arrival and urged the people to follow them. The monks also listened sympathetically to their traditional religious beliefs, finding similarities with biblical faith. In a relatively short time, nearly the entire native population of Kodiak Island accepted baptism; in two years they gained 7,000 converts.

Eventually, political intrigue and other factors forced some of the monks to leave. Herman settled on the small, wooded Spruce Island, which, as far as I can tell, is off the shore of Kodiak Island. There he led a life of extreme simplicity and asceticism, living off fish he caught and vegetables he grew himself. He became the advocate for the people against the excesses of the Russian commercial and political forces. And he spent his days teaching, counseling, healing, and comforting the sick and dying.

He had a small school built on Spruce Island and used it to educate the natives. He also helped administer an orphanage as well. By his life and example, Herman solidified the natives in their faith, and these folks remain deeply and enthusiastically Christian to this day. Herman died in 1825.

The fact that we remember Herman in the middle of December should give us pause. Here, when our culture is mired in an orgy of consumption and commercialism, we find ourselves confronted with this man who lived incredibly simply a life for God and others, and who was perpetually at war with the forces of economic injustice.

Juan de Yepes was born into a poor Spanish family in 1542. He recognized his own religious and spiritual calling early, and joined the Carmelite order at the age of 21, as a priest. Shortly thereafter he me the great Teresa of Avila, who was looking for someone to lead among men the monastic reform movement she founded for women. John was her choice.

John=s subsequent life was full of hardship and even terror, mostly at the hands of his brother monks who didn=t want to be reformed. Even in the houses he himself founded, he was rejected and abused. All the time he made no complaint and produced a series of writings on the mystical life.

His main point in these writings was to point out the role of suffering and hardship in purifying the soul for spiritual growth. The idea is not to seek out pain for its own sake, but to realize that the difficulties that do enter our lives have a purpose. They can be the way God is refining us for a higher form of life.

Griffiths started off as a middle-class Englishman. His sense of spiritual calling touched him early and he lived as a semi-hermit for a while after graduation from Oxford. He followed this impulse to a Benedictine monastery, where, in 1932, he became a Roman Catholic and joined the monks. After twenty years there, he accepted an invitation to go to southern India and establish a Benedictine house there.

Being in India transformed Griffiths= life. He immediately appreciated the way the culture was infused with a sense of the sacred, and he began to find ways of bridging the gaps between eastern and western spiritualities. The monastery he and his friends started came to have a distinctly Indian flavor. They introduced forms of yoga, saffron robes, and study of Hindu religious classics into their life. Griffiths believed it was important to discern the face of Christ in all religions.

In 1968, he established an even more radical ashram combining Christian and Hindu practices. Meanwhile, he wrote books which brought his ideas and his quest to the world. Mainly he used his experience of the Hindu world to inspire Christians to recover the mystical side of their own faith. He died in 1994.

Samthann founded a small monastic community in Ireland that emphasized simplicity of life. Her example helped to spark a reform movement within the Celtic Church, called the Celi Dei, or Friends of God. She died in 732.

Thomas gets the reputation of a "doubter," due to his demand for proof after Jesus’ resurrection. But he should not be judged too harshly for this. He was correct to insist upon some continuity between the crucified Jesus and the risen Christ; we should all insist upon that. Otherwise, our imaginations could invent a phantom Christ disconnected from the Crucified One.

Thomas was also dedicated enough to be the one who wanted to follow Jesus to his death when Jesus set his face for Jerusalem.

Thomas is credited in the tradition with evangelizing as far east as India. The Mar Thoma Churches there have existed for centuries and claim to have been started by the Apostle himself. There seems to be a consensus, in any case, that Thomas went east from Jerusalem.

December 23 - Abraham Heschel.

Heschel was a Jewish scholar who barely escaped from Poland before the Nazi invasion, and emigrated to the West. His books exerted a deep influence on Jewish spiritual revival, but also found strong resonances in Christian circles. He became a proponent of interfaith dialogue in calling Christians to an awareness of our Hebraic roots, and in forging relationships with such figures as Martin Luther King, and Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. His classic study, The Prophets, was required reading when I was in seminary, and his book on the Sabbath has helped me and other Christians recover some of the meaning of Sabbath for ourselves.

Above all, Heschel communicated a sense, derived from his Hasidic roots, of the holiness of all creation. Christianity talks about much the same thing, though in different words. He died in 1972.

December 25 + The Nativity of the Lord.

After Easter and Good Friday, perhaps the holiest day of the Christian year is Christmas, the Nativity of the Lord. On this day, which is fittingly close to the longest night of the year, we celebrate the emergence of the Light into the world. The familiar stories of Mary and Joseph, the angels, the shepherds, and the manger, all serve to direct us to a God who is found in weakness, humility, and poverty. In this way God teaches us that we find our strength, glory, and abundance in precisely those most ordinary and seemingly insignificant times, when we are closest to our own mortality. In Christ, God enters this flesh, this space, this time, this history, this human society, and so redeems it for us all. Hence, the spiritual task with which we are all faced is not how to escape beyond our mortal life, but how to find God’s saving Presence within it, and so see it redeemed and transformed into what it really is.

Stephen was stoned to death in Jerusalem for his faith in Christ (Acts 6:8-8:1). He was the first Christian martyr.

More Christians have followed Stephen in dying for their faith in the last hundred years than in the previous 19 centuries combined. On St. Stephen’s day, we might want to take a short break from our holiday festivities and reflect on how we might use our relative safety to aid those persecuted for their faith today.

December 27 + John the Apostle.

Traditionally, several different people bearing the name John have been conflated and celebrated on this day. First, there is John the Apostle, the disciple of Jesus. Along with Peter and James he was one of Jesus’ inner circle, and Jesus often took these three aside for special instruction or experiences. It is largely because John was one of the inner group that the tradition, by a process of elimination, came to identify him with the "beloved disciple," who was closest to Jesus.

The next John is the Evangelist, that is, the man who wrote the fourth gospel. Most scholars now believe the fourth gospel to be the product of the beloved disciple and his followers, with the final editor being someone else altogether. This final editor is also the one who wrote the letters of John in the New Testament.

Finally, some identify John the Apostle with John of Patmos, the author of Revelation. However, this John was almost certainly someone else, although his work has many themes in common with the gospel and letters.

More generally, the writings of what is called the Johannine School, centering on the fourth gospel, give us a unique and valuable theological perspective on Jesus and his mission. This Jesus is more messianically self-conscious, and the writings have a more mystical feel to them.

December 28 + Holy Innocents.

In the middle of the "twelve days of Christmas" comes this sad, gruesome, and horrifying account of Herod’s despicable action in ordering the murder of all the baby boys in Bethlehem, in an attempt to kill the Messiah. It didn’t work, and, like most evil, only served to expose itself.

On Holy Innocents it is good to reflect on several themes: 1) Our attitude towards boys, who are often viewed as threats and end up institutionalized or medicated or worse. 2) A consideration of the rights of children generally. To allow billions of children to go hungry, uneducated, abused, or neglected only extends in subtler ways the work of Herod.

December 31 + Melania.

The fourth and fifth centuries were blessed with a Roman woman named Melania. After being forced to wed her first two children died in infancy. She then was permitted to follow her original vocation, which was a life of prayer. Indeed, she managed to convince her husband and mother to join her in religious life! They divested themselves of their great wealth, giving it to the poor, and setting free their eight-thousand (!) slaves.

Fleeing the invading Goths, they went to North Africa, where Melania and her husband each established a monastery. Later they went to the Holy Land. She died in 439 a few days after celebrating the Lord’s Nativity in Bethlehem.