The season before Christmas is a special one, and not because of great shopping deals. It’s not because we make gifts, or sing carols, or decorate, or bake special things, visit with family or light candles at the Christmas Eve service. It’s not even about giving more to others. Well, that’s just the tip of the Christmas iceberg.
Advent is about anticipation and hope. As Christians, we celebrate the things God has done and is doing in various seasons of the year. Creating a special time of year for focus on particular spiritual truths allows those truths to gain more weight and more meaning in our everyday lives. Advent lasts four weeks, and it’s a holiday season full of introspection, reflection, hope, and divine mysteries.
Rituals and traditions often cement social and relational bonds, ready our hearts for worship, and create the vital space and time for better adoring our Creator. Not only does memory solidify our perceptions of reality now, but it prepares us for future love, service, and devotion, to God and others.
In these four weeks of Advent I’ll feature meditations, reflections, art, and more (from me and others) interspersed among typical posts to focus our spirits on the good things of God, and the time we celebrate the most amazing gift of grace from our Living God, Jesus, the Incarnation. Our Redeemer, Savior, and King.
(Must be a dog blog. hum. Could this just be a kitty laughing, or must it be a freak out?)
In a previous post, I promised I would review some blogs and give a report on my favorites.
First, bear in mind that I read probably 20-30 blogs regularly, and others occasionally. For this reason, I won’t cover all of the ones I like, today. Now, don’t feel offended if yours, or one you dig, didn’t make it in. Instead, submit links of up to 3 of your favorite blogs in the comments, and we’ll visit them. I’ll consider them in a future “Blogs I Like” blog in January.
Also, I won’t cover blogs from super well-known people (think: kickin’ Alexa Rating), especially if I’ve already mentioned them in past posts.
Here are some new blogs I’ve started reading quite recently because of reader recommendations, or other connections:
Teh=The Warwick Fuller is a bookish, 25% hipster, and an active dad and husband, who pens some worthwhile stuff. He’s fairly random with his topics, but I’m a fan. I also have a personal preference for his “Nana Stories” which are offbeat and charming.
Between the Sheets: A Novelist’s Adventures Heather Webb’s blog post are often delicious. Although I wish she posted more often, when she does she will often include amazing recipes.
Telling Stories Courtney Walsh is a scrappy author and scrapbooker whose site is awash in great visuals (photos, art, etc.), plus stories, and stuff on food, parenting, domestic diva/homemaking themes, rural life, and such. Likable!
Mom to 5: Full Time Mom, Part Time Sanity Sherri Jason has a great sense of humor, and she needs to, she’s be pregnant for years (if you add it all up). This reproductive quality is sort of a family tradition. Her sister Ginny also has 5 kids, and does guest posts on some Fridays, called Funny Farm Fridays. The antics of busy family life abound here, and many a busy parent can relate, or just be contented to know they don’t and won’t have enough children for a basketball team.
Awake My Soul Laura Crosby’s blog is insightful, honest, and nicely written. It’s a fairly recent venture (Feb 2011), but her welcome page made me realize that we’ve had the same sorts of thoughts about bloggers and blogging. So far, so good, Laura!
5 Personal Favorites: Blogs and Bloggers for whom I make time to read…who are also not in the category of “widely famed”…yet.
These authors post with predictability (most of the time) and have high quality content. Two musts for me to be a loyalist. (Yes, the list ought to be much longer, but I’m setting myself a limit…5….because I’m told this is healthy behavior.)
Ed Cyzewski Blog – In a Mirror Dimly is one of those blogs that is just consistently top notch. Ed posts frequently, and his installments can deepen your thinking, encourage you, and offer great insights. He focuses on spiritual things, practical theology, and writing. He’ll also write on other things he likes, gardening/canning, the outdoors, and rabbits.
Caleb Wilde‘s blog Confessions of a Funeral Director: Working At the Crossroads of This World and the Next might sound, well…dark and morbid, at first blush. Death is after all macabre. What is surprising and winsome about this blog is that Caleb offers hope, as a matter of course. His unique insights on living and yes, dying, are worth the read.
Christopher Cocca: Chris is funny, quirky, and interesting–all stuff I like. He’s sort of a hippie, too, in a nice way. This makes me feel young and “with it”. I’m hooked. Another great thing about Chris is that he’s generous, and regularly shares the love by promoting other writers.
Thom TurnerWriter, editor (for GENERATE magazine), poet, and soulful guy, Thom has a blog called Everyday Liturgy. It’s a perfect read for a short and potent spiritual shot in your day. Lately he’s also been blogging about Food and Christian ethics. A weird mix, you say? Maybe, but it gets you thinking. And think you should. (sorry..got a wee bit yoda on ya’ll) I’m looking forward to Thom’s prayer book project as well.
Brett McCracken This hipster-esque writer is under-rated. Though he’s written for some big outfits The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNN.com, The Princeton Theological Review, Mediascape, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today, to name a few, plus a very enjoyable book…
…I get the sense that he’s not receiving the props or reader traffic he truly deserves at his Still Searching blog. It’s like a “best kept secret” type of thing. Well, not on my watch, peoples. Not. On. My. Watch. Brett writes about culture, film, art, books, and stuff you’d expect to overhear at a college coffeehouse, if erudite students were hanging out…ya know, chillaxin’ and sh–tuff (Whoops, no one says chillaxin‘. It’s long “over,” dudes.) So. Right. Brett is pensive and interesting.
Photo of "corporate worship" (not a person in a bar waving "hello"...I think.)
By way of followup to the previous post, it’s probably wise to broach the topic of corporate and individual worship more thoroughly. Please note that the earnestness of this post topic is best served (here, in this venue, anyway) when swathed in a modicum of levity.
This time around, I’d like to discuss this, not just post my thoughts. I see a great benefit in conversation here; and saw it already and especially over at Stand Firm in the Faith: Anglicanism in America. There, Matt Kennedy covered my recent article (On Being Embarrassed When Worship Songs Seem Sexual). I appreciated reading the several dozen responses, and found most of them helpful. You can also read them here. After you reflect on this topic, whether you read the other responses or not, I hope you too will respond with your own thoughts or insights on the matter.
As I mentioned in the last post, personal worship and devotional practices, such as involvement in literature (biblical or otherwise), poetry, songs, and psalms may have a decidedly personal angle (or perspective) as relating to God. Also, it’s not just a contemporary convention that worship “songs” (most of which are prayer-like in structure and form) focus on the individual rather than, or at the expense of, the corporate church assembly.
The Romantic period gave us plenty of examples of this phenomena in art and literature. Even earlier, John Donne offered up intimate imagery within various genres. One example is his Holy Sonnet 14.
John Donne (1572-1631)
Holy Sonnet XIV:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
It seems, this sonnet, and countless other early examples of a similar sort, were not meant for corporate participation. This stands in contrast to the worship songs sung within church groups these days. Nevertheless, these works provide vehicles for deeper communion with God. They may easily benefit our spiritual formation.
This offers an excellent point to consider. I’ve heard many minters tell their audience that church is about worship (not performances, decor, fellowship, good preaching, etc.). Haven’t you? We may quickly assume, though, that church should be about our worship experience. Instead it is centered on the Church–the people Christ has saved–offering adoration to the Creator and Savior, whether we are conscious of it, or not.
Incidentally, worship happens with Christians past, present, and future, which is another reality we miss with regularity. So, it’s a Christian worldview, not merely a reduction of that. Worship mustn’t be viewed chiefly as an opportunity of personal expression to God, Jesus…and Spirit. Therefore, if worship is selfish, it’s not worship (of God) at all.
The Christian mystics throughout Christian history may have seen this sort of intimacy differently. This will take some research for me to know for sure, but if any of you have insights here, please share them. I would deeply appreciate it.
A crucial question to ask ourselves, or to those we minister: Is corporate worship intimate to compensate for a lack of intimate personal devotional practices, and a deepening relationship with God?
What about you: Are your times of personal devotions usually more or less intimate than your corporate worship times?
The song most of us have sung, Jesus Loves Me was written by Anna Bartlett Warner who was born August 31, 1827 – died January 22, 1915. Warner was an American writer, the author of several books, and of poems set to music as hymns and religious songs for children. (Via Wikipedia)
Anna’s family home was quite close to the United States Military Academy at West Point, in New York, in the era just before the Civil War. Each Sunday Anna taught Bible classes to the cadets. Her remains are buried in the military cemetery, and her family home is now a museum on the grounds of the United States Military Academy.
Undoubtably, her most well-known work (and the point of this post) came from the poem from her and her sister’s 1860s quite sentimental and best-selling novel entitled Say and Seal. It was soon set to music by William Bradbury, who added the chorus we still sing today in one of the most well-known children’s Christian hymns of all time…you guessed it! Jesus Loves Me. Many soldiers on the battlegrounds during the War Between the States sang this hymn and found spiritual comfort.
In a scene that brought many people to tears in the novel, a child lays dying and is comforted from his pain, as the main character recites a poem:
Jesus loves me! This I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong;
They are weak, but He is strong.
Children of God, let it be your simple prayer today.
Nothing is more vexing than being confronted with reality.
A string of truths or accurate revelations can be one of the more upsetting circumstances in life. Have you been there?
We’re hoping we have it all, or mostly, together. At times we are certain we do. Hello, red flag, there you are!
In times of spiritual obedience, I start to pat myself on the back. It’s ironic, yes.
In times of a broken and willing spirit, I like to revel in my desperation. “I come to you with nothing, Lord. Nothing.”
This may slide over to, something like, “Lord, thank you for not making me like other men…or…you know… “those people”. (See Luke 18:11)
The line is more fine than you realize…then I realize. It is a theological misconstruction to feel grandiose, at all.
It stops worship.
O, God, that we might realize our sinfulness.
A word for reflection, today:
Had you but once entered into perfect communion with Jesus or tasted a little of His ardent love, you would care nothing at all for your own comfort or discomfort but would rejoice in the reproach you suffer; for love of Him makes a man despise himself.
A man who is a lover of Jesus and of truth, a truly interior man who is free from uncontrolled affections, can turn to God at will and rise above himself to enjoy spiritual peace.
