Devotional – December 5, 2024

From one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott. 

@annelamott

All your better religions have a holy season as the days grow shorter, when we ask ourselves, Where is the hope of spring? Will it actually come again, break through the quagmire, the terror, the cluelessness? 

Probably not, is my first response this year, three weeks after the election, left to my own devices, but thank God I am not left to my own devices. I have faith in goodness, and that the light shines in the darkness, and nothing can overcome it, not even—well, I’m not going to name names.

Light and hope are the messages of both Advent and Hanukkah, distant but sure hope, light in very great darkness. I taught my bigger Sunday School kids about the Hanukkah miracle by having them imagine that in a scary situation, their cell phones had enough battery left for an hour, but it lasted eight days. All they had to do was keep the faith. I shared the great line from Rugrats, that a Macababy’s gotta do what a Macababy’s gotta do.

And what exactly is that?

We notice the darkness. There is no help or hope in pretending it doesn’t exist. They is called denial, delusion. We notice, and feel it. Then we light a few candles, and scatter some seeds. We remember that we only have to dread things one day at a time. Insight doesn’t help here. Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. 

Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: You can’t short-circuit grief, or emptiness and you can’t patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action, which is love, and giving. 

We live in darkness. Everyone knows this by the time they turn 21, or they’re seriously disturbed. 

For the last three weeks, my mind has perched on top of my head like a spider monkey on acid, and thought of more things that could go wrong, and whose fault those things would be. Poor old mind. It is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come with me. I have tried to get it to take up a nice hobby, like macramé, but it prefers just to think about stuff, and jot down the things that annoy it.

The other problem continues to be what I think the light looks like. Moses led his people in circles for 40 years so they could get ready for the Promised Land, because they had too many ideas and preconceptions about what a nice Promised Land should look like.

In these cold, dark days, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like. It would definitely be outside my comfort zone, larger than us and our anxieties and ferocious need to control. It would be good old love, caring, generosity, a heart for each other’s suffering, regardless of party affiliation, the responsibility we take for others, the kindness, marbled into our shared histories like a flavor streaked through the batter of our prejudices, catastrophic thinking, character defects, hidden and on the surface. 

Things get badly broken–they always do–and children always yap and stamp and cry and glower, and demand all your attention. I know that *I* do. The brokenness and mess are called real life, and it’s cracked and fragile, but the glue for me is the beating of my heart, and love.

What if there really is no hope this time? What if the insanity had grown more intense than wisdom? Outside my window, the recently glorious leaves are beginning to fall off, and they looked dead. But Hanukkah and Advent and John Lennon insist that things will be OK eventually, more or less, that we are connected, and everyone–everyone–eventually falls into the hands of God. 

In the gospel of John, when the woman is about to be stoned for adultery, the Pharisees, the officially good people, were acting well within the law.. A huge crowd of people willing to kill her had joined them. The Greatest Hits moment here is when Jesus says, challenging the crowd, “Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone.” But what I focused on with my Sunday School kids was that Jesus starts doodling in the sand, refusing to interact with them on their level of hatred and madness. i love this, And all the people who were going to kill the woman slipped away.

I can guess how the condemned woman must have felt–surprised. She was supposed to die. Hope always catches us by surprise.

So now is the perfect time to doodle, to look away from the hatred and madness, to give as we are able, to plant bulbs and scatter seeds, in the hope that some of them will grow. We will rise up when we are stronger and less crazed. For now, we show up when we are needed, with grit and kindness; we try to help, we prepare for an end to the despair. 

And we do this together.

Peace Be With You. – Paul