The Golden Ass

"The impossible burden of expectations for hope, peace, joy and love in a carefully orchestrated mood will break on the craggy rocks of reality - very likely today, if not certainly tomorrow, when our commercial Christmas ends and the liturgical season is just beginning. Rather than fighting that reality I have learned to embrace the fact that my understanding of Christ’s promises of hope, peace, joy and love depend on an awakening of despair in the alternatives. Thanking God for my disillusionment this morning, and imagining a community that welcomes that poor in spirit, forgives terrible sins, restores the children to their parents, carries the suffering of the forgotten and recognizes the delicate working of omnipotence in the tenderness of the weak - because this is where the Child is truly our king." - Sharad Yadav

*image from @monetnicolebirths on Instagram
I wrote the following on Christmas night, as Sharad wrote the above on Christmas morning. It's an account of how my day went. For those who don't know, Christmas goes until January 5th according to the Church calendar. So, I'm not actually late here.

To paraphrase of Matt Tebbe and Ben Sternke, founders of Gravity Leadership: "We don't just think our ways into new ways of living. We also live our ways into new ways of thinking." I have been discipling with them for a while now. I am learning that the groaning of creation on Christmas morning isn't a reaching out to grasp something beyond but, instead, is the embracing of our weakness and vulnerability, our limits.

Today, I set boundaries for the first time in my life. I also apologized for "violently" overstepping boundaries with my own harsh words in the past in that relationship.

Suddenly, in certain circumstances, I am able to imagine more healthy verbal responses where, before, my imagination was enslaved by my compulsion to responses that would be merely either helplessly passive or self-assertively aggressive. I am Zechariah. I was mute, and am now able to speak.

Then, I also suddenly found myself apologizing to two dear friends for a pattern in the past of being super pushy in forcing them to see what I saw or, to quote Matt Tebbe again, "want what I want." I was previously bound to frustration with them, and to the circumstances around my relationship with them, rather than acting out of a desire to love them by seeing them empowered as co-creators with God. I felt controlled by colonizing and imperial forces. Today, I enacted the way of peace. "We don't just think our ways into new ways of living. We also live our ways into new ways of thinking." (see Romans 8: 19-23)

Indeed, I feel like a new child has been born today, like it's Christmas morning. That child is me. A very difficult and draining day was a great gift. The groaning of all creation as though in childbirth lives in the appearance of the person of Jesus when he is working to free us us from old patterns of enslavement. A joyous morning and the power to speak creatively, the inheritance of the Christ child.

Luke 1 and 2:

18 Zechariah said to the angel, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” 19 The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. 20 But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”
....
7 Then [after the birth of the child] his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy:

68 “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.
69 He has raised up a mighty savior for us
in the house of his servant David,
70 as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
71 that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.
72 Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,
and has remembered his holy covenant,
73 the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham,
to grant us 74 that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies,
might serve him without fear, 75 in holiness and righteousness
before him all our days.
76 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
77 to give knowledge of salvation to his people
by the forgiveness of their sins.
78 By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
79 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Merry Christmas everyone. Shalom.