My parents were pretty quick to assimilate into life in Canada and as a result we didn’t get much of the St. Nicholas celebrations of December 5 that some other Dutch immigrants brought with them. Jenny’s family did have some of those traditions and as a result our boys got a taste for some of the terror of St Nicholas and Black Peter’s visits. Jenny sewed a costume that I wore on many a December 5 or 6 as he visited friends and relatives and we even introduced the tradition to some unsuspecting school children when I was teaching at Fraser Valley Christian High. Apart from the chocolate letter that he left in my barn boots this morning most of the tradition has faded for us and that is probably a good thing. But as far as celebrating saints go, he was a pretty worthy saint and the St Nicholas traditions carry less of the crass materialism that came with his morphed cousin Santa Claus.
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I was thinking the other day of the weird place between waking and sleeping that happens for me mostly in the mornings when I have had enough sleep and I could get up but don’t. The dreams seem to have a particular vivid quality then and it seems almost like when you wake from them you can get back to that place again and pick up where you left off. There is a word for that that those who study sleep call ‘hypnagogia,' the borderlands between sleeping and waking. An elderly person whom I respect very much and who has since crossed over, told us that late in his life he would have intense comforting visions and feelings of God’s presence in those borderlands between waking and sleeping. I wonder if that is a liminal space of sorts and that maybe we are in a liminal space as a culture, a place of transition and possibly transformation if we allow it to be that. Hypnagogia is for some an intense place that gives birth to creative thinking. When I think of all that has and is happening in the world today there is much to be grieved and much imaginative thinking needed to reimagine the future. In a Sojourners article from 2002 called Grieving as Sacred Space, Richard Rohr describes liminal space as “…a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the “tried and true” but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are in between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. It is no fun.” If we can live in the tension of not knowing what is next and just sit with it for some time it can yield something for us that we might not be expecting. As we move through the season of Advent, consider this year that it might be a liminal space or hypnagogic. Sometimes the best map will not guide you You can't see what's round the bend, Sometimes the road leads through dark places Sometimes the darkness is your friend. Bruce Cockburn - Charity of Night When I think of another oil pipeline going in for Canada and an in-coming president who seems to have little regard for the realities of climate change, it seems that there is only one thing we can do to make changes and that is in ourselves, in our own lives and practices. We need to redouble our efforts for the sake of the poor who always suffer the most from the impact of climate change and for the earth we are called to steward and love. I find that I may be looking “out there” for the climate change solution, hoping that the government will make a big decision that will force North Americans to change their lifestyles, when in fact it already is in our hands. We just have to begin, where we are, small as it may seem, insignificant as it may feel. Just do something. These words from Joan Chittister’s There is a Season suggest this kind of action, “A spirituality of work is based on a heightened sense of sacramentality, of the idea that everything that is, is holy and that our hands consecrate it to the service of God. When we grow radishes in a small container in a city apartment, we participate in creation. We sustain the globe. When we sweep the street in front of a house in the dirtiest city in the country, we bring new order to the universe. We tidy the Garden of Eden. We make God’s world new again. When we repair what has been broken or paint what is old or give away what we have earned that is above and beyond our own sustenance, we stoop down and scoop up the earth and breathe into it new life again, as God did one morning in time only to watch it unfold and unfold and unfold through the ages.” |
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