This Advent season I’m writing reflections on the lectionary Gospel readings forLight Reflections and reposting them here. Please feel free to borrow and steal anything from these that might be helpful in your own Advent sermon,teaching, etc., work.

Luke 1:39-55
39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴²and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. ⁴⁵And blessed is she who believed that there would be^* a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’

46 And Mary^* said,
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
⁴⁷   and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
⁴⁸ for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
⁴⁹ for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
⁵⁰ His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
⁵¹ He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
⁵² He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
⁵⁴ He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
⁵⁵ according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’

Last week I wrote that the terrifying image of Jesus with a winnowing fork is a far cry from the babe in the manger who we anticipate this time of year. This week we are reminded that these two images are not so far apart at all! Whether it’s Jesus at the end of time or Jesus entering into time, the Good News is consistent – his arrival will raise those whom our world sees as lowly and it will humble those we imagine to be mighty.

In the first few weeks of Advent, we’ve mostly pictured Christ’s arrival coming from somewhere distant – from the outskirts of the cosmos riding on the clouds, from the distant wilderness across the mountains and the valleys, or from the recesses of time carrying baptismal fire. But this week things get personal.

This week we picture Christ’s arrival rising from within the depths of our own bodies.

This week we’re reminded that God didn’t just appear in the world, but that God was birthed through the mess, sweat and struggle of a woman’s labour, ushered forth from her body. Vulnerable, naked, crying, Jesus Christ – God-With-Us – entered this world just like us.

I adore this image of Mary and Elizabeth spending an afternoon reciting poetry to each other. I imagine there was other chatter in there too – friendly complaints about Zechariah and Joseph, advice for how to cure morning sickness, gossip about that woman who comes to the well late in the day. Perhaps they marveled at the synchronicity of their bodies, allowing recognition to register between those housed within. What a shame that Luke didn’t include all that other chatter too. I’d love to know the context out of which these women’s theological and political pontificating arose!

In the midst of their rich and textured friendship, though, Mary takes a moment to get serious. What trust and love the two must have shared for Mary to be able to admit her deepest hopes for her son, her wildest expectations. Mary realizes and recites that the work Jesus will do in the world has already begun in her. Simply in God’s choice for her to bear Christ into this world, the tables have already been turned – the lowly raised and the mighty humbled.

In a strange and wonderful way, Mary’s gestation is our own. As with Mary, God longs to birth Christ in and through us into this broken world. As with Mary, God tries to do something startlingly new in us, and our faithful response must be creative, life-giving participation.  As with Mary, God chooses to be bound to our bodies in order to work in this world, and it takes time, dedication, and willingness to find new ways to love in order to participate in that work.

As we expectantly anticipate these final days towards encountering Christ in that lowly stable, I wonder how we will birth God into the world this year.  I wonder with anticipation what new thing God will do in us.  I wonder how we will labour with Mary, how we will make her gestation ours, and how, with God’s work in us, we will help each other praise the name, Emmanuel: how we will know and make known God-With-Us.

This Advent season I’m writing reflections on the lectionary Gospel readings for Light Reflections and reposting them here. Please feel free to borrow and steal anything from these that might be helpful in your own Advent sermon, teaching, etc., work.

Luke 3:7-18
7 John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? ⁸Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our ancestor”; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. ⁹Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.’

10 And the crowds asked him, ‘What then should we do?’ ¹¹In reply he said to them, ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.’ ¹²Even tax-collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, ‘Teacher, what should we do?’ ¹³He said to them, ‘Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.’ ¹⁴Soldiers also asked him, ‘And we, what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.’

15 As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah,^{* 16}John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with^* the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷His winnowing-fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’

18 So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.

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So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people!

This image of Christ with a winnowing fork, clearing the threshing floor and burning the chaff with unquenchable fire doesn’t immediately ring of Good News to me. It doesn’t quite match up to the vision I too often have of Jesus as my happy buddy. And it’s a far cry from the humble babe in the manger whose birth we anticipate joyfully this season.

This image of Jesus is terrifying, even violent, threatening to undo the world in which we live.

Luke proclaims a constant leveling, an evening out of the types of privilege some of us in this world have and some of us don’t. The cultural advantages afforded by birthright, wealth, status or any other imaginable identity marker are non-transferable in the Kingdom of God. God creates all things new – converting stones into beloved children while hacking back trees that produce no fruit, forcing them to begin from scratch. We all are told to collect no more than our fair share.

It’s easy to see how this is good news for those of us who are disadvantaged by the social structures of this world. It’s often more difficult to see how this is Good News for those of us whose birthright, wealth, racialized, gendered, sexual and other identity markers keep us close to the centres of power, however.

Those of us who were born into the citizenship of the country in which we live, whose parents could afford to send us to university or college, who are White, straight, or who never feel excluded by having to check the box of either male or female on a survey form – those of us whose identity is stable and valued by the culture in which we live – might have a harder time seeing how this passage is Good News for us.

But it is.

But there’s strange grace in John’s question, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” It’s tough to hear – even tougher to do – but I need to face the judgment that will call me into penitence. It’s only in humble repentance that I am able to face and give up or use well the privilege accrued from being born and raised and bodied according to this world’s broken parameters of success. If I flee the wrath, John warns, then I am unable to experience its liberating impulse – the promise that I can be set free from what drives this world along, and live instead somehow, even fragmentarily, in God’s promised realm.

This is the season when I dare to believe this might be possible – when I dare to believe Christ might come and call me out of my ordinary into his extraordinary, so that the heartbeat of each day might become the lifeblood of the Spirit. This is the season when I anticipate something revolutionary, hoping beyond hope for the Spirit’s baptism, for the chance to pass through that unquenchable fire, into the darkness of the longest night, and be born again on the other side as the days grow long once again.

Through Advent, I will be writing reflections on the lectionary texts for the website Light Reflections, and reposting them here. Hope you enjoy! Please feel free to use any of them in sermon, teaching or other church education type prep.

Luke 3:1-6

3In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler^* of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler^* of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler^* of Abilene, ²during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. ³He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, ⁴as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,

‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
⁵ Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
⁶ and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” ’

These stories about John in the wilderness are so familiar that I risk no longer fully hearing them. I can jump right over the political positioning in the first few lines to get straight to the heart of proclamation because familiarity makes me think that’s where the meaning is. But not this year. This year I’m trying to dwell in the time and space established by those first few lines to see what might reside there.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius locates this moment in time. Tiberius and Pilate as Governor locate it in a particular political regime. Herod, Philip and Lysnias locate it geographically. Annas and Caiaphas locate it religiously.  The image we have here is of a bustling, vibrant landscape that perhaps has little energy, space or desire for a saviour to arrive. These opening lines map the time and space of the context into which Jesus’ Good News comes. It’s a time and space marked by political and religious powers that shape how the Good News will be heard.

This time and space marks out the beginning of the story, but also the site of the story’s goal.

This is the context into which John proclaims the coming Lord – in the hustle bustle of the region all around the Jordan he preaches baptism for repentance and forgiveness of sins. But it’s also the context from which he needs to retreat to be audible. He preaches all around the region, but then he has to go out into the wilderness for the specificity of his words to be heard.

I imagine him standing in the wilderness outside of the city, preparing himself to go back in, and gazing upon its busyness with a sigh. How will the Lord even be seen in that wild topography? How will the Good News be heard over the din of trade and industry? Won’t liberation be squashed by all the powers and principles that rule the state.

I imagine John standing outside of the city he loves for a moment, preparing himself to go back in, and gazing upon its busyness with a sigh before returning to his task – before he begins to straighten paths, to watch the valleys raised and the mountains lowered, the rough ways made smooth. The prophecy holds the kernel of equalizing impulse that conveys the Gospel’s social justice. But it also demonstrates how creation itself will bend to the presence of the Divine.

John proclaims not just the coming of Jesus, but the very fact that time and space itself will bend to make room for Good News to pour out. It will appear that the land is still in the hands of Tiberius and Pilate, Herod and Philip, Lysanias, Annas and Caiaphas. But from the wilderness John can see a new territory charted over theirs. John sees the time and space of the Kingdom of God turning geography into sacred space. He sees the preparatory work required for all flesh to see the salvation of God.

As I gaze out over Toronto, the city I love, I wonder where geography is becoming sacred space. I wonder where eternal time and invisible space are spreading out to make room for the Good News. What valleys are being raised? What mountains being brought low? This year, as I gaze out over the city I love, I wonder where in its hustle, bustle, trade and industry God is laying in wait to release us from bondage, to set us free.

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This picture was taken with my phone of an early Toronto morning after I had pulled an all-nighter watching the art installation, The Clock, by Christian Marclay.

Through Advent, I will be writing reflections on the lectionary texts for the website Light Reflections, and reposting them here. Hope you enjoy! Please feel free to use any of them in sermon, teaching or other church education type prep.

WEEK 1: Luke 21:25-36
25 ‘There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. ²⁶People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. ²⁷Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in a cloud” with power and great glory. ²⁸Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’

29 Then he told them a parable: ‘Look at the fig tree and all the trees; ³⁰as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. ³¹So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. ³²Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. ³³Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

34 ‘Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, ³⁵like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. ³⁶Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.’

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I always used to be puzzled by these images of a wild and violent nature announcing the arrival of something spiritual. They struck me as mythical and strange, reminding me too much of a Shakespearean literary device for me to take them seriously.

Unfortunately, these days, it seems not a week can pass without the earth’s distress erupting in the confusion of nations, or without the seas, waves and winds turning to the shores in attack – or, perhaps, defense. Such images produce rich literary meaning when we encounter them in our great poetry and prose. But what theological meaning do they reveal when we read them in our Scriptures?

Should we allegorize them, dismiss them as metaphor? Should we read them literally, wondering what particular geographical location gives a front-row seat to the Son of Man’s cloud-carried arrival? Or is there something in between these options – some deeper, spiritual reality borne to us by strangeness that can expose us to mystery and wonder?

I always used to be puzzled by these images of a wild and violent nature announcing the arrival of something spiritual – that is, until the summer of this year.

My husband and I took the month of June to walk the ancient Christian pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago. We began in France, just over the Spanish border, and then took thirty days to walk to the cathedral where St. James’ bones were entombed – about 850km, give or take a few.

And so for a month we walked through the outskirts of a society that grew more and more alien to us. The spiritual practice of putting one foot in front of the other into steps that had been trod by thousands of feet for over a thousand years drew our bodies out of the time and space that held the rest of society captive. As pilgrims, the time and space in and through which we moved lost its grip on us and we began living in some version of elsewhere.

I always used to be puzzled by these images of a wild and violent nature announcing the arrival of something spiritual, then, until about five kilometers before my walk’s end.

In Santiago, the sky is strange. The colours swirl in mystery; clouds and winds form gorgeous, threatening patterns that dance upon and drown the city underneath. In Santiago, there is a sublime difference between those who have driven there and those who have walked. Only we who have walked, it seems, can see the sky for what it is.

Only we who have walked know how much the outpouring of alienation and anticipation, exhausted despair and bright purple hope, and every wish and dream and fear and desire of thousands of people walking with intention for over a thousand years can change their destination’s very atmosphere.

The confusing, mysterious majesty of a spirit filled sky – a spirit filled sky that eludes our ability to understand it – is what marks the next four weeks for us as Christians. These are the weeks in which we look for signs; we look for signs that will give us the gift of alienation from the society around us so that we can step out of the bustling worries of this life to see the truth.

Be alert, as the gospel writer says, so that these mysterious and wondrous signs will turn your anticipation to the coming of Jesus – to the hope that this season, he will be born once more.

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The image used is Santiago Sky by Maria Luisa Hernandez

Dear AGO,
Every morning on my way to work, I pass a poster advertising your current exhibit, “Frida and Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting.” Now, I’m an art lover. So you would think I would be excited that I get to stroll past your art images each morning. You would think your posters would inspire me to walk a few extra blocks from my workplace to check out your exhibit on my lunch-break. But, in fact, each time I pass this poster, I find myself less inspired than angry. The poster reads: “She painted a diary of her life. He painted a diary of Mexico.”

So far I’ve been venting my frustration in private, with friends, but Sarah Mortimer’s post at The Shameless Blog about your use of Frida unibrows in your publicity campaign has made me realize how insidiously deep the disrespect of women artists here runs.

It’s been years since I’ve heard someone make the old mistake of thinking the personal isn’t political, or domesticating women’s work to the private sphere while elevating men’s work to the public.

So let me be really clear – Both Frida and Diego painted a diary of their life. And both Frida and Diego painted a diary of Mexico. Each simply told those two stories by imaging different subject matters. But last time I checked, no one really thought art needed to be so literal to communicate something true.

Yes, Diego’s most famous works were large-scale and explicitly historic and political in their subject matter. In a somewhat antiquated aesthetic understanding – one that holds to a hierarchy of subject matters that has long been abolished (and abolished, largely, before and during Diego’s career and Frida’s childhood) – such historic and political subject matters would have been seen as the height of what could communicate a social world.

So if we’re judging (and publicizing) Frida’s and Diego’s work according to an antiquated aesthetic regime, then yes, I suppose he painted a diary of Mexico, a broad and complex social world, and she – as a painter most famous for her self-portraits, a subject matter much lower on that old hierarchy of subjects – painted a diary of her life.

But why would we interpret their work through an aesthetic understanding we’ve long abandoned?

Over a hundred years ago, the Impressionists taught us that portraiture can communicate a vast social world. Portraiture can tell a story about art itself. I can’t imagine you would publicize a collection of Van Gogh’s self-portraits as a diary of his life or, going back even further, a collection of Rembrandt’s?

For much too long, Frida’s work was dismissed as primitive, naive, personal and subjective. Diego was the important painter – the painter of Mexico. Frida was simply his wife, a quaint little painter of her self.

But now we know that she was using her story to tell much larger stories than her own. She painted a gendered diary – one that challenged our understanding of female beauty, one that played with the contrast between women as the subjects of art and women as the creators of art. Where would Cindy Sherman be without Frida Kahlo? Like the Impressionists – male and female – she challenged our understanding of what even constitutes art. And in so doing, she told a story about art itself – its limits and its possibilities. But she didn’t just tell a story about art as something personal or general – she told a national story about art as Mexican too. Not just via subject matter, but via form, medium, style, and even the canvas size, her works communicate a complex narrative of Mexican identity, Mexican art, Mexican history and Mexican politics.

She may have painted her own body, but she did so with a diary of Mexico tattooed onto it.

And even if you wanted to argue, dear AGO, that Diego’s subject matter remains more historical and political than Frida’s (although, given that the hierarchy required to uphold such an argument is undone, I’m not sure where that would get you), then surely you would need to concede that even when painting such historical scenes, Diego did so from a particular, unique perspective. As much as he was painting history, he was painting himself.

But Diego’s enduring influence has happened not through his subject matter so much as his medium – like Frida’s portraits, Diego’s murals opened up new media and new forms. They challenged our understanding of the relationship between art and public space. They didn’t just tell a story; they told a story in a new way that would change how we would tell a story.

And so what has made Diego enduring is precisely what has made Frida enduring – their ability to mix the personal with the political, their ability to change the way we see the world, and their ability to communicate something that transcends themselves.

In the end, the only reason why I can surmise you would interpret Frida’s work as a diary of her life and Diego’s as a diary of Mexico is because you’ve bought into perpetuating gender stereotypes that domesticate women to the private sphere and elevate men to the political. In other words, you’ve bought into a patriarchal regime that interprets the world to minimize women’s work and valorize men’s.

Every time I walk past that poster, I find myself wanting to shout the feminist mantra – the personal IS political! As a woman, I am offended by its false juxtaposition. As an art lover, I am confused by the antiquated aesthetic misunderstanding.

With hope that your next publicity campaign will be much less sexist,
Natalie

Given how sad – livid – I am that one of my favourite paintings was vandalized this week, I’ve been digging through some old files to see if I can find the piece I wrote on it 7 years ago. It’s funny to read an old piece of writing – a little embarrassing, but also kind of fun to be reminded of the things that moved me back then…many of which still do today. I get that to a lot of people, most paintings by Mark Rothko look the same – I’m posting this old piece of writing because for those of us who love his work, there are paintings with which we’ve spent hours of time in conversation and contemplation, paintings of his with which we’ve developed old, familiar friendships. The one that was defaced is one paintings of those for me.

I wrote this piece in 2005 while I was living in London. I wrote it in part for fun, but also with the thought that I might share it with my various friends who visited over the year, take them to the Tate, and let them enjoy this little aesthetic experience I’d put together. The Tate has since rearranged the room in which the Seagram Murals are housed, painted it with brighter colours (I liked the old version, in which I wrote this piece better). Nevertheless, the integrative art experience would still work – so if you find yourself in London, maybe pop on a little Ani, and make your way to the Tate with what follows after the jump in hand

            Let’s just hold here… Keep holding… Keep holding… Let’s just stay here….  Ani DiFranco breathes this petition in the middle of her extended, poetic, song, Pulse, her words honeyed with the hope of new love, but dripping with the heavy resolution of knowing her lover won’t stay, knowing that her words will vanish into the pulsing beat of this repetitive and undulating piece.  It is the moments when words have failed.  Resigned, she simply repeats all she has to give, I would offer you my pulse, if I thought it would be useful, I would give you my breath, and allows these words, too, to fade into the music, her only remaining language.

DiFranco’s pulse, her breath, her rhythmic language: turn to it on your iPod, sit on one of the three benches in The International Council Gallery – the dark room at the Tate Modern that houses a collection of Mark Rothko paintings known by many as the name of their original commission, “The Seagram’s Murals” – and allow the song to fill the space.  The collection is seven large-scale paintings in all, executed in deep, rich maroons, reds and blacks.  As you enter the room you leave behind the crisp, bright, white of the other exhibitions, and find yourself spellbound by a site for melancholic reflection.  All you really need to know from the information panel on the wall is that Rothko claimed he wished to make you “feel that [you] are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up.  So that all [you] can do is butt [your] head forever against the wall.”   The massive size of the canvasses, and similarity of their themes can create in you the sensation of overwhelming uniformity.  Many who enter giggle, shake their heads, and simply mutter, “I don’t get it; what on earth do they mean?” and quickly exit before attempting to answer the futility of their own question.  Because to stand in the middle of the room breathing in these great works is to know no exit; but it is not the panicked anxiety described by the artist himself.  Rather, when you turn on Pulse and turn it up, and revel in the beauty and engage the conversation ongoing between the works – begun before you entered, to continue after you leave – the space will envelope you in a tactile, pulsing motion.  When you allow yourself to be simultaneously haunted by the sight of these paintings and the sounds of this music, the murals can become like the womb of your mother, the space of blood and death and life, so long gone, and returned to you, a lost child, for perhaps only a moment.

First, sit down in the quiet of the room.  Then pause.  Remember to breathe.  Then look from painting to painting and imagine that they are speaking together.  Imagine that the abstractions of their images are sounds that can communicate with each other, and try to find patterns in their language.  Find the relationships between the slight variations in the colours.  Uncover your response to the same colour as it rests beside different shades.  Does the black over red evoke the same response as it does next to the purple?  Imagine that the thickness of line can bend and shape the language that these paintings speak.  Feel free to look at the works up close and try to see the differences in speed, motion and emotion that the artist used to get the paint on to the canvas.  Note that the paint appears to have dribbled in different directions as it dried, as if the artist rotated the canvases each day he worked on them in order to gain differing perspectives on his work himself.  Discover how shapes that may have appeared to be identical with your first glance might actually carry their weight in ways that are dissimilar enough to offer you clues for understanding how the seven members of this family are talking to each other.  Even if you cannot decode a precise system of meaning to this language – don’t worry, you are not supposed to be able to – let it vibrate between paintings, passing back and forth in multi-layered dialogue, and then, only then, press play on the song and let the whirrings and flashes of the its opening join in the ongoing cacophony of visual conversation.  Then, as the beat begins, allow the language to make sense, not in your mind but, rather, in your body as your toe begins to tap along to the rhythm.

The key to transforming this room into womb is to invite DiFranco to work her spell that reveals an ugly mess as beautiful.  She describes her lover: You crawled into my bed that night like some sort of giant insect and I found myself spellbound at the sight of you, beautiful and grotesque.  Spellbound by the grotesquely beautiful, DiFranco’s voice moans the same hope-tinged melancholy exhibited in Rothko’s work.  And in saying to her lover, That night you leaned over and threw up into your hair, I held you there thinking, I would offer you my pulse, she draws the juxtaposing experience back into her – simultaneously as you listen, into your – own body.  This is the late night trembling of clammy, drunk skin against the warm flesh that seeks to help it vomit all last traces of a long night of drinking; the wretched vulnerability of retching the last poison of one too many beers from one’s system.  As she becomes caretaker to her lover, in the damp and the stench, DiFranco – like a mother to the child that she cradles inside her self – offers to her partner the life in her breath.  She cocoons her lover in her protection as you, the listener and viewer, are cocooned in the womb created by the large, bloody, anxious paintings.  The beat of the music and the language vibrating between each artwork sustains your breathing.

Breathe it in, through your eyes, your ears and your skin, until you are ready to be expelled from this room, back to the clean, crisp, whiter walls of the other exhibitions.  You may find it rejuvenating.  You may find it exhausting.  If you can let go of the need to control your response and, instead, accept that simply responding is enough in this space, then you can wrap yourself in the pulsing rhythm of maroon and red and black, and try to imagine the language that throbs in the space before words.

I am usually in bed by 9:30, to fall asleep reading by 10:15, 10:30 or so. It’s been years since 10pm marked the start of my evening rather than its end. But last night I made an exception, trudging out of the house at 9:20pm and making my way down to The Power Plant at the Toronto Harbourfront to see if I could pull an all-nighter to watch a good chunk of Christian Marclay’s, The Clock.

I expected long lines and a minimum 1-2, probably 3, hour wait, which is I why I aimed to be there for 10. I wanted to be in the room when the clock struck midnight. But I arrived just in time to be the last person let in before the line-ups began.

The Clock is a 24 hour video compilation of short clips from films (and some tv shows), each of which contains some reference to the time, either via the characters’ speech or the display of a clock in the room. The film is played so that the temporal references correspond to real time – so when it’s 10:04pm in the gallery, it’s 10:04pm onscreen (meaning that I arrived, gloriously, as Marty McFly and Doc Brown try to harness nature’s power from a lightening struck clock to propel the Dolorian through time). I giggled as I thought to myself, in a multi-layered dorky self-comment: “Perfect timing!”

What’s amazing about The Clock is how quickly time passes – 10pm till midnight did not feel like the length of a regular feature length film, and I was as engrossed, if not more, in these images as I would be with a mainstream movie. Stripped of conventional, linear narrative form, the pieces instead were held together by theme, emotion, playful cross-references and, of course, by sharing the same time of the night.

When one actor closes a door, the next, in a completely different context, opens it. Fragments of telephone conversations connect to create relationships that exist now beyond the speaker’s intentions. What is genius about the assemblage is that Marclay manages to build mood, even story, somewhere beyond the linear, such that I found myself reinvested in characters I knew (or, strangely, thought I knew because they were portrayed by actors I recognized) without even knowing their immediate context – simply by their new association with each other and with us, the gathered. The beauty of a skilled actor’s face acting replaced the story she inhabited, instead focusing my attention on the moment itself as that moment connected with the moment we were all sharing in the room.

The 10 minutes that build to midnight, for example, build in intensity with those onscreen together counting down the minutes – so much so that I found myself stunned to watch someone leave the room at 2 minutes to the hour. I was desperate to know what would happen when the clock struck 12, and was overjoyed to find an utter avoidance of relying on stock footage of New Year’s Eve parties (even as I was equally as happy at 6am to see the somewhat obvious, “Good Morning Vietnam” shouted by Robin Williams and poor Bill Murray crash his alarm clock as he was forced into another repetition of the same day).

But these onscreen events connected to the time we in the gallery shared also. Shortly after scenes of bars closing down for the night, a wave of new viewers arrived to fill the room’s smell with the traces of alcohol burning off their breath. As they settled in to our little community, the smell was replaced with the stench of feet released from the restrictive types of shoes one wears for a night on the town.

The reason I had wanted to pull the all-nighter was because I had read that watching through the night distorts the viewer’s sense of reality – and I imagined that dozing on the couches, waking each time someone screamed or a telephone rang out onscreen would take me to some place of transcendence. But as I sunk into the non-story, captivated by each clip, I forgot this desire and simply enjoyed the show.

But then I was awoken, sometime in the 4 o’clock hour, I think – a particularly trippy hour, although I’m not sure if that’s because of what’s onscreen or my own state at the time! – to see a rocket ship taking off into space. The scene was not modern; it was old school cartoony, bright colours and figures moving around awkwardly. And I remember thinking, “Oh, that looks just like the time I went into outer space.” The strangeness of the thought woke me up for a moment, as I found the sense to question its veracity. And the next minute was spent in confusion – have I been into outer space? Have I been on a rocket ship? Surely not, I kept thinking…and yet, I was convinced that I had.

Before I fell asleep again, I had utterly convinced myself that I had, indeed, been into outer space and that I could access the memory to prove it.

It wasn’t until I was driving home this morning that I figured out where that memory came from. In high school, we had a hypnotist come to our school do a show, and I was one of the students put under. In my hypnotic state, the guy took me on a journey into space. Aliens attacked my ship, but I fought them off. And to this day I have fragmented memories – memories that feel utterly real, even though I know they’re not – of the travel and the battle. On some level, my body holds a recollection of weightlessness and inter-galactic flight and fight.

So now as a write, with the sun risen and The Clock playing on elsewhere in the city – and with me feeling a little lost because I’m not there – I realize that’s the memory I accessed somewhere around 4am. For a moment, the film led me to transcend not only the time and space I was in in the gallery space, but it also led me to transcend the structure of my own memory, into false memory – into believing for a moment in something I know isn’t true.

As I write this now, I realize that I accessed something else in that moment too – yesterday afternoon I finished Will Self’s book, Psychogeography, wherein he has a fantastic little satirical essay on Virgin Atlantic’s space program. The essay evokes the simultaneous plausibility and implausibility of recreational space travel…precisely the dilemma of memory I faced somewhere in that 4 o’clock hour.

Just as the film rearranged fragmented clips into non-linear storytelling, so too did my brain in response to it. I hesitate to say, because it’s more than a little cliched, but just can’t help myself – what a trip!

I had to force myself to leave at 6:30am, 8.5 hours after I had arrived. Watching all these characters wake up made me long to spend my day with them. But my parking was running out, and the real world of a hectic week that would not run smoothly if I didn’t find some sleep beckoned. I arrived home, took off my watch and clothes to climb into bed beside a sleeping husband as his alarm clock turned to 7am on the dot – I couldn’t help but feel I was a character on screen as the uncanniness of the ordinary enveloped by tired body.

But oh, I was desperate to know what the actual on-screen people looked like as they started their days while I ended my night! Next 24 hour viewing, I’ll be up early for a 6am arrival…to greet Kirsten Dunst as she awakens in a beautiful sunrisen field (Virgin Suicides?) and we’ll begin our day together.

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While I usually only use my own photographs on this blog, I had to borrow this one because you aren’t allowed to take pictures in the viewing room. For the bulk of the night, I had the front left couch all to myself. The room was full like this on my arrival; when I left at 6:30am, there were only 7 of us left.

Before I left for the Camino, I purchased a livingsocial deal for an overnight yoga retreat a couple of hours from my house. I wasn’t able to use it before it expired, but the man who runs the centre was kind enough to let me book my time there for after my return. This was only the beginning of the kindness I experienced in this place.

On Friday afternoon, I thought I had budgeted well for a timely arrival – I did not, however, budget time for getting lost, nearly running out of gas, a chiropractor appointment to treat a herniated disc on the way out of town running waaaaay over time, and a nightmarish amount of Friday afternoon Toronto traffic. What was supposed to be 2 hours in the car turned into 4 hours, and by the time I arrived I was in quite a state.

It’s one thing to mess up my own plans through failures of planning, but I just hate messing up other people’s plans. The proprietor of the retreat centre had been so kind to fit me in, and I had visions of him and the other two guests having their plans for the afternoon all thrown out of kilter by my errors.

When I finally arrived 2 hours late, I came through the door in a flurry of bad energy, apologizing profusely and just feeling sick.

And here’s where my retreat began.

Rather than make me feel bad – either by telling me how much I had messed up everyone else’s plans, or by doing that terrible passive aggressive thing where the person says it’s all ok but uses every bodily cue at their disposal to let you know it’s not, Andre – the proprietor – calmly told me he was just happy I was safe. “We’re just glad you’ve made it,” he said, “take your time, we’ll start the yoga session in a few minutes, but we’re happy to wait for you.” I could see the other two women stretching in the adjacent room. No one emanated any form of impatience whatsoever. Every tightened muscle in my body responded by beginning to loosen up. “Let me take your bag,” he said. “Have a seat and catch your breath.”

Such a simple act offered one of the more radical forms of hospitality I have experienced in a long time and challenged me at the core of one of my greatest struggles.

I write a lot on this blog about my frantic relationship to time. I can guarantee that if someone had kept me waiting like I kept these three waiting, I would not be able to be so gracious.

And ‘gracious’ is the right word for it. What Andre offered to me as I rushed through that door was a moment of grace. The reason I was in a panic was because my lateness had the potential to communicate so many things I didn’t want to communicate: carelessness, rudeness, disrespect, etc… But all those extra meanings were meaningless to him – instead he offered me forgiveness without even hearing my excuses and reasons. And while forgiveness in Christian theology is such a complex issue, I think I most often use that complexity to get myself off the hook of offering forgiveness like this. So what is it like, Andre got me wondering, to feel that freedom to forgive without any malice or bitterness or passive aggression? What does it feel like to open grace to another person like that, a stranger no less, without any reserve?

The moment set the tone for the whole retreat for me, as I experienced a sense that I was welcome in that place exactly as I was. Whatever place in my own spiritual journey I was at, it was valued there; whatever capacities (or incapacities) I have with my own yoga practice, they were honoured there.

It got me thinking that such radical welcome and acceptance is pretty rare in the churches I know. I’ve been welcomed in churches, that’s for sure – but the welcome almost always comes with a little something attached: “here’s what we think you can do for us” or “we’re glad you’re here now so that we can fix you up and change you”.

But at this retreat centre, the welcome felt pure, for lack of a better word. And in that welcome I actually wanted to do something for them; I genuinely wanted to get fixed up…or, rather, to dig deeper into my own faith and spiritual practices, to be opened up to the presence of God anew.

We write a lot about hospitality in Christian theology these days, but I’m sad to say how rarely I experience it. We’re also writing quite a bit about vulnerability, but again, it’s rare I feel I can be vulnerable in churches. Perhaps this is in part because so much of my professional life is wrapped up in the church? But that alone should maybe give me pause. And to be fair, I rarely feel such hospitality and vulnerability in the yoga studios of Toronto and other places I’ve lived either. That’s what made Lotus Heart Centre feel so very special – it brought together the desires of my Christian practice with what I’ve felt is missing in my yoga practice. It welcomed me into vulnerability, and in so doing, called me to face my Spirit and to seek the face of God. It’s difficult to imagine now that I was there for less than 24 hours! It already feels like an eternity and an eternity ago.

Between yoga sessions, thai massage, delicious home cooked meals, and vibrant conversation I got to live for a few hours right at that place where mind, body and spirit connect to each other and to God. Actually dwelling there for a moment revealed how little time I actually do get to spend with that sense presence. And it left me hungry for more.

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This photograph was not actually taken at the retreat centre. This was at a cabin that Tyler and I visited with our dear friends Thunder, Emily and Mya – this deck was my glorious yoga spot for the weekend!

I wrote before I left for Spain that I didn’t know how I’d feel when I reached Santiago, but that my first pilgrimage was actually to Bilbao – and the walk proved me true.

We reached the city about a week in. By that point we’d made some good friends, a couple in particular, and we were treasuring our final moments with them. I think we all knew the good-bye was approaching, and this allowed us to push into our rapidly expanding intimacy with a little more courage than an expanse of time allows. Tyler, walking with our Brazilian lawyer friend tested and expanded the limits of language barriers to get deep into a conversation about Liberation Theology. I, walking with our British economist/writer/tv industry/soon-to-be-(I-hope)-film-maker/eclectic friend enjoyed that peak and fall that happens as you sink into the type of conversation that lets you actually get to know someone.  We personalized general topics like art, writing, religion, and death as each became a springboard for sharing our fears and hopes for the coming years. The genuine moments of human connection that everyday life tend to occlude are made present on the Camino, but contrary to the ways we generally think about relationships, these connections seem possible precisely because they are temporary, fragmentary, and impermanent.

Bilbao, it seems, is a bit of a scattering place. People relate to it in different ways, for different lengths of time, and so the community of travelers that develops over the first week breaks up upon arrival. Especially on the Camino Norte, a lot of people only walk the first week or two, and so you lose a lot of friends by virtue of the fact that they go home. But Bilbao is also such a significant destination, that everyone has to enjoy it at their own pace. Some move on right away, some take an afternoon, others a few days. And as Camino herself is the only walking partner who promises full and complete companionship for the journey, it feels like there’s something just as important about letting go of friends as there is of hanging on.

The willingness to let go of friends is rare for my generation in our contemporary culture. Facebook has completely changed our patterns of relationship, not simply because social networks are now, literally, networked, or because we can anonymously creep our ex’es, old crushes and various nemeses (not that I would ever do that)…although the opening of these possibilities has certainly impacted contemporary modes of relating.

But the most powerful relational impact facebook has had in my view is that we no longer say good-bye. Relationships are denied their natural end. For example, I am “friends” with people I have never met (whose fragmented form of friendship I actually enjoy immensely). But I’m also “friends” with people I don’t like, people I don’t want to be “friends” with but feel obligated to be “friends” with (and if you’ve followed this post from my facebook page, I’m almost certainly not talking about you, I promise). I’m “friends” with people I haven’t seen in 25 years, people from my elementary school who I can’t quite place but their name sounds familiar. I have accepted “friend” requests from people whose real-world friendship fizzled out because either they betrayed me or I betrayed them…and somehow facebook brings us back together without any real sort of reconciliation. Facebook creates this strange cyber-world of permanence (despite the volatility of its stock, FB isn’t going anywhere for a while – at this point, the end of facebook would be like the end of email, unimaginable) where there is no letting go. And so we carry every friend we’ve ever had along with us – a virtual nightmare for an introvert and an utterly unsustainable relational web for any human being.

And so we’ve been tricked, I think, into believing that for a relationship to matter, it has to be permanent – it has to endure.

We’ve lost the joy of passing connections, intimacy for an afternoon, the thrill of spending a summer, only a summer, by someone’s side and the painful but important ache the end-of-summer good-bye leaves us (can you imagine how much poignancy that song would lose if Fantine could have friend requested her lover some time in October and kept up to date with his new loves?).

Ok, so it’s true that I’m weak, and I did friend that British friend…but the Camino forced me to let so many others go.

The Bilbao Scattering (and multiple other Scatterings along the rest of The Way) forced me to say good-bye to (or actually, set out one morning never to see again) Pierre, the first friend I made along the road who Tyler and I managed to stop from inadvertently drinking non-potable water; it disrupted a hilarious relationship growing with Mauzio, the cheeky Italian guy who taught me to go piano, piano, but who also was getting increasingly handsy every time Tyler wasn’t around; I lost the Danish ladies with whom I had commiserated at length about high income tax rates, and who had been there for me when I hurt my arm; I lost Jose, the tiny little man who inadvertently walked in on me naked in an Albergue bathroom, only to insist in broken English, “I SAW NOTHING” while frantically pointing at my now-clothed breasts…leading to me to believe that he had, in fact, seen everything; I lost Sonya, the Austrian doctor who was carrying a little boy’s hamster in her backpack because her heart broke when she saw him crying on the side of the road, forced by his mother to let the rodent loose; I lost Leo, who I swear was Jesus in disguise (but I’ll write about that another time) one morning without even thinking about it, with a wave as I caught him peeing off the side of a church porch where he had slept that night.

The fragmentary – but nevertheless intimate – nature of each of these connections is what allows them to flourish now in my imagination. Their enduring impact is possible because each constituted a nugget of my journey that connects them to each other, to me, to the road, and to love in ways that must be fleeting if they are to survive. That their meaning to me is contained, held within the parameters of my own experience does not mean that I used them for my own purposes (though, I think our dominant ways of thinking about relationships would trick us into thinking this to be the case).

Rather, we shared an exchange – not an economic exchange, but a spiritual one – by which our presence to each other was held together by something larger than us both. I don’t necessarily mean God or Spirit, but it might be that. If anything, it was held together by the Road and the energy that animates it. They are, for me, points in a finite story, just as I am (or hope to be) a point in their finite story – and that finitude, that ending is what makes the fragments sacred.

Ecclesiastes is quite possibly my favourite book in the Bible. Qoheleth’s words always ring true, for me – gathering is good, but so too is scattering. What all these fragments of relationship reminded me, then, is that there’s a joy to transience, and that we can love for a but a moment and it still be love. To devalue the connection that snuffs out quickly, longing only for those that abide, is in a way to deny that life is serendipitous, unpredictable, and always beyond our control.

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Photograph taken in the last Albergue before Bilbao – from left to right, Jose, Pierre, Jose’s walking partner (who walked in denim cut-offs!), our British friend. We are all sharing small sips of a bottle of local wine provided by our Brazilian friend (an impromtu Eucharist, in some ways, perhaps). With hindsight, we all knew it was good-bye, even though none of us said it at the time. The spirit in the Albergue that night was celebratory, connective, the feel of a last hurrah.

Dear reader,

I have a confession to make: I started writing the post “Bilbao: Part 2″ as a follow up to last week’s reflections on the Guggenheim, but I found myself stalled…as I have done each week I’ve sat down to try to write about the Camino. Something strange happens each time I try; I get this drive to summarize the experience of the week with the lesson it taught me. I don’t know why I do this. I know consciously that these experiences matter – have meaning, impacted me, had their own power, etc… – regardless of whether or not there’s a “take home” to take home. And yet each week this odd compulsion takes over and I find myself pressed to sum the stories up neatly with something I learned. I don’t know if this compulsion is annoying those of you who are kind enough to read…but it’s annoying me! And here’s why:

in truth I have no idea what I learned yet! And so each week I feel like I’m lying…just a little. The events are all true (my philosophical friends can debate me on this, but you know – just give me this one, please). But my interpretations of them – that is, my interpretations of my own experiences! – all seem to conflict. I learned to move more slowly but also to move quickly. I learned push myself, but also to rest. I learned solitude and community. I learned to unplug, but also the joys that a well timed email can bring. Because no lesson is neat (in fact, most are not even so clean as the binaries I just listed), and most experiences can’t be summed up in lessons, I tend to finish each post with a bunch of paragraphs that feel to me like an argument for who gets to stake what’s true – but these are all arguments with myself! So why the drive to sum my stories up this way? Why not just narrate the experience and let it stand for itself?

Perhaps this is a symptom of being an academic and a teacher – I always feel the need for an argument to persuade with a little pedagogy on the side. But the Camino eludes these kinds of categories. Walking it is the persuasion; each step is the teacher (or something corny like that). In fact, that’s a big part of the problem – anything I did learn feels so trite once put into words (wow, we move too fast in this modern world…hey, did you the body has limits?…gee, I sure need to find some time for rest…). Everything I learned I already knew with my mind, cognitively. But I didn’t yet know it with my body.

Experiencing time, truly experiencing it, and feeling every muscle in my body take it in turns to hurt – these are the kinds of bodily lessons that can’t quite be articulated in words.

What’s funny is that so much of my academic work is on the importance of embodied knowledge – the type of wisdom we have in our gut, in our bones (heck, my dissertation – and by extension the book I’m currently working on – are both titled, “Faith in My Bones”!).  I study the significance of slow, apprenticed, bodily learning – how certain perceptions of reality come to feel natural and true to us through our continued participation in practices that bear their logic intrinsically. And yet I keep finding myself frustrated by the fact that I can’t put into words these truths, these lessons, these fresh perceptions of reality that now feel so natural I can’t quite name them.

So I’m hitting the pause button on the Camino reflections. I’m making a confession against learning: NO MORE CAMINO LESSONS! (Or, at least, I’ll try…grace is abundant, right? Forgiveness for backsliding?). Next week when I write “Bilbao: Part 2″ I’m going to try to skip summing up what I learned about community (the current topic of the post), and instead try to describe what community in this place felt like (the soon to be written new version of said post).

My hope is that this will allow more truth telling – because to tell you true, right now I’m avoiding telling stories that end in lessons that feel trite or, more so, which narrate faith events in which I don’t quite believe, things that felt like magic and miracles and the confusion of trying to figure all that out! And for those of you who have been kind enough to read along with me on this journey, I hope it will allow for a better story!

See you next week…and thanks for taking my confession!

xoxo,
Natalie