Tag Archives: preparation

Pedagogy for Preparation: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Dec

What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God. Hans Urs von Balthasar

Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. Toni Morrison

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. Sydney J. Harris

Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which is never shown to anybody. Mark Twain

The more involved you are, the more significant your learning will be.  Stephen Covey

Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.  Ingmar Bergman

Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.  Rumi

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul. Walt Whitman

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. Susan B. Anthony

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. Rebecca Solnit

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness. Meister Eckhart

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. John Dewey

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. Eric Hoffer

I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship. Louisa May Alcott

The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms. Thomas Merton

As some of you recognize, Advent is a special season for me, a time of preparation for what remains as one of the great mysteries, even ironies, of my faith tradition – the baby in a manger representing an incarnate hope for the world that has, needless to say, yet to be fully realized.

To put so much stock in such a vulnerable setting has always seemed a marvelous leap of faith to me. In our own time, some factions of Christianity  seem to prefer the God of wrath and vengeance to the figure who left the cold manger to forgive – and transform — the coldness of our hearts, calling us to feed multitudes, put away swords, cease petty competitions, give cloaks to the poor, and help others to feel the grace that had long been denied. 

For some self-proclaimed Christians, apparently, this post-manger Jesus is simply too naïve, too divorced from the dog-eat-dog societies which we have crafted for ourselves, too willing to extend an invitation to soften hearts and minds that we have willingly cased in metaphorical cement.  Jesus may “get us” as the US television commercial proclaims, but for some in our Christian orbit, he apparently doesn’t “get” our times, doesn’t “get” the rampant “evil” knocking at our doors which apparently obscures” the “evil” for which we are also responsible while giving us license to hate and purge the “evil” which some of us are quite convinced lies wholly beyond our remit.

This time of what I at least would consider a form of pseudo faith would not seem to easily accommodate the self-preparation and commitment to growth and learning to which the season of Advent invites us all.

Perhaps it is because I am now too old to embrace so much of our modern mind-set, but I remain almost serially disinterested in the incessant branding and self-promotion which characterizes the current moment.  I am less interested in hearing what people “know” than what they have learned about their craft, about themselves and the “dark sides” of their metaphorical moons, about their responsibility to others close and far, about the world and its multiple challenges and blessings. I am less interested in where people think they “are” and more interested in where they’ve been and where they’re heading. It is the path that appeals to me, especially the path that beckons our better selves and which provides a context for the forgiveness of our less-better ones.

After all, if Advent is to mean anything beyond consulting our budgets and making sure our cars are sufficiently gassed to endure the malls, it means preparation of a special sort, a preparation that is one part attention and two parts assessment, one part seeking comfort in tradition and two parts allowing tradition to breath and grow, to stare down the inherited recipes for life and refuse to follow them entirely straight, to keep the windows of learning, growth and change open even as we stare into a mirror reflecting all we have been and failed to be, all we have neglected and all we have cherished.

And so as this new Advent adventure unfolds, I know that I too have learned, albeit often too late, often too casually, often with transaction in mind rather than grace.  What I have learned, especially during Advent season, is reflected in some of the quotations above.  Those same quotations no doubt also mark the limits of my current learning, mark the way still to sojourn on a long and wonder-filled path towards a life that is finally and ultimately in sync with itself, becoming more of a “gift to God” that might actually be in sync with God.  

And what are some of those Advent learnings you might ask? Well as with my other posts, it might be more fruitful to visit the introductory quotations rather than dwell on my own reflection.  But a few things come to the fore. For starters, I’ve often felt that many of us need a crash course in wonder, leaving those windows open for the unknown which is not entirely unknowable, making space for the new ingredients which could spice up a recipe, or even energize a life.  So many of us struggle with letting God be God, giving ample credence to the belief that God honors our path, honors our growth, even when we backslide, even when we misrepresent grace in all its forms, even when we fail to acknowledge that our failures are not God’s failure, our spiritual ignorance is not God’s ignorance, our enemies are not God’s enemies. 

There is something seriously wrong at this time given those within my own faith tradition who proclaim to know precisely what God wants from us, what God has in mind for us, but who are so often steeped in grievance, preferring to vanquish rather than to forgive, proclaiming enemies as though such was a badge of divine favor rather than a symbol of divine distance.  I’m not sure I always know what Advent requires of me, but I’m pretty sure that making and destroying enemies is not it.

And this leads me to the next point, perhaps the final one lest I test your patience further.  For faith to be real, and for the quality of learning which faith in Advent seems to require, it must be fully and practically engaged. I know that there have been times – too many in number – when I have talked a better game than I have played, when I have doubled down on the learning I’ve acquired and shut the windows on the wonderous revelations which continue to flood our world, albeit those which we largely ignore. I don’t always recall that we have actually been given metaphorical guidance for this revelation in the form of parents and guardians who routinely, at times even seemlessly, adjust their caregiving to the stages of the children under their charge.  We know that children are continually evolving, and we know that our own adjustments to their growth are the healthy and loving responses. Truly, the life of Advent is also about change and the God who honors it, who adjusts the forms and contours of divine love as we struggle to move in directions which allow us to celebrate a created order which needs more care from us and about which we still have so much to learn.

This learning may have something to do with classrooms but has more to do with life itself.  We point here to an immersion experience, immersing in the not-yet-known to both confirm and revise what it is that we thought we knew about faith, about the world, or about ourselves. It is learning as a preparation of sorts, but a preparation which is more layered and nuanced than merely breaking out last year’s metaphorical tree ornaments, social schedules and cookie recipes. It is about preparing ourselves to be those “spiritual beings having human experiences,” to learn how best to both be active and to sit still, to be both curious and grateful, to be both attentive and reflective, to sail our own ship and help others sail as well by risking a more robust and dynamic worldly presence, by learning all that we can in those places where learning is best served, the world which we believe has experienced the gift of divine presence and which calls us to share in that presence yet again.

Of all the quotations at the front of this post, the one from Toni Morrison probably expresses best my understanding of the Advent Season. For love, indeed, is a diploma, an elusive achievement that is greater perhaps than all other achievements to be had in this world, one which tests us, humbles us, confounds us, sometimes bringing us to our knees, sometimes bringing us to our senses. Love is a hard practice. Faith is a hard practice as well.  During this season, in a time of armed violence, acrimony and division, a time when trust is scarce and forgiveness scarcer still, it seems as though Morisson’s “diploma” is further from reach than ever. But there is a path of learning and preparation for us to follow. There is a way forward to graduation for us.  

So far as I can tell, the Advent path to this graduation is to recommit to turning at least some of our mirrors into windows, to learn and prepare as though the full flowering of our spiritual and physical lives depended on it.  Advent represents our annual calling to do precisely that.

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Lonely Exile: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

29 Nov
Feeling lonely? You've got company. | The World from PRX

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.  F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Donna Goddard

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them. Sylvia Plath

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting. Khaled Hossein

They’d elevate small grievances; they’d cherish hurt feelings and ill treatment like they were signs of virtue. Amy Bloom

As we have said about many things in this strange and uncomfortable year, this Advent season feels like few we have experienced in our collective lifetime.

One of the reasons, I suspect, why Advent is not more resonant within communities and even across faith traditions is that we don’t routinely engage in the reflections and reactions that the season demands. The word “Advent” is perhaps best translated as “expectation.” The signature image is, as we have noted over many years, the lone person peering into the night sky, knowing that something is out there that can reverse the trend of lonely exile, that can provide a lift to relationships in disarray and the loosening of the iron grip of occupation both of our nations and our souls.

This peering into the Milky Way was never merely wishful thinking, for Isiah and other prophets had long-anticipated “a light to those who sit in darkness” indeed even to those who find themselves sitting “in the shadow of death.” And yet this expectation was accompanied neither by a timeline nor a script. Something out there would surely come, a visitation would commence that could “guide our feet into the way of peace,” peace in our families, our communities, our world, but the timing and the program elements were as yet unclear, as yet uncertain. And the wait for clarity was genuinely painful as “the simple act of waiting” so often is.

But longing and waiting for a visitation are insufficient. This “way of peace” demands more of us as well. The visitation that can “guide our feet” requires us to use those feet to walk that path, to trust the direction but do so willfully and mindfully, to push ourselves forward and not wait for some unseen hand to keep pushing from behind. And as we walk, to engage in the two demands that, for me at least, signify the essence of the Advent season, the essence of our longing and response.

For me, the core of Advent takes the forms of Anticipation and Preparation: anticipation of the world made possible in part through the promise of a visitation; preparation to seize that opportunity, to be as ready as we can be as that world of promise takes its welcome shape.

On the surface, these two attributes seem like obvious conduits for the best of our modern age; indeed in healthy families, institutions or even governments, both play a key role. Such health requires an attentive and active investment in the world and its peoples, a willingness to see past our often-petty, soul-clogging grievances and our sometimes discouraging logistics to a time when, as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer puts it, we have “cast away the works of darkness” and now bathe in a light which is accessible to all and not just to some, a light which never dims in part because we ourselves have accepted the responsibility for illumination.

But all this sounds now like a bit fantasy, doesn’t it? Those in our time who dare to anticipate at all often see a future filled with obstacles for which we are no more prepared than we were for prior sets of challenges. We “expect” the next major storms to devastate coastlines, the next geo-political tensions to spill over into brutal conflict, the next species to be made extinct through our own greed and negligence, the next pandemics lying in wait to inflict their damage once the current virus has had its fill of us.

On and on, anticipating an epoch of impediments for which we do not know how to adequately prepare, indeed that our elected representatives and policymakers don’t seem properly equipped to address either. Rather than anticipating that time when our feet finally reach that place of light and peace, that time when anticipated visitation becomes trusted presence, we expect to see only the faintest glimmers of a world that seems perpetually beyond our reach. Indeed, especially in this pandemic year, it seems to many as though our sun is always setting, regardless of the hour.

But Advent calls out circumstances not in perpetual dusk — calls us to anticipate and prepare for the world that can and must exist beyond the loneliness that has disabled so many of our current connections, beyond the (non-virtuous) grievances that rob the world of light and disfigure our very souls, beyond the masks and social distancing which are necessary for physical health but challenging to emotional stability. We fear the dusk and the darkness which soon envelops it, but we fail to properly discern what such fear reveals about the status of our own resilience, our own courage to stay the course of peace, our own capacity to illuminate a path different from the one we are on now, a path inconsistent with Advent’s calling.

In writing this, my thoughts turned to a deceased Aunt who helped raise me but whose later years were a veritable cauldron of suspicion and grievance, immersed in conspiracy theories and half-truths she never bothered to interrogate. She was one of those people who when the phone or doorbell rang, would erupt in expletive-saturated discourse as though the voice on the other end had no goal other than to take her money or make her life more confusing and threatening than it already seemed.

With all due regard for the prevalence of elder abuse, I used to think that my Aunt was a relatively extreme, isolated case. But in this era of pandemic, climate and economic threats, when even a jaunt to the market has potentially grave health and budgetary implications, the numbers of socially isolated persons are vast approaching epidemic proportions. Indeed, one explanation for the failure of political polling to make accurate forecasts in the US election just concluded is the large number of people who now simply refuse to answer the phone or whose grievance-laden and conspiratorial responses made pollsters wish they hadn’t bothered.

Most of us are not as angry and self-protective as this, of course, but many of us seem unable to see past the current circumstances to that time when it is no longer necessary or appropriate to see others primarily as viral conduits or threats to our increasingly privatized spaces, but rather as fellow beings who need our touch, our encouragement, our tangible expressions of interest. It is thus cause for concern, especially apparent during this season of anticipation, that our heart-habits are still tracking in dubious directions, that the visitation of Advent finds so many of us in hardened, isolated, impatient, even desolate places.

As circumstances better enable, it will be instructive to see if and how we are able to pivot to a world where solidarity makes more sense than competition; where vulnerability makes more sense than isolation; where sharing makes more sense than hoarding; where showing interest in others makes more sense than demanding attention; where gratitude makes more sense than grievance; where our aching feet carry on the path towards that revelatory state wherein the world remains illuminated and lasting peace remains within our grasp.

This Advent more than others, such instruction still indicates a risk of of slipping deeper into “lonely exile,” a place of disconnect from ourselves but also from those who can bring richness to our lives, including those who can inspire visions of a better world and help enable the multiple preparations we must now be about in order to to get there. Thankfully this Advent can also serve as a reminder of what months of isolation, social distancing and face coverings have tended to obscure, that the keys to our recovery from this pandemic are also keys to our recovery as a species.

The blank stares which define so much our battered present must not be allowed any longer to blur anticipation of a healthier, fairer, saner planet. Something is coming to help push us down a path towards a world that is no longer falling apart, that is no longer shedding species and hope, that is no longer enveloped in a fog of virus, mistrust and indifference. Advent is our time time to prepare for that visit, for that push, and for that world.

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