Eve of Holy Name

Eve of Holy Name

Isaiah 65:15b-25

Psalm 90

Revelation 21:1-6

You shall no more be termed Forsaken,

and your land shall no more be termed Desolate,

but you shall be called My Delight Is In Her,

and your land Married;

for the Lord delights in you,

and your land shall be married.

For as a young man marries a woman,

so shall your builder marry you,

and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride;

so shall your God rejoice over you.

-Isaiah 62:4-5

What shall we call this? What name shall we give it? A woman browses magazines, another pulls her screaming toddler down the sidewalk just outside, a stock man returns to his cart with handfuls of books again and again- the thud of spines each time he puts them down. A gray mist covers everything outside. SUVs wander the parking lot like sleepwalkers, beyond the service road are the as-yet-untouched forests of northern Raleigh, the ones that always lie just beyond the strip malls- there are always more to plow here. And in me- in me there is a tug. Something would pull at my guts and touch the length of each one. Something would splay me, lay me out to be examined, and delight in each exposure, even as the dry air robbed them of their moisture. Something would love me and love to put me back again. It is a restless feeling. The feeling of being desired; but not touched. What shall we call it? What name shall we give to it?

There was a very troubled young man in the Barnes & Noble last night. I have been going there to be around people I do not know in this week away from school. I go to read and write and have my coffee around people who are reading or writing or speaking to one another. We keep to ourselves. Last night, as we were doing this, there was a whining, grunting sound. I looked up and saw a young man- maybe 13, dressed all in black with long, loose dark hair- turn the corner with his fists clenched. First he slapped one of those computers down from the help desks at the end of an aisle, then he pulled down all the books from a shelf. He took a stand of merchandise and pushed it out into the center aisle, then swiped all the books down from one of the center tables. Beyond that I couldn’t see anymore as he headed towards the front door, I only heard him squealing. He had the attention of the whole store, and then he left. We, who had been keeping to ourselves, sat or stood dazed for a minute, and made a few comments, and the clerks came and put the books back, set the computers upright.

What do we call this? We called it “troubled” in the commentary that followed in the cafe. We wondered at where his parents might be- if one of them was here in the store with him, if it had been something they had said or required that sent him off. We named the medications he might be on or might need to be. We named the event, “attention-seeking”, and “acting out”. It was easy enough to do. As much as it disturbed us, it seemed perfectly in place. A little eruption from beneath the surface of so much placid routine, an undercurrent of soft suburban rage come too close to the surface to break. It is from the same family of rage that takes boys out for armored rampages in their schools. And we, patrons of a moment momentarily unsettled by it, could name it what it was, and give thanks that it was no more.

This place, the place that I come from, is very easy to feel exiled from. It is much like many other places I have seen, and that is because it prides itself on normalcy. It is easy to know what normal is, there are examples of it everywhere, and when you are not normal you are informed of it. In schools, packs pick off the ones who don’t belong, and in stores the service simply isn’t as good. Many of us know this to be true, because the truth is that normal is not the majority, and most of us look in on what we’ve come to call normal from the outside, exiles in our own cities, homes, and places of worship. The moment we find a kind of belonging to lift us up out of it, we snatch it up. The moment we are given a chance to end our exile, we take it, and move in to a crowded, comfortable place, where we feel we can fit in.

There are moments of course, when the effort of normalcy is far from successful. Days come when everything we do is a mess. A zit, a bounced check, a forgotten obligation, and then suddenly a loved one reminding us of some thing that makes us feel so small, so hurt. There are days when we simply cannot take it. And there, on every side of us, rows and rows of books, just waiting to be thrown down to the ground in a rage. What is stopping us? The mother with her latte and toddler in the stroller at the end of the aisle? The old man reaching for a biography at the top shelf? What is stopping us from turning the whole thing upside down in a petty little tirade? What have we learned to swallow that the 13-year old simply couldn’t bear?

This place is easy enough to name. This place that sends us out from ourselves lest we disturb the peace that seems apparent. We call it Desolation. We call ourselves Forsaken. The desolation named by Isaiah seems very different from this. That desolation was a product of military exile, a people displaced by the alleged fault of their own community and rulers, suffering in a foreign land for what they had not done, vows they had not kept. Our desolation is a byproduct of idealized normalcy, building up like a land fill, packed full like the garbage bin behind the restaurant we love the most. Our desolation speaks a foreign language and takes our plates away when we are done. Our desolation looks in the mirror after coming home from days of this, and hates the sight of what looks back. Do not be fooled. It is a familiar enough ghost that rattles behind the eyes of so many here. It was behind the register just now, it has paused after parking the car to stare down the dirty windshield.

This is what God comes to take for himself as bride. What we have named Forsaken, what we have named Desolate, God names his Delight, God calls Married. What we have been too afraid to break the surface with, what we have kept muffled in the basements of our daily interactions, God will name, Beloved. All the terrible, ugly, shit. All the stuff we swallow lest we look like some petty 13-year-old suburban goth kid who is so obviously desperate for attention. That’s what God wants. God has named it Married. God is opening the door, like the bridegroom to the bedroom of his honeymoon, to see us: a people good at hiding ourselves standing naked, pale, pimpled, mid-tantrum: the perfect bride. That is what is loving us. That is what may be so hard for us to name.

The Holy Innocents

Jeremiah 31:15-17

Psalm 124

Revelation 21:1-7

Matthew 2:13-18

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.”

-Elie Wiesel, Night

We have met survivors. We have heard stories that claim the grace of God as a miraculous agent for one life spared when many were not. It is the drunk driver she swerved to miss when so many others have met their end there. The plane he did not board which crashed. The children left orphaned by plague who are taken in, nourished and sent to school while most of their brothers and sisters still starve. For Joseph, an angel came. “Get up, take the child and his mother, go to Egypt- Herod is going to kill children looking for the Messiah.” We might desire something more heroic. Something even as simple as an angel who says, “Get up, tell the other families to flee, Herod is going to kill children.” But we don’t get it. Neither do we get to know why, though we may keep asking.

We have seen the tyrants. Worldly power distilled and made paranoid for its own security. Broad, terrible actions, innocents killed. Tyranny begets innocence, strips power away so cleanly that the victims never had a chance, were born into an innocence, void of worldly power. We have seen our own complicity in the tyranny, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done to stop it. We have subscribed to economies of power and wealth and health that have necessitated poverty to level our extravagant claims. Children in Haiti eat cakes of mud to stave off feeling hungry. Children in Nigeria are born with AIDS. Children in American ghettos take their rage to school and are given no place to check it while their privileged counterparts sit in tidy rows and sing songs. The line between complicity and innocence blurs as the tyranny masks itself in the status quo. The Spirit of God hovers over the face of the deep dark mess, a discerning hand holding its jaw, a furrowed brow, and then: grace. But we are not privileged to see what that grace might be, unless we happen to be ministering among it, unless we have left our chair that day where we so often sit, instead, and wonder.

We have heard her crying. “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” She is the hardest one to deal with. We can send money to the rest, (boxed rations, C-grade medicines, a convincing new government program) and go to sleep- but a silence from the wailing cannot be purchased. God tries anyway: “Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; for there is a reward for your work,” says the Lord, “they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future,” says the Lord, “your children shall come back to their own country.” And if we, ministers, prophets, anyone who might dare to give human voice to such a message of outrageous, blind hope in the face of Rachel’s weeping, if we are to serve any function in that exchange, how can it be anything other than the face that she will slap when she hears it?

So the priest sets the altar, holds a feast. The frontal and the chasuble which she wears from it are violet- the first martyrs of God’s anointed are too young to give the full, robust, red color of their rendered blood to the vestments of the Church. And as we stand to sing and take our fill we pray, “by your great might, O God, frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace,” risking the chance that God might frustrate us along the way. We pray, “Receive, O God, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims,” risking the chance that God’s arms may try to receive them with the mercy of our own instead.