gaudete

and the dark shall be the darkness of God

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

— T.S. Eliot, East Coker

This morning, the tufted titmice are all over the birdfeeder, flying back and forth between the feeder and the shrub by Da Jane’s old garden whose name I can’t recall, but is filled with orange berries in the fall, and a few still cling to the spiky leaves and branches.

They are beautiful. There are half a dozen of them, full of grace and a nervous elegance in their swooping flight pattern across the backyard clearing, bringing life to the dead branches of the pine trees.

I am thinking of how, in Bethlehem, the campus ministers at Bethlehem are coming up with ways to support and accompany their students during a Christmas season in which the usual pageantry of Christmas in Bethlehem has been canceled.

They are faced with the task—they are at the historical center of Christmas celebrations. How does one celebrate now? As they are also at the center—or close to it—of a heartless killing spree that does not observe Christmas, either.

I have always thought of tradition as repeating the same thing over and over again. We did this in our family growing up: gingerbread houses each year, matching pajamas for Christmas Eve, the same ornaments, the same Mass, the same music. All things you love and look for and enjoy once a year.

And, for other holidays as well, the Easter Vigil Mass, with the same readings, the same music, Easter morning egg hunts. At Notre Dame, the pattern of an Easter weekend is rich and full and runs like clockwork, from the banging of the strepitus at Tenebrae to the trip to Nick’s after Easter Sunday Vespers. And then, of course, the Indulgence Party, which is exactly what its name advertises it to be.

This sort of tradition—repeating the same thing over and over again—can get sclerotic. I think of that when my friend in Oxford gripes about serving up Christmas concerts for tourists in richly decorated Cathedrals, all the while pastors in the pulpit dutifully remind churchgoers this is Advent, not Christmas. Honestly, I would give my right arm to hear “Candlelight Carol” by a small army of British choristers right now, but I can see his point.

At what point do we become tourists in our own tradition? Bill Cavanaugh, in Migrations of the Holy, notes that tourism is an isolated experience—the tourist seeks authenticity from the locals, of whom he is not one, and seeks transcendence through sightseeing, through collecting and understanding the world through his own lens. The tourist is always on the hunt for the new, the unseen, the unspoiled by other tourists.

The pilgrim is also on the move, but with others. The pilgrim looks for where others are. “The presence of pilgrims hallows a particular place; the presence of tourists hollows it out,” he writes.

Tradition, like pilgrimage, is the deeper principle that allows you to respond to the world around you. And in order to live tradition you have to know its deeper why. The pilgrim knows why she is on a journey. She knows her destination—both its geographical location and its interior location—and its meaning.

Tradition means that as the world moves through its seasons, the same seasons over and over again and as it grows and changes, you know how to respond. You know what to do.

The Victorians have passed down to us the insistence on Christmas cheer—and surely, who can be sad when God is among us?—but we are not Victorians and this is not Victoria’s world.

And so, in sorrow or in joy, Advent becomes a time of waiting: of waiting without hope, of waiting in hope for something you may never see, waiting like the earth is waiting, full of seeds and promises, and the sunlight it soaked up in the summer slowing ebbing away.

And the time has already been marked for us, artificially, but it’s there for us, to live into. Week one, week two, week three—our weeks are marked suddenly by something beyond them—they are defined by a future that has not yet come.

We remember that God is a God who promises us everything, who is with us even when he seems far, and we remember that God is faithful, even if the mountain of the Lord where the lamb and the lion lie down together is a vision realized most fully (in this life) in our own hearts.

And Christmas. Christmas really is the most delicate and sad of Christian feast days. The long-awaited king comes, and he is in a stable! How anticlimactic and what an unsatisfying story. How unfitting a response to the phenomenon of God’s birth.

But what a truly human feast. And so in our sadness and sorrow, in the tragedy of the world, God comes and is with us. It’s the bare minimum statement of faith and also all that is ever needed to be said.

Tradition means walking with all our fellow pilgrims from the past. We walk with them, but we take their responses to the divine and make our own, for the world we have inherited and the world we have made.

Tradition does not tell us what the scenery will be, but it tells us where others have gone, where we’re going, and why. It tells us the road to take and how to walk it, and promises that we will not be alone on the journey.

Last night, at the Franciscan church down the street, we celebrated the 800th anniversary of Francis of Assisi's creation of the Christmas creche. Three hundred parishioners walked with candles throughout the church’s large campus as different families acted out each “station” from the stories of Christ’s birth.

I do not usually look at Christmas creches and think of St. Francis. Nor do I think of Bethlehem or pilgrimage. Not much about the glow-in-the-dark nativity scenes that graced the front lawns of our suburban neighborhood made you think that this was an invention of a thirteenth-century crazy man who traveled to Palestine out of a fierce desire to see the land where a man named Jesus actually lived and was actually born and had actually died—Josephus wrote about it! It happened, and that’s so scandalous a belief most Christians can’t even wrap their minds around it—and who tried to bring back to his little northern Umbrian neighbors the feeling and the reality of Christ’s life.

But that’s what I think of now when I see a nativity scene—52 of them were on display last night!—and see the families dressed up to recreate these scenes. God is with us in history, and this tradition we have made of picturing the mother, the father, the baby God in the hay-filled manger, surrounded by donkey, shepherds, and three rich kings, has become a stock image and a cliché, but was once a fresh invention. And, like all inventions, it was created to communicate something beautiful that the inventor desperately needed communicated: God is inside history. God has a history, like us, our history is now the history of God, and let us walk with him. And so we retrace his footsteps throughout the year, because our story is no longer only ours, but is divine.