Thursday, June 23, 2022
Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Sing along with all the human race
From Plough Magazine, Summer 2022:
In mid-February, as fear built to a froth in Ukraine, something strange happened. People began to gather in public to sing, in strangely peaceful crowds, seemingly unaffected by the chaos around them. Their singing was more than mere catharsis; it was an entry into a posture of expectancy and hope, an engagement with a practice of the early church that many of us have forgotten: the belief that the whole of the created order is made from music, and that to sing is to prepare for the end of the world. – from “At the End of the Ages is a Song”
 Hear me, O coastlands, listen, O distant peoples.
On a humdrum warm and cloudy afternoon when many of us are simply simmering in the summer soup, Jesus is coming quickly. John the Baptist told us so, and he was right. Jesus himself told us so, and he was right.
Even as the early Christians realized the return of Christ would not necessarily be in their own lifetimes, they retained a sense of the second coming as an ongoing event in the here and now. Even creation groaned in expectation, and to sing was to groan with it.
Not groaning, really, but more like rejoicing, jumping up and down, shout hosanna! Jesus is coming soon, come Lord Jesus; Jesus is alive, Jesus is here. There is nothing mundane or humdrum about this day after all; like all our days, this is the day that the Lord has made, and I sweat and labor “as if” for the Lord (Colossians 3).
Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly spent my strength, yet my reward is with the Lord, my recompense is with my God. And now I am made glorious in the sight of the Lord.
The Baptist’s refrain was not only, “Repent” but also, “for the Kingdom of heaven is near.” And then in an instant … it is here! Jesus is here. He has not left us any more than he left his disciples when he was arrested, or his mother when she stood at the foot of his cross. His presence rests on us. We are part of the body of Christ, which was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
At our centering prayer meeting Mary Lou brought us a piece by Henri Nouwen:
Allow your heart to be a marketplace of humanity, allow your interior life to reflect the pains and the joys of people not only from Africa and Ireland and Yugoslavia and Russia but also from people who lived in the fourteenth century and will live many centuries forward.
Isaiah heard God say much the same thing:
It is too little for you to be my servant and raise up the survivors of Israel. I will make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.
Henri Nouwen, in America but always missing his Dutch homeland, living in a single century but at home in many others via prayer and literature and song, called his life a journey:
Somehow, if you discover that your little life is part of the journey of humanity and that you have the privilege to be part of that, your interior life shifts. You lose a lot of fear and something really happens to you. Enormous joy can come into your life.
Something really happens to you. No fancy words this time, and this from Nouwen, a master wordsmith.
Something really happens to you.
You formed us each in our mother’s womb. I am fearfully and wonderfully made; I know that full well.
And perhaps, as John’s father did when John was born, you begin to sing.
Joel Clarkson ends his Plough Magazine article with a ringing exclamation:
Though darkness may seem strong, a light shines in the darkness which the darkness cannot comprehend. In song, the signs of Christ’s coming continue to shine brightly for those have eyes to see, ears to hear, and lungs to sing.
(Isaiah 49, Psalm 139, Acts 13, Luke 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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