Our December Hearts - Anne McConney

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but mental and spiritual burdens as well. We are not simply to lend a sympathetic ear, either—we are to actively relieve the other person by taking the burden on ourselves.

      Is your friend worried by a necessary car trip in bad weather? You can agree to bear the burden of worry for her. Though she herself will still have to make the trip, she will do so without anxiety. Does your brother fear medical tests? Your offer to carry his fear can put him at peace and allow him to face the tests calmly. In Williams’ thought, such substitutions are “the open secret of the saints,” known and practiced in the church from its earliest days and taking their power from the one great substitution made by Christ.

      Spiritual exchange or simple psychological comfort, these substitutionary concepts serve to keep us aware of the great web of life that covers our planet, weaving a single tapestry rich with color and movement.

      Less than half a century has passed since we saw the first photograph of the world as it truly is, a fragile blue bubble singing its song of being against the black silence of space. We have seen that the seas wash many shores, that the land masses have no boundaries marked upon them. This single image says more clearly than words that we are all one, caught in the great matrix of existence.

      We are flung out from God's hand to walk for a time on this sphere that looks like no more than a Christmas ornament, then gathered home again. And meanwhile all who draw or have ever drawn breath are our brothers and sisters.

      There are, of course, exiles among us, but they are not those you think—not the broken, not the outcasts, not the prisoners nor yet the homeless. They are, rather, the self-exiled. They are those who refuse to think in terms other than Us and Them. They are those who believe that power confers right and that all the earth is theirs to use. The god they have made in their own image always agrees with them.

      They too are part of the dance; God draws no circles of exclusion, and they are welcome whenever they are ready to claim admittance to the great gathering where birth is the only entrance fee and the music of kinship plays for all.

      The host is coming to feast with us; in Advent we prepare to dance with him.

      DECEMBER 3

      THE SPIDERWEBS OF LIFE

      Perhaps the greatest shaping force in the life of a human being is the one that, much of the time, we are least aware of—the culture in which we live. This complex matrix of values and behaviors and expectations and mindsets is so much an unquestioned part of our lives that we seldom think about it. Yet this, perhaps more than any other factor, governs us from birth to death.

      To speak of “culture” in the singular is, in fact, misleading, for all of us participate in and partake of many cultures: religious, professional, ethnic, national, and neighborhood cultures, each with its program of shared, inculcated beliefs. The languages we speak, the foods we eat, the ways we relate to one another within our families and our circle of friends—all are a part of the cultures that shape us and make us what we are.

      Humans are not solitary animals. We are part of a community, which means that we are part of a culture. Without it, we could not survive as human beings; even those rare souls who reject their cultures are, by that very act, related to the thing they reject.

      For most of us, there is no more temptation to reject our culture than there is for a fish to reject water. Culture exacts certain dues from us and we pay them gladly, without thought or question, for within a culture we find safety and acceptance. As long as we do not violate the generally accepted taboos, as long as we share certain basic assumptions, as long as we behave as expected, our place is secure. Culture rewards those who conform and punishes those who do not.

      And yet throughout history we see an odd phenomenon: this social spiderweb that holds us fast is also our major vehicle for change, and change almost invariably begins from the bottom up. Like a great groundswell that suddenly breaks into the foam and froth of a wave, change comes with the rush that proves a great many persons were ready for it.

      Those in positions of power seldom welcome change, and the young, the questioners, sometimes the discontented or the misused, seldom have the power or resources to initiate change. When a great visionary emerges to give voice and focus to their feelings, however, they follow with enthusiasm. Cultural changes often come, when they come at all, with blinding speed.

      Such, I believe, was the case with Jesus, whose problems lay entirely with the authority figures of his day while, we are told, “the great throng heard him gladly” (Mark 12:37).

      Jesus was clearly and directly involved in the common culture of his day; every parable he told shows his intimacy with the daily round of the villagers, farmers, and merchants of first-century Palestine; every recorded event of his life shows his deep knowledge of their thoughts, their values, and their assumptions. Yet there is no other historical figure who so completely transcends the cultural imperatives of his or her time and place. He did not reject his culture; he was, in fact, completely immersed in it, and yet he dreamed so far beyond it that, even after twenty centuries, the dream still calls to us in our madly different world.

      Most of us, his present-day followers, are not called to be rallying points of great social changes nor, I imagine, do most of us want to be, as there are few more dangerous jobs in this world. Yet we can all be not merely followers of the dream but its active disciples. And we can do this not by either blindly rejecting or blindly accepting our culture, but by immersing ourselves in it as he did, by bringing each facet we uncover into the clear and all-revealing light of God's love and by daring to question old tenets and embrace new concepts.

      There are, after all, no perfect cultures, for any culture that might manage to achieve perfection would, at that same instant, become stagnant and moribund.

      We may dream of our Edens, our Utopias, our Camelots, even as we know they are impossible, but we follow God, the great Dreamer who forever makes all things new.

      DECEMBER 4

      THE CALL OF THE UNWILD

      There was a year, and not too long ago, when I happened to be unemployed except for a small part-time job that fell woefully short of even beginning to pay my bills. I was frantic and battered and perilously close to defeated.

      I had one extravagance, and everyone who has ever been on the thin edge of broke will know how much of an extravagance it was. I went out each Saturday morning quite early and bought a cup of coffee and a doughnut. I then drove to a nearby park where there was a small lake. I sat in the car and ate my doughnut and watched the geese and gulls and ducks, and when I had finished my own breakfast, I fed them some of the day-old bread I bought every Friday at a bakery thrift shop.

      I was not, of course, the only one to perform this Saturday ritual. Young mothers arrived with toddlers in tow, impeccable old gentlemen in Norfolk jackets—and sometimes in three-piece suits—came to take the sun on the park benches, earnest joggers thumped past. Nearly all came carrying bags of torn-up bread; even the joggers seemed to plan their runs to end at the lake. Feeding waterfowl was a sociable event.

      The appearance of a human form on the lake shore was a signal to every winged creature in sight; a few would even mount sentry duty beside the car. These would pounce on the first crumb and the rest would come—winging, swimming, waddling—to get in on the handout. Some of the geese were so bold that, if you didn't toss the bread quickly enough, they would tweak it irascibly out of your fingers. For a time the lake became home to a bachelor swan. This creature's head came up to my shoulder, and he had no compunction about thrusting that head through the car window and giving an outraged “Aaannk” if he thought I dallied.

      So feeding these raucous, demanding mendicants became important to me. I knew why and I knew that one day feeding them would still be fun but would never be important in quite that way ever again.

      The geese were Canadas, surely the most elegant of all geese with their black heads and neat white chin straps. Hearing a flock of migrating Canadas overhead is the quintessential sound of wildness, just as the crying of gulls is the quintessential sound of the sea, but the birds I fed in the park

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