comfort and joy

This Christmas does not feel particularly merry. While there is so much to be grateful for - friends, family, abundant provisions - there is also much to grieve over. We are grieving for our first Christmas without my grandmother, who brought so much joy to every family occasion. We are grieving for the tensions and discord in our nation, which have exploded into such ugly violence in the last few weeks. We are grieving with friends for whom Christmas is always a dark and difficult time. We are grieving for family members who are feeling the force of fallenness in their lives in one way or another. And so I am deeply grateful for reminders of true comfort and joy.
For this thoughtful reflection, which reminded me that the gospels tell a Christmas story that is all about suffering. The hardship of Mary and Joseph, who found no place to stay; the massacre of every baby in Bethlehem; the terror-stricken flight to Egypt; the warning to Mary that a sword of sorrow would break her heart. This is the story of an unlikely hope, appearing in the midst of great suffering.
For our visit to a small and struggling congregation yesterday, where the prayers included heartfelt prayer for those for whom Christmas is a distressing time.
For a beautiful performance of The Messiah by the Melbourne Philarmonic last night. Handel starts his oratorio in the right place: 'Comfort ye my people', says your God 'and cry unto her that her warfare is ended and her iniquity is pardoned'.
Have a comforting Christmas.

powers and submissions

Emily Dickinson said: 'If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.' I feel somewhat the same way about theology. And so I suspect I'm reading serious theology at the moment: Sarah Coakley's Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender. This is a really profound book. In short, she argues for 'an inalienable surrender ('submission') to God, that.... must remain the secret ground of even feminist 'empowerment'.' (prologue)

She writes 'The message here is not, of course, one of submission to the 'world' - in the various senses of 'worldly' power that we have already entertained. On the contrary, it is about a very subtle, and one might say sui generis , response to the divine allure that allows one to meet the ambiguous forms of 'worldly' power in a new dimension, neither decrying them in se nor being enslaved to them, but rather facing, embracing, resisting or deflecting them with discernment.' (p. xviii)

To make a strong and passionate case for wholehearted submission (even to God) is a daring move in feminist theology... so far she has me spellbound... I have my mouth open even when I'm shaking my head. The top of my head is taken off!

email embarrassment

I am usually very, very careful about how I email. On too many occasions I've been on email lists where people have composed very personal emails and then blithely hit reply-all.... I am scrupulous about checking who I have in the To: heading. Today I wasn't careful, and I really should have been.
I'd taken my courage in my hands and sent a copy of an article I'd written to a senior academic I really respect. I don't know her very well, but she had been kind enough to invite me to send something I'd written. I waited with bated breath (all this tragic postgraduate insecurity!) and this morning she wrote back and said nice things about it. Woohoo! I said to myself. 'Woohoo!' I wrote in an email to Andrew. Only it didn't go to Andrew, of course... I'd hit reply instead of forward.
'Woohoo!' Honestly!

good reading

I've had the pleasure recently of reading three quite different books that discuss issues across the boundaries of my personal/political/professional interests. They are all very good, so I thought I'd share about two of them today, and hopefully get to the third tomorrow.
The first is Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism and the Theological Academy by Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Christine D. Pohl. What is so special about this book is that it is not primarily a prescriptive work, telling evangelical women how they should deal with the tensions that face them in relating to feminism and their place in theological institutions. Rather, it's a descriptive and analytic book, based on interviews that the authors conducted with a large group of academic women who considered themselves (or had once considered themselves) evangelical. It was in many ways a painful book to read, confronting me with the reality of many tensions I prefer to ignore, as I listened to other women say things I'd often thought. But it's a powerful and passionate book, and I found it a liberating read. Thanks to Stephen at Greenflame for recommending it!
Closer to my own field of evangelical history, a terrific new book by D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative. Hindmarsh is dealing with all these fascinating questions that confront the evangelical historian: why does the genre of conversion narrative just explode in the eighteenth century, what does this trend do to the Christian understanding of self, how does that relate to evangelical culture as well as the broader cultural shifts that make up 'modernity'. He warms my heart (heh) by dealing closely and carefully and sensitively with the source material - hundreds of conversion narratives - and making fine and convincing distinctions between the conversion narratives that came out of the different cultures within eighteenth-century evangelicalism. He sets the bar high for the rest of us, bless him!

more narnia

Still on the Narnia theme, a couple of very different takes on the film from The Guardian.
Peter Bradshaw loves it; Polly Toynbee needed a sickbag.

music

I say that I don't listen to much 'Christian' music. But when my iPod throws up a succession of songs like 'Yahweh' (U2), 'Jesus Walks' (Kanye West), 'People Get Ready' (Eva Cassidy) and 'God drinks down at the Sandringham' (The Whitlams), I realise there's something of a theme! This morning, feeling short on wisdom and kind of desperate, I enjoyed Sixpence None the Richer's song, 'Sister, Mother'. Here are the lyrics...

My life is plagued
By mistakes, broken love, slaps in the face.
But I'm trying to care, to dare to embrace your face.

Hug him like a brother.
Kiss her like a sister.
Let it be my mother for now.

I want to find where the maid in the street
Is pouring her wine.
I heard she takes you in and gives you the words
You need said.

If you'll be her brother,
She'll kiss you like a sister.
She'll even be your mother for now.

Hug him like a brother.
Kiss her like a sister.
Let it be my mother.
Let it be my father.
I will be her brother.
Kiss her like a sister.
Come and be my mother forever.

stroll in the park

I went along yesterday to the Long Walk - a walk around Princes Park led by Aboriginal leader Michael Long, who last year walked to Canberra to draw attention to the plight of Aboriginal people. It was moving and encouraging to be part of a crowd of 10,000 people calling for change... but the real question is what comes next?