Announcement to the Shepherds by (Abraham Bloemaert, ca. 1600)
Today isn't Wednesday. But it's Wednesday I'm wondering about today.
Jan 1, 2020. Happy new year!
And I wonder what makes a year good? What are we really wishing one another when we say, "Happy New Year"?
One card we received this Christmas put it this way: "may the best of 2019 be the worst of 2020."
How great that would be! I appreciate the sentiment. And the sympathy it shows among our friends for the hard bits we suffered this past year.
But is that how life goes? Especially as our bodies age and weaken? As our spirits remain sensitive to accumulated wounds of the past, and subject to unresolved anxieties about the future? And our memory has not failed quite enough yet to allow us to live in a blissful awareness only of the blessed present?
Is it realistic to wish for a life of successively only-happier and easier years, when we know that life -- neither ours nor God's, is like that?
But what then? Is the only other option a depressing Eyore-ish wish like, "Oh well, hope that 2020 won't be too bad for you ... hope you make it through ... if you can."
Is there maybe a middle way between -- or more accurately, a third way beyond optimistic dreaming and pessimistic dreariness?
Today I received in my email inbox this thought of Howard Thurmann (1899-1981), an African-American author, theologian, educator and civil rights leader. He says:
"There must be always remaining in every person's life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and by an inherent prerogative, throwing all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness, something that gathers up into itself all the freshets of experience from drab and commonplace areas of living, and glows in one bright light of penetrating beauty and meaning -- then passes.
"The commonplace is shot through with new glory; old burdens become lighter; deep and ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear. Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all of the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels."
Maybe the third way (usually the gospel way?) has something to do with ready and opened listening? A particular kind, and direction of listening. Intentional listening to what is both momentarily and eternally life-and-perception-and-possibility-and-reality-changingly beautiful.
I wonder, for instance, if Thurmann's thought helps me understand why I choose to listen at times to Philip Glass's Songs of Liquid Days, especially the last two songs that I find achingly and overwhelmingly beautiful -- David Byrne's "Open the Kingdom" sung by Douglas Perry, and Laurie Anderson's "Forgetting" played by the Kronos Quartette and sung by Linda Ronstadt backed by The Roches. I wonder -- as I listen, is life as it is, transformed for me, and am I, as I am, transformed for life?
And in how many varieties of ways, approaching us through how many more of our more-than-five senses, do the angels appear and "sing" to any of us -- sing to you, as and where you are, of the holiness and wholeness of life, just as it is?
And in how many ways, also, am I and are others blind, deaf and insensitive -- dulled by what we make and think of life, to the song the angels want to sing to us?
In the painting above of the announcement to the shepherds, for instance, how many are actually attending to, or even aware of the angels' song?
Thurmann, when he says "there must be .. in every person's life some place for the singing of angels" is not naive about the matter of angel's songs and life's transformation. His "must" is more a wake-up call to intentional awareness, than a statement of universal, inevitable experience.
"There must be always remaining in every person's life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and by an inherent prerogative, throw[s] all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness.... Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all of the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels."
So ...
Happy New Year! May the angels be with you. And may they sing to you as and where and when you need their song.
